 Homicide and maim are major public wrongs because they deprive we the people of the continuation of a fellow citizen, even as they victimize a sovereign citizen. Lesser crimes are generally acts that cause public assault, putting someone in fear of being victimized or doing lesser damage to the person who has made the victim. Battery is an unwanted, uninvited, and disruptive touching. It is a violation of the person who is battered. In this sense, being battered is simply being touched and almost any contact can be battery. Even poking someone with a broom or hitting them with a thrown cotton ball can be battery. We have to immediately limit this by recognition that the person who walks into a dense crowd is inviting some contact that is the nature of being crowded in with others. The person who stands in lines for tickets may well expect to be urged along by those behind should they lose attention and gap forms in front of them. These are accidental and incidental touchings. If this is all that happens, there is little chance of describing these as criminal. It is notable that every public arrest involves a battery, a laying on of hands as part of taking physical charge of a person. It is only excused by being a necessary act for the policeman who makes the arrest and no other touching is permitted prior to the arrest. Contrary to some popular misinformation dressing provocatively or behaving in a flirtatious manner is just an invitation to look, not to touch. Someone being physically or socially attractive is not any valid excuse for committing battery. This is especially noted in terms of sexual battery. Being attracted to someone else does not justify criminal actions and sexual battery, groping someone or even touching their organs of sexual identity is considered a serious crime. Such disruption of the social rights of the victim are considered more than simply significant. They are damaging. The most serious such battery is rape, the sexual violation of another person. This is a personal violation that is so disruptive of the peace of everybody that it has to be considered somewhat equivalent to maim, to disfiguring the other person. Its effects on the victim are likely to be very long term and not ever be really healed. Assault is another crime that creates a personal victim. Assault is putting someone in fear of violence or being the victim of criminal acts. Even as trying to kill someone is considered a separate crime so is trying to commit other crimes against the person separate. They are victimized by even the threat of such actions. Assault is a crime that requires seeing things in the perspective of the victim and noting that they have good reason to be in fear of becoming a victim. Prosecution is usually reserved for actions that are immediate and threatening as in the obviously angry person pulling a gun from his clothing and pointing at it the one who makes them angry. Even if the angry man had no intention of causing physical harm even if it is a toy gun that simply looks real that damage is done. It is an assault. It is putting someone in fear of violent criminal actions. The assault is every bit as real as if the imitation gun was a deadly weapon. A special case is where the purpose of putting the person in threat is a criminal action as in aggravating the other crime so that harsher punishments are appropriate. Dressing up to appear to be violent and dangerous as a person and surprising people by appearing suddenly before them is criminal assault. It is excused only where this is normal behavior as in a fun house where the very purpose of the person entering includes being startled or scared. This is where the victim actively invites being insulted. Entering into that situation invites the assault. I would note that the one who commits an act of criminal assault is responsible for the consequences of the action. If the victim has a heart attack and dies, the crime is murder, the intentional killing of the victim. If an armed robbery is interrupted by an intentional act that frightens the robber so that he ends up shooting and killing the victim, the one who has committed the assault may also be considered to have actively taken part in that death. If the assault is accomplished with touching, we have assault and battery. If the touching causes maim, then it is an aggravated battery. Robbery is considered to be a separate crime and involves both a taking and an assault. The use of assault to accomplish a robbery is an aggravated crime, even if the ability to cause the harm is the illusion. It is abuse of the person as part of committing another crime, theft. Robbery has long been considered a way of life for the career criminal using threat to relieve other people of valuables. Robbery has traditionally been treated separately and harshly due to its being a common threat to both peace and prosperity of the common people. It remains so today with robbery of places of business and commerce being a threat to everyone who is in the vicinity of the crime. The fear of others who witness the crime in their presence is an assault upon as many as are there and it is not limited to the immediate victim of the theft. Robbery is a serious anti-social crime as well as one victimizing specific people. Fraud is a light crime without committing the assault. Instead, it is gaining by trickery or exploiting common personal weaknesses such as greed. It involves creating a situation where the victim is falsely convinced to surrender his or her valuables by or through the intentional acts of the criminal. Criminal intent is a necessary part of this crime. The person who truly believes that they are a divinity and who collects money from others who they convince to agree with them is not engaged in fraud. The man who marries a sexually experienced woman believing from her general behavior that she is a virgin has not been the victim of fraud but of his own mistaken belief in a fact not in evidence. Fraud is often hard to prove. It is usually involved victims who take actions that are foolish or expose their own personal weaknesses. They are often unwilling to give witness to their own follies. There are also fraudulent schemes as where people send a dollar to the last five names on a list and add their own names to the list, mailing it out to ten other people. They invest five dollars in the scheme hoping to get many thousands back. The first few who initiate such