Supreme Court rules for a Jan. 6 defendant

The Supreme Court has decided that the Justice Department applied a statute too broadly when prosecuting alleged rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The ruling likely means that federal prosecutors must relitigate hundreds of Jan. 6 cases.

On Friday, the court narrowed the interpretation of a law criminalizing “obstruction of an official proceeding” to require that prosecutors prove a defendant impaired or attempted to impair the availability or integrity of documents or objects needed for the official proceeding. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts reversed a ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and told the lower court to reconsider the case of Joseph Fischer.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor in a dissent.

What is the statute at the heart of the case?

A section of Title 18 of the criminal code makes it a crime for anyone to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal a record, document, or other object … with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding or otherwise obstruct, influence, or impede any official proceeding.” It was enacted as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 in response to a massive accounting and financial fraud scandal at the energy company Enron, whose executives destroyed documents that were possible evidence of crimes.

The Justice Department used the statute to charge Jan. 6 defendants since Congress had to pause the official certification of the presidential election results when rioters entered the Capitol. Senators and members of the House had to go into hiding, and former Vice President Mike Pence took shelter in an underground parking garage.

The majority of justices agreed that the Justice Department applied the law too broadly to defendants who may not have destroyed property but not documents.

In the oral arguments, Fischer’s attorney Jeffrey Green argued that “the January 6th prosecutions demonstrate that there are a host of felony and misdemeanor crimes that cover the alleged conduct. A Sarbanes-Oxley-based, Enron-driven, evidence-tampering statute is not one of them.”

What was the case about?

On Jan. 8, 2021, Joseph Fischer was indicted on seven counts for his involvement in the riot. The charges included forcing entry, breaking windows, and assaulting U.S. Capitol Police officers. In Count Three, he was also charged with obstructing an official proceeding. In March 2022, a federal district court granted Fischer’s motion to dismiss the obstruction count. But the government argued that the section applied to all obstructive actions, not just the destruction of documents. In April 2023, an appellate court reversed this decision.

The obstruction charge carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.

What did the justices say?

Much of the decision came down to grammar. Roberts wrote that by listing terms such as “obstruct, influence, or impede,” Congress meant to give examples of prohibited actions, not to introduce new meaning to the law.

“For instance, a football league might adopt a rule that players must not ‘grab, twist, or pull a face mask, helmet, or other equipment with the intent to injure a player, or otherwise attack, assault, or harm any player,’” Roberts wrote. “If a linebacker shouts insults at the quarterback and hurts his feelings, has the linebacker nonetheless followed the rule? Of course he has. The examples of prohibited actions all concern dangerous physical conduct that might inflict bodily harm; trash talk is simply not of that kind.”

In a concurring opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote, “Given that Congress has never before passed a similarly broad obstruction law when others have long existed, it is highly unlikely that Congress intended for subsection (c)(2) to establish a first-of-its-kind general federal obstruction crime.”

Writing the dissent, Justice Barrett said the majority opinion is too narrow and disrespects the authority of the legislative and executive branches.

“Section 1512(c)(2) is a very broad provision, and admittedly, events like January 6th were not its target. (Who could blame Congress for that failure of imagination?)” Barrett wrote. “But statutes often go further than the problem that inspired them, and under the rules of statutory interpretation, we stick to the text anyway. The court, abandoning that approach, does textual backflips to find some way— any way—to narrow the reach of subsection (c)(2).”