Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn talked about exactly that in the USSR in Gulag Archipelago.
He said that in the entire time he was in the gulags, he never met one single person who hadn’t been legitimately tried and convicted of an actual crime. And the key was exactly what you describe - the Soviet laws were so extensive and byzantine that whenever any official wanted to disappear somebody, all they had to do was investigate them enough to figure out what laws they’d inevitably broken, then try them for that.
That’s how authorotarian scumbags implement a police state while maintaining a superficial appearance of justice and the rule of law.
And it’s guaranteed that American authoritarian scumbags know that.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn talked about exactly that in the USSR in Gulag Archipelago.
He said that in the entire time he was in the gulags, he never met one single person who hadn’t been legitimately tried and convicted of an actual crime. And the key was exactly what you describe - the Soviet laws were so extensive and byzantine that whenever any official wanted to disappear somebody, all they had to do was investigate them enough to figure out what laws they’d inevitably broken, then try them for that.
That’s how authorotarian scumbags implement a police state while maintaining a superficial appearance of justice and the rule of law.
And it’s guaranteed that American authoritarian scumbags know that.