Supreme Court narrows law for fighting state and local corruption

The Supreme Court made it harder for federal prosecutors to go after state and local officials for corruption Wednesday, significantly narrowing the scope of an anti-corruption law used in much of the country.

The 6-3 decision came in favor of former Portage, Indiana, Mayor James Snyder, who challenged his conviction after prosecutors said he received a $13,000 reward from a trucking company that he had steered contracts to.

The high court’s conservative majority determined that the law in question only applied to bribes, which are agreed to before an official commits a corrupt official act, and not to gratuities, which are given afterwards as an expression of gratitude.

The law in question, referred to as Section 666, makes it a crime for state and local officials to accept “anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded” for an official act. It carries a punishment of up to 10 years in prison.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the way prosecutors in much of the country had been using the law gave public officials and government employees almost no indication of what was or was not permissible. Neither Congress nor a federal ethics office provided any details, even though the law had been on the books since 1986.

“It is unfathomable that Congress would authorize a 10-year criminal sentence for gifts to 19 million state and local officials without any coherent federal guidance (or any federal guidance at all) about how an official can distinguish the innocuous from the criminal,” Kavanaugh wrote for the majority. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the opinion, along with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.

Good government advocates criticized the high court’s decision, which follows several other cases in which the court has made it harder to prosecute public corruption. In 2016, for example, the court overturned the corruption convictions of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. A unanimous court in 2020 also tossed the convictions of two aides to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie who participated in the “Bridgegate” scandal. Furthermore, several Supreme Court justices have also attracted criticism for taking lavish gifts from people advancing legal causes that have landed before the court.

Daniel Weiner, the director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the majority decision on Wednesday was “a significant escalation” from those cases.

“In prior cases both conservative and liberal-leaning justices seemed to share a concern that over-zealous federal prosecutors were trying to criminalize distasteful conduct that the perpetrators nevertheless could not reasonably have known would send them to federal prison,” Weiner wrote on social media.

“None of that is the case with Snyder, an Indiana mayor who took thousands of dollars in kickbacks for steering city contracts to a truck dealership,” Weiner wrote. “No sane person would think this was legal. Indeed, his conduct would seem to be covered by the plain language of the relevant statute, which criminalizes the corrupt acceptance of payments intended as a ‘reward’ for official acts.”

The outcome could affect other public corruption cases, including the prosecution of former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan, whose trial has been on hold pending the Supreme Court decision.

Kavanaugh gave several examples of rewards that elected officials or government employees might receive for their job performance, albeit none of them approaching the $13,000 that Snyder had received in the underlying case.

“Is a $100 Dunkin’ Donuts gift card for a trash collector wrongful?” Kavanaugh wrote. “What about a $200 Nike gift card for a county commissioner who voted to fund new school athletic facilities? Could students take their college professor out to Chipotle for an end-of-term celebration? And if so, would it somehow become criminal to take the professor for a steak dinner? Or to treat her to a Hoosiers game? The government offers no clear federal rules for state and local officials.”

The majority opinion listed several other reasons why the law should not apply to gratuities. The justices said reading the law the way prosecutors had asked them to would lead to an absurd situation, where state and local officials convicted of taking gratuities could be punished with five times as much prison as federal officials who do so. A separate statute sets the maximum punishment for federal officials taking gratuities at two years of prison.

“We cannot readily assume that Congress authorized a 2-year sentence for, say, a Cabinet secretary who accepts an unlawful gratuity while authorizing a 10-year sentence on a local school board member who accepts an identical gratuity,” Kavanaugh wrote. “What sense would that make?”

The majority also said the prosecutors’ interpretation would undercut “the carefully calibrated policy decisions that the states and local governments have made” about the limits they placed on acceptable gratuities for public officials.

“In other words,” Kavanaugh wrote, “a county official could meticulously comply with her county’s local gratuities rules—say, by declining a $200 gift card but accepting a $100 gift card from a neighbor as thanks for her diligent work on a new park—but still face up to 10 years in federal prison because she accepted a thing of value in connection with an official act.”

Before Wednesday’s ruling, federal appeals courts were split on how to read the anti-corruption statute. Two appeals courts—covering seven states—took the approach that the Supreme Court adopted. Five appeals courts—with jurisdiction over 20 states—took the opposite view.

The court’s three liberal justices said the majority’s reading of the law ignored the actual words in the statute, particularly the fact that it includes punishments for people who were “rewarded” for corrupt actions.

“Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s court could love,” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

“The question in this case is whether Section 666 criminalizes gratuities in addition to bribes,” Jackson wrote. “The text and purpose of [the law] alone provide an easy answer. The word ‘rewarded’ means to have been given a reward for some action taken. So gratuities are plainly covered.”

That doesn’t mean that all gratuities would be punished, though, she noted. There are several restrictions in the law about when it applies. For example, the government agency has to get more than $10,000 in federal funds a year, the transaction that triggers the payment has to be worth more than $5,000, and the payment can’t be for the official’s bona fide salary.

But Snyder didn’t ask the court whether his case met one of those exceptions, Jackson wrote.

“We have not been asked to settle, once and for all, which gratuities are corrupt and which are quotidian. Snyder did not argue that his $13,000 check was part of some subset of noncriminalized gratuities. Rather (and this is important to note), Snyder has taken an all-or-nothing approach to the argument he makes in this case. He insists that all gratuities—every type in the entire class—are excluded from Section 666,” Jackson wrote.

“Because the statute’s plain text says otherwise, that should have been the end of this case, even if a future petitioner might have asked us to do a more nuanced analysis,” she added.

And Jackson said that prosecutors using Section 666 to go after public officials was “not the dragnet for public school teachers, soccer coaches, or trash collectors that the majority conjures.”

“Rather,” she wrote, “the real cases in which the government has invoked this law involve exactly the type of palm greasing that the statute plainly covers and that one might reasonably expect Congress to care about when targeting graft in state, local, and tribal governments. After today, however, the ability of the federal government to prosecute such obviously wrongful conduct is left in doubt.”