mr. cline. >> mr. chairman, ranking member scott, and -- members of the task force, thank you for the opportunity to share my views as a criminal defense lawyer. a comprehensive revision of the federal criminal code should focus on five main points. reducing the number of federal crimes, ensuring that the revised code strikes a proper balance between federal and state law enforcement, clearly defining the appropriate levels of mens rea, establishing uniform rules of construction, and revising the overly harsh punishment system. i'll take those in turn. fir, reducing the number of federal offenses. the list of federal crimes has grown from handful in the crimes act of 1790, to thousands today. this has occurred in part because the country has become more complex and also occurs because everytime there's a national crisis the reaction is to enact new federal crimes. the result is a morass of overlapping statutes. the more than two dozen different -- chapter 47. seven different fraud statutes in chapter 6

so i'd be interested in perhaps start with mr. cline -- how do we deal with the problem of prosecutorial overreach and the imbalance or the harm that is caused by it and the imbalance and the threat to liberty when you have an overly aggressive prosecutor taking advantage of the explosion of federal crimes and in certain instances the limitation of judicial discretion. >> let me start by distinguishing between prosecutorial misconduct and prosecutorial overreach. misconduct is the failure to turn over exculpatory information. improper comments in closing argument. i take it that's not a what you're talking about. what you're docking about is prosecutors using the tools they have to extort -- i use that word advisedly -- harsh fremonts to coerce defendants into not going to trial. i don't view that necessarily as anything bad on the part of prosecutors. they're advocated and want to win their cases and they use the tools available to them. the key is, many of those tools i view as unfair. mandatory minimums are a perfect example but ther