SCOTUS to give a fishy rulling

[about_average]

Another poorly written law from congress ends up in the Supreme Court.

http://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/36182...g-fish-compare-to-shredding-documents-legally

 

[Ishmael]

Pardon the pun but the whole thing sounds 'fishy' to me.

With all of the various obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence (including the destruction of same) it would seem to me that there are numerous other statutes that the captain could have been charged with.

That being said, if that's the only law that the captain could be charged with then he should be let off the hook. (sorry, another pun there) Let congress do its job and either modify the existing law or pass another law that would effectively cover this set of facts. The reason I say that is that I object to the courts broadening the interpretation of law. This starts a never ending process that ends up with citizens being entrapped by statutes that were never intended to cover what ever it was that the citizen was charged with. The RICO act is a prime example of this 'mission creep.' And my opinion should in no way be construed as saying that the captain is innocent, he isn't and he does deserve punishment, just not at the expense of broadening the scope of a particular law without an act of congress.

Ishmael

 

[PayDay]

You could call it 'the not so average thread' or something.

 

[about_average]

The captain got off pretty lightly, 30 days, compared to what he could have been sentenced to. I don't think 30 days is unreasonable, unless one can demonstrate the catch was accidental.
Of course, that doesn't remove the possibility that some judge, who's mother was beat by his fishing captain father, wouldn't sentence someone to 20 years for it.

The law does say destruction of any "tangible object".
I know the law was written in response to Enron, but I haven't read the debate on it so don't know if it had narrow or broad intent about tangible objects.
Either way, it should certainly be modified to consider the circumstances.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

Martinez replied that he understood the court's concerns about potentially "harsh results in particular outlier applications." But in this case, he pointed out, the defendant is not arguing for some sort of "de minimis rule." He's arguing that "an entire class of evidence" is beyond the reach of the federal obstruction of justice statute.

This would seem to me to be the crux of the matter, and unless the law was written to obviously differentiate between classes of evidence, then I would expect the government's argument to prevail.

 

[about_average]

This would seem to me to be the crux of the matter, and unless the law was written to obviously differentiate between classes of evidence, then I would expect the government's argument to prevail.

Well, certainly if they go by the letter of the law, I don't see how SCOTUS could rule against the government.

On the other hand, if they go with the intent, there appears to be a pretty good argument that the law was intended to deal only with financial type crimes.