The US Supreme Court sided with a Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendant in a ruling that could affect hundreds of prosecutions, including the criminal case in Washington against former President Donald Trump.
Voting 6-3, the justices limited the Justice Department’s use of a 2002 law that makes it a crime to obstruct an official proceeding. The majority said that law, enacted in response to the Enron Corp. collapse, is designed to protect documents and other records and wouldn’t apply simply to the act of trying to stop a congressional proceeding.
Given that the law was “enacted to address the Enron disaster, not some further flung set of dangers, it is unlikely that Congress responded with such an unfocused and grossly incommensurate patch,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
The case divided the court along unusual lines, with liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joining the majority and conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the dissent.
Trump, who is campaigning to return to the White House, is likely to invoke the ruling to try to pare back the federal prosecution against him over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, though Special Counsel Jack Smith has said the high court case won’t affect the ex-president. The Supreme Court is expected to rule Monday on an even bigger case, involving Trump’s bid for immunity from prosecution in the election case.
The ruling also could have ramifications well beyond Trump. Prosecutors have invoked the law in more than 350 Capitol riot cases, with more than 120 defendants so far being convicted and sentenced under the provision. The provision authorizes up to 20 years in prison for violators, though Capitol riot defendants have received only a small fraction of that sentence.
The decision is a win for Joseph Fischer, a former Pennsylvania police officer who stormed the Capitol. A grand jury returned a seven-count indictment against Fischer in November 2021. Before the Jan. 6 riot, Fischer allegedly sent text messages advocating violence, including one that said “If Trump don’t get in we better get to war.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland criticized the high court decision for undercutting “an important federal statute” that the Justice Department has been using in cases brought against “those most responsible for that attack.” But the attorney general said the impact of the decision should be limited.
“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,” Garland said in a statement. “There are no cases in which the Department charged a January 6 defendant only with the offense at issue in Fischer.”
Fischer’s lawyers were not immediately reached for comment.
52 Convictions
According to the US attorney’s office in Washington, 82% of the Jan. 6 cases to date involved defendants who either weren’t charged with obstruction or weren’t convicted of it. The ruling will “most significantly” affect about 52 people convicted of obstruction and no other felony, with 27 of those now serving a prison sentence, the office said. It didn’t indicate what the next steps are in those cases.
The high court left open the possibility that people still could be charged for interfering with the availability of “other things” besides physical documents, such as “witness testimony and intangible information.” The majority also made clear that the ruling didn’t automatically mean any Jan. 6 prosecution involving the obstruction charge had to be dismissed. The court sent the case back to the lower courts to reconsider the issue.
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