The Supreme Court on Friday ruled in favor of a former police officer who is seeking to throw out an obstruction charge for joining the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
The justices in a 6-3 vote on nonideological lines handed a win to defendant Joseph Fischer, who is among hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants — including former President Donald Trump — who have been charged with obstructing an official proceeding over the effort to prevent Congress’ certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory.
The court concluded that the law, enacted in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act after the Enron accounting scandal, was only intended to apply in limited circumstances involving tampering with physical evidence.
The court sent the case back to lower courts for further proceedings on whether the Justice Department could still prosecute Fischer under the new interpretation of the law.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that the government’s view of the law’s reach “defies the most plausible understanding” of the statute in question, 18 U.S. Code 1512. The provision carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
To prove a violation, prosecutors have to show that the defendant “impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or … other things used in the proceeding,” he added.
Roberts was joined by four other conservatives and one liberal — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — in the majority. The other two liberal justices were joined by conservative Amy Coney Barrett in dissent.
Barrett wrote that as no one disputes that the joint session of Congress to certify the election results was an official proceeding, the question of whether Fischer can be prosecuted “seems open and shut.”
The majority, she added, “simply cannot believe that Congress meant what it said” when writing a broad statute intended to cover a lot of different conduct. She wrote that the court “has failed to respect the prerogatives of the political branches” in ruling against prosecutors.
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has in the past been skeptical of prosecutors when they assert broad applications of criminal provisions.
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