When serious bad guys get nabbed for a minor crime, it provides an opportunity to check for outstanding warrants on them and get them off the streets.
Even this seemingly minor crime, however, has its sinister side.
If she wants to go easy on a given defendant, she can indict for the most minor possible crime, present a skimpy criminal history, and downplay the offense.
The suspects are also being charged with involving a minor in a crime, Mr. Braga said, as a boy between 10 and 12 years of age is believed to have participated in the robbery, but not the rape.
Women were forced into Magdalene laundries for a crime as minor as not paying for a train ticket, the McAleese report found.
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"Under laws that Congressman Foley helped write, soliciting sex from a minor online is a federal crime, " the Nevada Democrat said.
"There's also a drop in crime in every other major and minor city, so just because somebody tries something and you see a drop in crime, it doesn't mean it necessarily caused it, " Ms. Dugan says of Lancaster's piped-in birds.
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Yet if the DOJ had gotten its way, that minor violation would be a federal crime.
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Violent crime victims who suffer minor injuries will not get compensation under changes which have come into effect in England, Wales and Scotland.
Separate versions of federal bills on the issue passed the U.S. House and Senate this year, that would make it a crime to take a minor across state lines for an abortion.
Hampshire PC Mark Walsh hopes to set up a scheme so young people can decide punishments for peers committing their first crime - if it is a minor offence.
Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences, for example, have been a double disaster, diverting a lot of money from the war on serious crime and turning huge numbers of minor miscreants into hardened criminals.
The vast majority of prisoners in any country are not violent criminals or dangerous psychopaths, but young men who have committed a non-violent property crime, or got into some relatively minor scrape with the law.
The Conservative candidate for the job of Nottinghamshire police and crime commissioner is pulling out due to a "minor offence" committed 44 years ago.
"Like it or not, the archdiocese is canonically responsible for the financial care of a priest -- even a priest who has committed such a horrible crime and sin such as clergy sexual abuse of a minor, " the statement said.
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In Nottinghamshire, Conservative candidate Mike Quigley pulled out over a minor offence committed 44 years ago and in Avon and Somerset, Labour's Bob Ashford said a crime committed when he was 13 had blocked him from the candidacy.
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