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From: kadie@m.cs.uiuc.edu (Carl M. Kadie)
Newsgroups: comp.admin.policy,misc.legal
Subject: *Legal* obligation to report a crime (Re: E-mail Privacy)
Message-ID: <1991Jun14.180542.14481@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 14 Jun 91 18:05:42 GMT
References: <2539@maserati.qsp.UUCP> <1991Jun14.130553.28202@oar.net>
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL
Lines: 17

karl.kleinpaste@osc.edu writes:
[...]
>Anyone who witnesses a crime and does nothing to stop it is a party to
>it.  In fact, screwed up though the USA legal system surely is, it
>makes a lot of sense that certain crimes are defined in terms of the
>failure _of_the_citizenry_ to report other crimes.
[...]

I won't address the original question or the moral quesiton, just this
legal question.

In general, a citzen is under no legal obligation to report a crime.
The only exceptions I can think of involve child abuse and doctors.

- Carl
-- 
Carl Kadie -- kadie@cs.uiuc.edu -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign