Justices rule for Jan. 6 defendant

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-5572_l6hn.pdf

The Supreme Court on Friday threw out the charges against a former Pennsylvania police officer who entered the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the law that Joseph Fischer was charged with violating, which bars obstruction of an official proceeding, applies only to evidence tampering, such as destruction of records or documents, in official proceedings.

Friday’s ruling could affect charges against more than 300 other Jan. 6 defendants. The same law is also at the center of two of the four charges brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith against former President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C.

The Supreme Court heard oral argument on April 25 on Trump’s claims of immunity and has not yet issued its decision in that case. But Smith has argued that even if the court were to rule for Fischer, the charges against Trump could still go forward because they rested, in part, on efforts to use false electoral certificates at the joint session of Congress.

The law at the center of Fischer’s case is 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2), which makes it a crime to “otherwise obstruct[], influence[], or impede[] any official proceeding.” U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols concluded that because the previous subsection, Section 1512(c)(1), bars tampering with evidence “with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding,” Section 1512(c)(2) only applies to cases involving evidence tampering that obstructs an official proceeding, and he dismissed the obstruction charge against Fischer.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed Nichols’ ruling, concluding that the “meaning of the statute is unambiguous,” so that it “applies to all forms of corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding, other than the conduct that is already covered by” the prior subsection.

On Friday, the Supreme Court vacated the D.C. Circuit’s decision, interpreting the law more narrowly to apply only to evidence tampering.

Roberts explained 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.” Here, he continued, subsection (c)(1) provides several specific examples of evidence tampering that the law prohibits – such as altering a record and concealing a document. When subsection (c)(2) immediately follows those examples, he reasoned, “the most sensible inference” is that the scope of (c)(2) is limited by the examples in (c)(1). Indeed, he noted, if subsection (c)(2) sweeps as broadly as the government posits, “there would have been scant reason for Congress to provide any specific examples at all” in subsection (c)(1).

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

When the case returns to the D.C. Circuit, Roberts instructed, that court can reconsider the obstruction charge against Fischer “in light of our interpretation of Section 1512(c)(2).”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett dissented, in an opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. The court, she wrote, veered from the text of the law; the majority “simply cannot believe that Congress meant what it said.” Although “events like January 6th” may not have been the target of subsection (c)(2), Barrett acknowledged (noting in a parenthetical, “Who could blame Congress for that failure of imagination?”), she argued that the court should “stick to the text” when statutes “go further than the problem that inspired them.”

Instead, here, she wrote, the court “does textual backflips to find some way – any way – to narrow the reach of subsection (c)(2).”

In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland indicated that he was “disappointed” by the ruling, but he stressed that “the vast majority of the more than 1,400 defendants charged for their illegal actions on January 6 will not be affected by this decision. There are no cases,” Garland said, “in which the Department charged a January 6 defendant only with the offense at issue in Fischer.”