a scheme can get a moderate amount from the effort and the rest are unlikely to even get five back. It is simple greed that will keep the scheme going forward. Such schemes are considered public frauds, intentional acts that built the public based on greed. As a limit, the story is from Pennsylvania and has a few speculators starting up a company to drill for oil. They acquire the rights to drill in an area known to have good possibility for finding oil and invite investors to fund their effort on the promise of getting a fair share of all profits earned. They receive the investments and drill the well and it comes up dry. They notify the investors that there is no profit and pocket the remaining investments as personal gain. They did not commit fraud. The intent was to get wealth for the investors from a well considered effort. The fact that it failed to produce is by unhappy accident, not by intent. They had after all done everything that they promised to do with the intent for all parties to benefit. There was no fraudulent claim or action involved. False imprisonment is the crime of interrupting the freedom of a citizen to move about. It can accordingly address an improper arrest where the citizen is subject to being taken into custody of the police without reasonable cause. False imprisonment does not have effect when addressing minors whose freedom is subject to parents or guardians. Imprisonment of a child by others is a violation of the parent's rights rather than the child's and respecting movements of a minor or a person declared to be incompetent as special conditions to consider. For example, educators have been granted in local parent's authority where they legally stand in the place of parents as to maintaining students for regular hours in an educational facility or for travel to and from those facilities. Again, this crime involves intent. A point-to-point bus driver has passengers that cannot just get off wherever they want. That driver is not engaged in false imprisonment when refusing to stop where a passenger insists that he should. A person held in a room by fear of those who guard the door is falsely imprisoned even if there is no lock on the door or anyone immediately restraining him or her. If intent to restrict the victim can be reasonably assumed, say, be a guard standing outside the door, this is proof of crime. Kidnapping is an aggravated form of false imprisonment. This is where a child or other person is not only restricted by a non-parent non-guardian but is moved to a place where there is no easy way for the parent or guardian to regain their rightful control over the person constrained. Sometimes parents with marital difficulties can engage in kidnapping as a crime against the other party rather than being a threat to the children who are kidnapped. The more serious crime comes from engaging in kidnapping or false imprisonment with a threat to the welfare of the one who is kidnapped. These crimes are aggravated when they are used for the purpose of profiting from those who would prevent the harm to the victim. In the United States, kidnapping becomes a federal crime when the child is moved into another state. Slander is the criminal form of gossip. It is gossip that is intended to damage the one who is slandered. It is speaking or writing falsehoods for the purpose of creating damage. Slander is an intentional crime, one based on publishing falsehoods. If the slanderer has reason to believe that the false statements are in fact true, it is simply gossip instead of slander. The truth of the statements made or written is an absolute defense against charges of slander. An aggravated form of slander is where the intent is to damage the victim's ability to pursue their livelihood or to inhibit their ability to earn an income. It is then called slander per se and has different proof requirements. It has the same requirement for proving damaged statements or writings, but a more limited defense. The statement must be factually provable to be a defense against a charge of slander per se. Mistake is no justification for this aggravated slander. And neither is having a good reason to believe the false statements are true. Again, the intent of the per se slanderer is implied by the nature of the damages accomplished. Our final personal crime, provoking to violence, has largely been subject to judicial abuses. The crime is one of initiating the criminal acts of other people, effectively taking part in their criminal behavior by taking actions that have a reasonable expectation of provoking the criminal result. The one who provokes the violence is legally accountable for the resulting behavior of those who are victims of their provocation. If a person speaks to dishonor someone else's spouse in public, it is provocation that is likely to gain a hostile response. The one who does the provocation is likely to be assaulted, or perhaps even maimed by the one they are so vicious as to attack in their words. For this crime, the one who provokes the violence is the proximate cause of that violence, and is considered to intentionally commit the crime through the one they provoke. If the other spouse assaults them, beating them with fists and stick, then it is the one who promoted the assault who is most responsible for the battery or maim that results. U.S. judges have, in taking part in these criminal acts by their decisions, become the criminals. They have, from the bench, determined that certain provocations are protected by law. They have an open rejection of both the purpose of keeping the peace and the limits of government in rejecting the common law contributed to the resulting violence by becoming accessories to the criminal provocations that they protect. The idea that it is somehow legal to provoke others to violence is an offense to both the common law and to we the people in whose name and authority the courts take action. Those who use the gathering of people to promote violence are commonly excused from any responsibility for the damages from actions that they set in motion. Religious leaders who exhort their people in their congregations to violence are being actively protected from responsibility for the damages by the ones they incite into violence. Political leaders who, in protection of their offices, provoke others to violence are treated as leaders instead of perpetrators. This has become a dark part of modern U.S. criminal law.