By Matthew R. Nola
While 42 U.S.C. § 1983 is one of the most commonly utilized statutes in federal civil litigation, federal prosecutors hardly afford the statute’s criminal counterpart, 18 U.S.C. § 242, the same attention. Since the volume of federal rights–vindicating cases under Section 1983 far outstrips that under Section 242, the people are largely left to enforce their own rights. But this regime of federal rights enforcement has several costs, both practical and expressive. Practically, a host of socioeconomically dependent factors—from fear of retaliation to distrust of the legal system—renders private plaintiffs especially poorly suited to stand as the primary enforcers of civil rights. And expressively, the fact that nearly all litigated federal rights violations are at most met with merely civil fines, rather than the opprobrium accompanying criminal punishment, communicates to the public that federal rights violations are not prohibited but priced. This Note argues that federal prosecutors could alleviate the costs of a primarily civil, rather than criminal, federal rights–enforcement apparatus by reviving an old but underutilized tool: the Section 242 misdemeanor prosecution.