GERMANY: GOOD NEWS FOR CRIMINALS

The country's highest court has ruled that a law allowing the state
to take all of a criminal's assets as part of his punishment was
unconstitutional. The law, passed in 1992, did not set an upper limit
for punishment and thus was so vague that it did not meet the
constitutional requirement to be clear, the court said. The ruling
came in the case of a convicted drug trafficker who in 1994 was
sentenced to three and a half years in prison and an additional
$271,000 fine that came close to the value of all his assets.