SCOTUS Decision in Bond v. U.S.
The Supreme Court issued its long-awaited decision in Bond v. U.S. on June 2, 2014. Briefly, the Court voted 9-0 against the legality of the Government’s indictment of Ms. Bond, an angry wife who used chemicals to threaten and harm her erstwhile best friend and husband’s paramour. The issue before the Court was whether Congress had the power to enact the underlying criminal statute, designed to deter use of chemical weapons, pursuant to its treaty power. (The U.S. is a party to the international Convention on Chemical Weapons). In an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the majority of the Court did not reach the treaty issue, instead ruling that the statute should be construed narrowly to avoid the constitutional question, i.e., they concluded that Congress did not really intend to address chemical weapons of the type used by Ms. Bond, and that the chemical weapons statute did not therefore support her indictment. Three justices, Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito, concurred in the judgment, but would have reached the constitutional issue, asserting that the indictment would fail because Congress’s treaty power would not extend so far as to support the enactment of the chemical weapons statute. These justices, in separate opinons, directly questioned the scope of the Supreme Court’s venerable 1920 decision in Missouri v. Holland, which upheld Congress’s statutory regulation of migratory bird hunting as an exercise of its treaty power following a treaty with Great Britain/Canada.
Some immediate reactions to the Bond decision are already posted here, here and here. The Human Rights at Home blog will be posting thoughts on the decision’s implications over the next few days, so stay tuned.