Argument analysis: Building to a Scalia crescendo

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Lyle Denniston Reporter

Posted Wed, November 5th, 2014 1:26 pm

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Argument analysis: Building to a Scalia crescendo

A Supreme Court argument is usually only an hour long, and yet such a session can start slowly and then build toward a clarity that is as defining as a symphonic crescendo. A standard dictionary defines crescendo as “the highest or loudest point of something that increases gradually.” That would be a perfect description of the argument Wednesday inYates v. United States, and of Justice Antonin Scalia’s outburst at its high point.

 

The argument opened with the Justices trying to sort through alternative ways of reading a federal criminal law, to see how far its language did reach, and what Congress’s intent was about its scope. It was a fairly dry effort at parsing words in a sweeping but ill-defined statute. But when the hearing got to its most jarring moment, the federal government appeared to have become the accused, on trial for a perceived abuse of power.

 

The law at issue was passed to deal with what Congress saw as a profoundly serious problem of corporate fraud — specifically, the Enron scandal — and the law sought to get business executives’ attention by raising the prospect of twenty years in prison for a violation.

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Meet The Fisherman Who Faces 20 Years In Prison For Losing Three Fish

There are now so many federal criminal statutes, and prosecutors can so broadly interpreted them, that anybody can be accused of anything at any time. Like losing fish.

 

NOVEMBER 6, 2014 By Vikrant P. Reddy

The Case of the ‘Missing’ Three Fish

Consider the case of John Yates of Holmes Beach, Florida. In 2007, a state law enforcement officer boarded Yates’s ship in the Gulf of Mexico to inspect his catch of more than 3,000 fish. The officer accused Yates of catching 72 undersized red groupers and ordered him to bring the ship ashore, where he—along with several federal agents carrying weapons—counted only 69 groupers. Yates was accused of disposing of evidence by throwing fish overboard. Yates believes the fish were incorrectly counted, but even if the officer was correct, what happened next was bizarre.

 

A federal prosecutor charged Yates with violating the “anti-document-shredding” provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act

http://thefederalist.com/2014/11/06/meet-the-fisherman-who-faces-20-years-in-prison-for-losing-three-fish/