If intent counted more, then nobody would be acquitted of a crime on the basis of a technicality
One person's "technicality" is another person's last hope to have a core principle enforced like "innocent until proven guilty".
Intent is a squishy thing that's open to endless subjectivity and biases. Intent should only be used when the letter of the law isn't sufficiently clear.
Separation of Powers was one of the most brilliant concepts undergirding the US Constitution. It's already been damaged pretty badly over the years. We don't need to double down on that damage by insisting upon having judges ignore the wording of laws so they can go with their feelings regarding intent.
I have never seen any law, ever, that came anywhere near close to "sufficiently clear".
Upthread there was a discussion of hundreds of pages going into something as trivially straightforward as the requirements of a financial contract. For something involving human behavior, there will always be billions of corner cases, exceptions, confounding events, and other factors leaving decisions open to a judgment call.
That's why lawyers spend years just learning to read the law, and then reading and synthesizing thousands of decisions that try to patch together all those inconsistencies and gaps. And even then, every case ultimately comes down to a judge's judgment call on which lawyer has done so more successfully... or worse, a jury of twelve people deliberately selected for their ignorance of the law.
Human beings are too squishy to write genuinely precise laws. Lawyers try to pretend otherwise, and that pretension is fundamental to trying to actually have a society. But let's not kid ourselves into thinking that any law is actually rigorous in a sense that a computer programmer, scientist, or logician would recognize.
One person's "technicality" is another person's last hope to have a core principle enforced like "innocent until proven guilty".
Intent is a squishy thing that's open to endless subjectivity and biases. Intent should only be used when the letter of the law isn't sufficiently clear.
Separation of Powers was one of the most brilliant concepts undergirding the US Constitution. It's already been damaged pretty badly over the years. We don't need to double down on that damage by insisting upon having judges ignore the wording of laws so they can go with their feelings regarding intent.