Posted on 06/28/24
| News Source: WSJ
The Supreme Court on Friday limited the Justice Department’s ability to use an Enron-era obstruction of justice statute to prosecute some people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The court said a Pennsylvania man who entered the Capitol building during the riot may have been improperly charged under a statute enacted in 2002 that makes it a crime to impede certain government proceedings.
The decision is expected to ripple through lower courts and could upend hundreds of other Jan. 6 cases. That may include the election-interference case brought against former President Donald Trump by special counsel Jack Smith.
Congress enacted the 2002 law in response to the Enron accounting scandal and allegations that the energy company’s outside auditor, Arthur Andersen, had systematically destroyed incriminating documents.
In the years after the statute’s enactment, prosecutors mostly used it against people they thought were tampering with evidence in criminal investigations.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a 6-3 court, said Congress likely didn’t intend for the obstruction provision to serve as a catchall to address conduct beyond the type of wrongdoing that prompted the legislation.
To convict under the statute, prosecutors must prove that the defendant interfered with “records, documents, objects” or “other things used in the proceeding, or attempted to do so,” Roberts wrote.
The decision didn’t fully follow ideological stereotypes. Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the majority along with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.