The Supreme Court is not known for its bent for the colloquial, but a majority of the justices appeared ready to insist on this definition, as a matter of statutory interpretation, during an argument on Monday on the scope of the federal Money Laundering Control Act.
That presented an obvious problem for the government, which interprets the law a good deal more broadly, applying it in this case to the activity of a courier who hid $83,000 in cash under the floorboard of his car as he headed for the Texas border with Mexico.
According to the government, that act of concealment, as part of a plan to take the money out of the country, was exactly what Congress had in mind when it passed the act in 1986. The federal appeals court in New Orleans agreed, upholding the money-laundering conviction of a Mexican man, Humberto F. R. Cuellar, who was stopped on a Texas highway for driving substantially under the speed limit. The police officers began searching the car after they smelled marijuana on the roll of bills that Mr. Cuellar took out of his pocket.
The justices on Monday appeared unpersuaded by the breadth of the government’s argument, wondering why its interpretation of the statute might not make a criminal out of someone who walked across the border with a few dollars tucked into a shoe.
“I don’t know why they call this statute ‘Laundering of Monetary Instruments,’ ” Justice Stephen G. Breyer, referring to the set of provisions at issue. “Why didn’t they call it ‘shoe hiding’?”
And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed, “On the government’s theory, anyone who transports hidden money to get it out of the country, who drives the car, just the driver, is a money launderer.”
An assistant to the solicitor general, Lisa H. Schertler, replied, “No matter how you see it, this was precisely the conduct that Congress was getting at.”
The law makes it a crime to take the proceeds of “some form of unlawful activity” out of the country while concealing or disguising any of five of the proceeds’ “attributes.” These are the money’s “nature,” location, source, ownership or control.
Mr. Cuellar’s lawyer, Jerry V. Beard, urged the justices to interpret the word “conceal” in context, to mean some activity other than simply hiding cash. “The statute does not criminalize concealing money’s existence,” Mr. Beard said. He added that while his client “may have in fact concealed money itself, he did not conceal the ‘nature, source, location, ownership or control’ of the unlawful proceeds.”
“Well, he certainly concealed the location,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said.
“All money changes location,” Mr. Beard replied, adding that the government’s position “would effectively render all transportation of funds necessarily to be money laundering.” By contrast, he said, the crime of money laundering requires the effort to “minimize the criminal taint of unlawful proceeds” by making them appear legitimate.
Although the chief justice’s initial questions during the argument suggested that he supported the government, he later appeared to share the mounting skepticism of his colleagues. When Ms. Schertler said that putting money in a suitcase in a car’s trunk might be evidence of a “design to conceal,” Chief Justice Roberts said: “When I use a suitcase, I’m using it to carry my clothes, not to conceal them.”
Justice John Paul Stevens told Ms. Schertler that the government’s position in the case, Cuellar v. United States, No. 06-1456, seemed to make the concept of money laundering, as such, irrelevant. “Is this just a total wild goose chase?” the justice asked.
The statute is a powerful prosecutorial weapon that carries a sentence of up to 20 years and fines of $500,000 or more. In 2006, it accounted for nearly 1,000 convictions. Another law, which requires reporting the transportation of more than $10,000 in cash across the border, carries much lighter sentences and is not often useful in the case of drug couriers, because it requires proof that the defendant knew the law’s requirements and was deliberately violating them.
In another development on Monday, the court accepted an appeal from the State of Arizona on whether the police need a warrant to search a car after arresting the driver and any passengers and removing them from the car’s vicinity.
Over the years, the Supreme Court has ruled on so many permutations of automobile searches that it might have seemed safe to assume that all possible questions had been answered. But the one presented by this case, Arizona v. Gant, No. 07-542, evidently has not been.
The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that once a car’s occupants had been arrested and secured, presenting no threat to officers on the scene, there were no “exigent circumstances” to justify a search without warrants, and that the Fourth Amendment required a warrant.
Arizona is arguing that its Supreme Court places too great a burden on the police by underestimating the threat to their safety and requiring them to make detailed assessments of different circumstances. Instead, the state argues, there should be a “bright-line rule” that permitted searches without warrants of cars whose occupants had just been arrested.