New York Times

WASHINGTON — After a botched bank robbery in 2008 in North Carolina, Larry Whitfield entered the home of a 79-year-old woman, telling her he needed a place to hide. He directed the woman, who was upset and crying, to move with him from her living room to another room some nine feet away.

Those few steps exposed Mr. Whitfield to prosecution under a federal law that calls for a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence when a criminal “forces any person to accompany him” during a bank robbery or while fleeing.

They also gave rise to a lively Supreme Court argument on Tuesday, one largely concerned with the meaning of the word “accompany.” Mr. Whitfield’s lawyer, Joshua B. Carpenter, said it should not apply to short distances.

But Justice Antonin Scalia said “accompany” is commonly used that way. “I can accompany my wife to her table when we go to a dinner party,” he said. “Isn’t it proper to say I accompany her to the table?”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, perhaps reflecting on a trip to the hospital last week for a heart procedure, offered a different example. “Suppose I were to say, ‘The nurse accompanied a patient as she walked around the Intensive Care Unit,’ ” she said.

Still, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said of the law, “It’s a very peculiar statute.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. gave an example of the anomalies the law could produce.

“You take two bank robberies,” he said. “One, the robber comes in, waves a gun, pistol-whips five people, grabs the money and leaves.”

“In another,” he continued, “the bank robber comes in; just gets the bag of money; says, ‘You walk over here two feet with me’ so he can get the bag of money; and leaves.”

Only the second robber, the chief justice said, would be subject to the 10-year minimum. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. Justice Scalia agreed, to a point. “It may be a very foolish statute,” he said. But he suggested that it was not the court’s job to rewrite it.

He was also frustrated by Mr. Carpenter’s failure to articulate a specific standard to determine when the law did apply. Mr. Carpenter said the distance had to be substantial or at least more than “de minimis,” a Latin phrase lawyers use to mean too trivial to be of concern.

In response, Justice Scalia reminded Mr. Carpenter that the old woman, Mary Parnell, had died during the invasion of her home.

“The woman died from a heart attack, didn’t she?” Justice Scalia asked. “That wasn’t de minimis.”

Mr. Carpenter said that was so, calling it “tragic and sad.” But he added that the death did not figure in the legal question before the court in the case, Whitfield v. United States, No. 13-9026.

A ruling for Mr. Whitfield, Mr. Carpenter said, would still result in a sentence of 12 to 13 years, down from 27.

The justices seemed to have different understandings of how common it was for bank robbers to force tellers, customers and others to move some distance, exposing the criminals to the enhanced penalty.

“I think the statistics that we were shown is that the vast majority of bank robberies are at the counter, that people are not moved at all,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said.

But Chief Justice Roberts suggested that forcible movements during bank robberies were commonplace, giving the government unwarranted power in plea negotiations.

“The prosecutor is armed with another 10 years automatically in his pocket,” the chief justice told a government lawyer, Brian H. Fletcher. “And then you use that to extort a plea bargain of, you know, six years, from somebody who might otherwise have wanted to go to trial.”