The United States Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Department of Justice incorrectly charged a former Pennsylvania police officer with “obstructing an official proceeding” during the January 6th Capitol riot. The court’s ruling in Fischer v United States narrows the scope of federal obstruction statutes, potentially paving the way for hundreds of other January 6th defendants—including former President Donald Trump—to have their cases reevaluated.
The case argued before the court stems from a lawsuit filed by former police officer Joseph Fischer, one of more than 300 people charged with obstructing an official proceeding while protesting the Congressional certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory. In 52 of the cases that have already resulted in a sentence, the obstruction charge was the sole felony count of the indictment. 27 of those defendants are currently incarcerated.
The statute used to prosecute each of these cases, 18 U.S. Code §1512(c)(2), was passed in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in response to the Enron accounting scandal. The law prohibits evidence tampering, witness intimidation, and other forms of “obstruction” that would impede an official proceeding. The “Enron statute” was used as the basis for the DOJ’s claim that rioters at the Capitol on January 6th also “obstructed” proceedings by delaying the certification of the 2020 Electoral College vote. Under this line of argument, defendants face up to 20 years in prison per charge.
Critics of this move, Fischer’s lawyers among them, argued that this law was never intended to apply to protests or other speech-based activities.
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In a 6-3 decision that broke along surprisingly non-ideological lines, the Supreme Court determined that a lower court ruling had been overly broad, narrowing the obstruction statute to apply only to a person who “alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding.”
In the majority opinion penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court maintained that the DOJ had stretched the law far beyond its intended purpose.
“Although the Government’s all-encompassing interpretation may be literally permissible, it defies the most plausible understanding” of why certain provisions of the statute were put together, “and it renders an unnerving amount of statutory text mere surplusage,” Roberts wrote. Rather, to charge a defendant with “obstruction,” the government must “establish that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or as we earlier explained, other things used in the proceeding, or attempted to do so.”
This ruling means that, in order to prosecute under the Enron statute, the DOJ must prove that a defendant was not only present in the Capitol on January 6th but also directly participated in damaging or impeding the delivery of documents needed for the certification process. Those charged with violent crimes of property damage during the riot may still face charges, but those who merely stood by during the chaos now have standing to relitigate their cases.
Roberts was joined in his majority opinion by fellow conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas, as well as liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett dissented, along with liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
In her dissenting opinion, Barrett argued that the obstruction law clearly applied to January 6th because the riot “forced Congress to suspend the proceeding, delaying it for several hours.” She also accused the majority of making “textual backflips to find some way — any way — to narrow the reach” of the obstruction law.
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Since the Supreme Court concluded that the prosecution against Fischer was decided incorrectly by the lower court, the case will now return to the DC federal appeals court for a new hearing under the narrowed interpretation of the law. The high court made an allowance for retrying Fischer if the DOJ can prove that his behavior met the newly established criteria of the statute. He also faces several other criminal counts, including assaulting a police officer and disorderly conduct.
The DOJ must now also decide whether to proceed with prosecuting other obstruction cases while the courts sort out the issues. In cases where obstruction of an official proceeding is the only charge, this would mean dismissing the case entirely.
It is not clear how this ruling will affect Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case against Donald Trump, who has been charged with two counts of obstruction in that case under the same statute. However, in a filing submitted ahead of the Fischer ruling, Smith argued that the charges against Trump would remain valid regardless of the outcome because the former president is accused of submitting a slate of “fake electors” to challenge the election—a process that would have involved documents.
The Supreme Court has yet to reach a decision on Trump’s separate claims of presidential immunity.
Connor Walcott is a staff writer for Valuetainment.com. Follow Connor on X and look for him on VT’s “The Unusual Suspects.”
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