Well, its better than crimes and convulsions!

The crimes and distortions of the past might work.

or past offences and foibles

The key here is "Verwerfung": while there is a possible legal sense to the word (i.e. overruling), in this context it seems to be tending more toward the connotation of "Verdrehung" i.e. a dishonest or misleading representation of facts.
This is obviously a play on words (but not on Dostoyevsky!), more specifically a case of alliteration (cf. "richtig und wichtig").
Finally, "Verwerfung" (active) here has little in common with "verwerflich" (passive and moralizing).

Any literary or journalistic text starting with "Verbrechen und..." will most certainly evoke - in a German reader- associations with Dostoyevsky's novel "Verbrechen und Strafe"/Crime and Punishment" (BTW, the earlier translation of this classic was "Schuld und Sühne" - another kettle of fish altogether!)

As a result, the author of this text surprises the reader when talking about 'Verbrechen', yet not following up with 'Strafe' , but with 'Verwerfung'. 'Verwerfen' means to disapprove, discard, even condemn, and your particular context seems to suggest that proposals (for improvement) were made but, unfortunately, later discarded, -even worse, that crimes were committed (by doing so?)


While I was tempted to suggest "commendations and condemnations" just because it sounds pretty smart, it certainly would not do justice to the "criminal element" involved here.

If you want to truly convey the author's intent, you would need to come up with a variation on the 'Crime and Punishment' theme, i.e.on the English title of Dostoyevski's work, PLUS find a suitable alliteration!
'Crime and NOT Punishment', but maybe

"Crimes and Casualties"

[ sorry if I got carried away here,... after all those years I'm still not over good old Dostoyevsky]


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Note added at 57 mins (2003-09-01 22:22:12 GMT)
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it should read \'Crimes and Casualties\', with the \'s\'

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Note added at 23 hrs 25 mins (2003-09-02 20:49:43 GMT)
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Um alle noch ein bisschen mehr zu langweilen:

Unter \'Verwerfung\' versteht man in der Geologie einen Bruch oder Sprung in einer Gesteinslagerung, bei dem an der Bewegungsfläche zwei Schollen gegeneinander verschoben sind, und wenn man diese Bedeutung zugrundelegt, ist \"distortion\" in der Tat eine angemessene Übersetzung.

Wenn man dagegen den Terminus in juristischer Weise verstanden wissen will - und eben so habe ich ihn ausgelegt - dann bedeutet \'Verwerfung\' simply \'rejection\' ( z.B. einsn Antrags, eines ((Verbesserungs-)vorschlags). Mit dieser Interpretation im Kopf lässt sich (vielleicht) nachvollziehen, warum ich \'casualties\' vorgeschlagen habe: das sind sozusagen die Opfer der \'Abweisungen/Verwerfungen//rejections\'.