Neil Gorsuch Unveils 'Masks' in Supreme Court Corruption Case

Justice Neil Gorsuch stands during a group photo of the Justices at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC on April 23, 2021. Gorsuch penned a concurring opinon on Wednesday stressing the rule of lenity.

Justice Neil Gorsuch sought to unveil the "masks" in a Supreme Court case challenging a federal public corruption law.

The court overturned the bribery conviction of a former Indiana mayor on Wednesday, narrowing the scope of a broad federal law that's used to prosecute state officials who engage in fraud related to federal funds.

The case of Snyder v. United States was decided on ideological lines, with the bench's conservative majority on one side, and the three liberal justices dissenting.

James Snyder, the former mayor and plaintiff in the case, was convicted of taking $13,000 from a trucking company that prosecutors say benefitted from $1 million worth of city contracts that were sent their way by Snyder. Snyder, a Republican, has denied wrongdoing, saying that the $13,000 he received was for consulting work.

In a concurring opinion, Gorsuch wrote that, "Lenity may sometimes, as it does today, go unnamed. It may be deployed under other guises, too. 'Fair notice' or

'fair warning' are especially familiar masks."

Lenity is a legal principal used in criminal cases that tells the court that when a defendant is charged under ambiguous or unclear statutes, the law should be applied in a way that favors the defendant.

"But make no mistake: Whatever the label, lenity is what's at work behind today's decision, just as it is in so many others," the justice said. "Rightly so. I am pleased to join."

"Call it what you will," Gorsuch's concurring opinion reads, "The Court today speaks of inferences from the word 'corruptly,' the statute's history and structure, and associated punishments."

"But the bottom line is that, for all those reasons, any fair reader of this statute would be left with a reasonable doubt about whether it covers the defendant's charged conduct," he said. "And when that happens, judges are bound by the ancient rule of lenity to decide the case as the Court does today, not for the prosecutor but for the presumptively free individual."

In the Wednesday ruling, the Supreme Court said the government was asking the justices to adopt an interpretation "that would radically upend gratuities rules" by turning the law "into a vague and unfair trap for 19 million state and local officials."

"Within constitutional bounds, Congress can always change the law if it wishes to do so. But since 1986, it has not, presumably because Congress understands that state and local governments may and often do regulate gratuities to state and local officials," Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority.

In a scathing dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called Snyder's argument an "absurd and atextual" reading of the law that "only today's Court could love."

"Officials who use their public positions for private gain threaten the integrity of our most important institutions. Greed makes governments—at every level—less responsive, less efficient, and less trustworthy from the perspective of the communities they serve," Jackson said.

"Section 666 imposes federal criminal penalties on agents of those entities who 'corruptly' solicit, accept, or agree to accept payments 'intending to be influenced or rewarded.'"

"Today's case involves one such person," she wrote of Snyder in her dissent.

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