Today the Supreme Court ruled in favor of an ex-police officer who joined the Capitol rioters in an obstruction charge case.
The 6-3 vote provided a win for “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,” NBC News reports.
Essentially, the high court held that the prosecutors overstepped in their use of an obstruction law when they charged him as a member of the rioters that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Section 1512(c)(2) was enacted in 2002 after the Enron scandal as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Under this section is “a crime to ‘corruptly’ obstruct, impede or interfere with official inquiries and investigations by Congress and carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.”
This law has been used in prosecuting January 6 insurrectionists, but Fischer, along with other rioters, claimed that the U.S. Department of Justice overreached by retooling “a charge that once criminalized document shredding to encompass the conduct of those who stormed the Capitol that day.”
Fischer was formerly employed by a Harrisburg, P.A. township as a police officer, and there is a four-minute video recording of him from that day, “in which he is heard yelling, ‘charge,’ and is seen in a scrum with police officers.” Prosecutors also allege that Fischer sent threatening text messages, including one that said “take Democratic Congress to the gallows….can’t vote if they can’t breathe lol.” Furthermore, when the FBI attempted to arrest him “he shouted profanities at the agents and at his own police chief, and he sought to conceal the phone he had used to record events at the Capitol.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing on behalf of the majority “read the law narrowly, saying it applied only when the defendant’s actions impaired the integrity of physical evidence.”
“It would be peculiar to conclude that in closing the Enron gap, Congress actually hid away in the second part of the third subsection of Section 1512 a catchall provision that reaches far beyond the document shredding and similar scenarios that prompted the legislation in the first place,” wrote Roberts.
“The better conclusion is that subsection (c)(2) was designed by Congress to capture other forms of evidence and other means of impairing its integrity or availability beyond those Congress specified in (c)(1),” Roberts continued.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the conservative majority, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in the dissent. In her dissent, Barrett wrote, “The case that Fischer can be tried for ‘obstructing, influencing, or impeding an official proceeding’ seems open and shut. So why does the Court hold otherwise?…Because it simply cannot believe that Congress meant what it said.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland released a statement about his disappointment in the ruling, but qualified that the “vast majority” of insurrectionists charged for participating in the events on January 6 “will not be affected by this decision.”
