On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that a federal law, anyone “Obstructs, influences or obstructs any official proceedings or attempts to do so” makes it a very serious federal crime, not actually applicable to everyone who obstructs, influences or obstructs an official proceeding.
Worse, the court did so in a case involving the January 6 uprising.
An estimated 330 people who allegedly participated in the uprising have been charged with violations of the law at issue. Fisher v. United StatesIncluding Donald Trump. So Friday’s decision could potentially curtail the Justice Department’s ability to prosecute hundreds of people who attacked the US Capitol.
On the surface, in other words, Fisher The decision did not add much to the growing narrative that the Supreme Court is a partisan institution that protects the interests of the Republican Party and Trump in particular. How can one explain the court’s decision that the anti-obstruction law does not do what it says?
Its full story Fisher, however, is a bit more subtle. For one thing, although five of the majority justices are Republicans, Biden-appointed Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson joined the five in the majority. Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the dissent, which was joined by the court’s two remaining Democrats.
And, although Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion does not read the statute of limitations according to its plain text, it relies on rules governing statutory interpretation that courts have applied, at least in less politically charged cases.
Fisher, in other words, is less a case of how easy it is for judges to read seemingly unambiguous laws in multiple ways to tie judges in knots to help defendants on Jan. 6. The rules governing statutory interpretation are not clear, nor is it certain that judges should apply one of these rules over a different rule.
And that means each judge could have chosen either outcome Fisher the case
So what did you do? Fisher actually caught?
The Fisher One involving litigation Federal law with two separate subsections. Subsection (1) applies to anyone who “corruptly … alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, for the integrity of the object or for use in an official proceeding.” with intent to destroy availability”
Meanwhile, subsection (2), the provision that many of the January 6 defendants are accused of violating, applies to someone who “otherwise obstructs, influences or obstructs, or attempts to obstruct, any official proceeding.”
As Barrett wrote in the dissent, the most natural reading of the statute is that anyone who enters the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election “could be prosecuted for ‘obstructing, influencing, or obstructing official proceedings.'” Subsection (2) of the Act is a “very broad provision.” Jan. 6 The case that applies to the defendants “seems to be open and shut.”
Indeed, the vast majority of lower court judges hearing similar cases have reached the same conclusion as Barrett.
Roberts’ reading of the statute is, to put it mildly, less intuitive. He contends that the broad language of sub-section (2) is “associated with its surrounding sounds.'” So the broad language of subsection (2) in subsection (1) is “limited by the preceding list of offences”.
Therefore, under Roberts’ reading, subsection (2) must be read to capture only activities similar to those described in subsection (1) – that is, activities such as altering, destroying, mutilating or concealing a record or document. According to Roberts, the way it looks is that Jan. 6 defendants can only be charged under the act if they falsify evidence or otherwise damage the “availability or integrity of other material used in an official proceeding outside of the record.”[s]document[s]or other objects[s]’ enumerated in (c)(1), such as witness testimony or intangible information
Let us conclude that Roberts’ interpretation of the statute is highly misleading and inconsistent with the way most English speakers would read the statute. Strange thing about Fisher There is actually some Supreme Court precedent that supports the Roberts decision.
consideration Yates v. United States (2015), which involved a very similar dispute in a much less politically charged case. Law in Yeats Targets any person who “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, conceals, falsifies, or makes false entries in any record, document, or tangible thing” with intent to obstruct a federal investigation or proceeding.
The defendant was a commercial fisherman who caught undersized red groupers, then ordered a crew member to throw the fish overboard “so that federal authorities would not be convinced that he had harvested undersized fish.” Yeats It was asked whether these undersized fish were a “tangible object” within the meaning of the federal statute.
Significantly, the majority of justices concluded that they were not. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s plurality opinion concluded that a court should “avoid extending the meaning of a word so broadly that it is inconsistent with its accompanying words” and thus read the term “tangible object” as “referential, not actual.” objects, but specifically the subset of real objects involving records and documents.”
Ginsburg’s opinion received only four votes, but Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion on the question Yeats “Intimate” but it basically agrees with Ginsberg’s argument.
is given Yeats Exists, Roberts Fisher The opinion is not entirely ridiculous. Uncomfortable facts about Fisher Defendants who want to crack down on Jan. 6 can read the statute according to its plain text, as Barrett did, while jurors who want to reach a different result can rely on it. YeatsAs did Roberts.
What actually happened in this case was that five of the court’s Republicans read the law in a way that minimized the law’s impact on particularly lawless bands of Trump supporters, and they were joined by the court’s only former public defender. Read into that what you will.
The point is simply that the previously established rules governing statutory interpretation give judges ample scope to reach different results in many cases.
