Tag Archives: 18 usc 1512

SCOTUS Takes Bear Spray To Cherished DOJ Legal Theory – Update for July 2, 2024

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

HOW IS A CROOKED ACCOUNTANT LIKE BEAR REPELLANT SPRAY?

bearspray240702Hint: The Supreme Court says he’s not.

SCOTUS ruled last week in a 6-3 opinion that 18 USC § 1512(c)(2) – which bars obstruction of an official proceeding – applies only to evidence tampering, such as destruction of records or documents, in official proceedings.

The law, intended to plug a hole in the criminal code after the Enron scandal in 2001, was meant to criminalize tampering with records to obstruct their use in government proceedings. After listing “altering, destroying, mutilating or concealing objects” to impair their use in an “official proceeding,” the subsection adds a “catch-all” provision that it also applies to anyone who corruptly “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.”

j6240702The government unsurprisingly has seized on the “catch-all” to prosecute people who rioted on January 6, 2021, at the Capitol, including more than one person who used bear spray on Capitol Hill police. This is not to say that the “tourists” who trashed the place with human feces on the walls and beat up the police didn’t have it coming: what they did was rioting, pure and simple.

However, you can always trust the Dept of Justice to stretch a criminal statute like a taffy pull when the government wants to convict someone. Why be simple – say, charging them with riot, mayhem, assaulting a federal officer, criminal trespass – when you can be cute?

bewareaccountant240702The Supreme Court effectively vacated about 300 of those January 6th § 1512(c)(2) convictions, holding that the general principles used to construe statutes instruct courts that “a general phrase can be given a more focused meaning by the terms linked to it.” Because subsection (c)(2) immediately follows examples that relate to messing with “objects” to be used as evidence, SCOTUS said “the most sensible inference” is that the scope of (c)(2) is limited by the examples in (c)(1).

The government’s expansive construction of subsection (c)(2) would have other effects as well, the majority opinion suggested. It “would criminalize a broad swath of prosaic conduct, exposing activists and lobbyists alike to decades in prison.”

Fischer v. United States, Case No 23-5572, 2024 USLEXIS 2880 (June 28, 2024)

– Thomas L. Root

Supremes Will Review Four More Criminal Cases – Update for December 19, 2023

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We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

SUPREME COURT ENDS YEAR WITH CRIMINAL-CASE CERTIORARI BLOWOUT

In what was probably its last certiorari grant order for 2023, the Supreme Court issued probably added four criminal cases last week.

blowout231219The highest profile case is Fischer v. United States, which arises from a defendant convicted of obstruction of Congress for the January 6th Capitol riot. He was convicted of an 18 USC § 1512(c) offense, which prohibits corruptly obstructing, influencing, or impeding “any official proceeding.” The district court dismissed the § 1512(c) charge, holding that Congress only intended it to apply to evidence tampering that obstructs an official proceeding. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision in a 2-1 opinion, ruling that “[u]nder the most natural reading of the statute,” the law “applies to all forms of corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding, other than the conduct that is already covered by” the evidence-tampering language of § 1512(b). One judge dissented that the government’s interpretation of the statute would render it “both improbably broad and unconstitutional in many of its applications.”

SCOTUS also will review a 9th Circuit ruling in favor of Danny Lee Jones, sentenced to death for two murders. A federal district court in Arizona rejected Jones’s claims that his lawyer had provided inadequate assistance, but the 9th reversed that decision, upholding its position in an order denying an en banc rehearing with ten judges dissenting.

The issue is how evidence not presented by a defense attorney because of failure to investigate should be weighed in determining Strickland v. Washington prejudice in a post-conviction proceeding. Although the issue relates to an Arizona death penalty case, the outcome could provide the first new ruling on Strickland prejudice in well over a decade.

goodpros170330In Chiaverini v. City of Napoleon, the high court will consider whether a claim for malicious prosecution can proceed for a baseless criminal charge, even if there was probable cause for prosecutors to bring other criminal charges. In Snyder v. United States, the Supremes will consider whether the federal bribery statute – 18 USC § 666(a)(1)(B) – makes it a crime to accept “gratuities” — that is, payment for something a government official has already done, without any prior agreement to take those actions in exchange for payment.

The Court will rule on the cases by the end of its current term on June 30, 2024.

Sentencing Law and Policy, Four criminal cases of note in latest SCOTUS cert grants (December 13, 2023)

Fischer v. United States, Case No. 23-5572 (certiorari granted December 13, 2023)

Thornell v. Jones, Case No. 22-982 (certiorari granted December 13, 2023)

Chiaverini v. Napoleon, Case No. 23-50 (certiorari granted December 13, 2023)

Snyder v. United States, Case No. 23-108 (certiorari granted December 13, 2023)

– Thomas L. Root