New York Times

Chemical Weapons Treaty Does Not Apply to Petty Crimes

June 2, 2014
by Adam Liptak

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Congress had not meant to authorize prosecutions of minor crimes under a chemical weapons treaty.

“We are reluctant to ignore the ordinary meaning of ‘chemical weapon,’ ” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for six justices, “when doing so would transform a statute passed to implement the international Convention on Chemical Weapons into one that also makes it a federal offense to poison goldfish.”

The decision was unanimous, but three justices did not join the majority’s reasoning. They said they would have rested the decision on constitutional grounds, saying that the chemical weapons law covered minor crimes but that Congress had overstepped its constitutional authority by enacting it.

Chief Justice Roberts said constitutional concerns figured in the decision, but only as “background assumptions.” Since Congress would not lightly alter the constitutional balance between the federal government and the states, he said, the law should not be read to “convert an astonishing amount” of local criminal conduct into matters for federal law enforcement.

“In this curious case,” he wrote, “we can insist on a clear indication that Congress meant to reach purely local crimes before interpreting the statute’s expansive language in a way that intrudes on the police power of the states.”

To do otherwise, he said, “would transform the statute from one whose core concerns are acts of war, assassination and terrorism into a massive federal anti-poisoning regime that reaches the simplest of assaults.”

Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the majority opinion. Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. each issued a concurring opinion.

The chief justice’s opinion, Justice Scalia wrote, “enables the fundamental constitutional principle of limited federal powers to be set aside by the president and Senate’s exercise of the treaty power.”

“We should not have shirked our duty and distorted the law to preserve that assertion; we should have welcomed and eagerly grasped the opportunity — nay, the obligation — to consider and repudiate it,” he added.

Justice Scalia wrote that the majority’s interpretation of the law had left it unintelligible by using “interpretive principles never before imagined that will bedevil our jurisprudence (and proliferate litigation) for years to come.”

“Poisoning a goldfish tank is apparently out, but what if the fish belongs to a congressman or governor and the act is meant as a menacing message, a small-time equivalent of leaving a severed horse’s head in the bed?” he asked.

“One guess,” he wrote, “is as bad as another.”

The case arose from a lurid domestic dispute that started when a Pennsylvania woman, Carol A. Bond, learned that her husband was the father of her best friend’s child. Ms. Bond, a microbiologist, spread harmful chemicals on the friend’s car, mailbox and doorknob in late 2006 and early 2007, and the friend sustained a minor injury.

The local authorities decided not to pursue the matter. But federal prosecutors charged Ms. Bond with using unconventional weapons in violation of a law based on the Chemical Weapons Convention, a treaty concerned with terrorists and rogue states.

The arguments in the case mostly concerned the source of Congress’s power to enact the law. The Constitution limits the areas in which Congress can act, leaving the rest to the states.

The Justice Department said the law was justified by the federal government’s power to enter into treaties and that no additional constitutional authority was required.

That position found support in a 1920 Supreme Court decision,Missouri v. Holland. “If the treaty is valid, there can be no dispute about the validity of the statute” enacted to fulfill it, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote for the court.\

Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion avoided a ruling on the question of the scope of the treaty power by interpreting the chemical weapons law narrowly.

The case, Bond v. United States, No. 12-158, had made an earlier appearance at the court. In 2011, the court unanimously ruled that Ms. Bond had suffered the sort of concrete injury — a six-year prison sentence — that gave her standing to sue.