Supreme Court Rules Prosecutors Overreached in Jan. 6 Cases
WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court ruled Friday that the Justice Department improperly charged some of the people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a decision that could affect hundreds of cases—and potentially help former President Donald Trump.
Prosecutors have charged more than 1,400 people who attacked the building while Congress met to certify President Biden’s win, and turned to an Enron-era obstruction of justice statute to elevate some of those cases.
The Justice Department may have gone too far in doing so, the Supreme Court said, by taking a law prosecutors have mostly used against people they thought were tampering with evidence in criminal investigations and applying it to the riot.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing a 6-3 decision that didn’t fall neatly along ideological lines, said Congress likely didn’t intend for the obstruction provision to serve as a catchall to address conduct beyond the type of wrongdoing that prompted the legislation—the corruption or destruction of documents in an official proceeding.
To convict under the statute, prosecutors must prove that the defendant interfered with “records, documents, objects” or “other things used in the proceeding, or attempted to do so,” Roberts wrote.
The Supreme Court’s decision will have immediate ripple effects, prompting some Jan. 6 defendants to seek resentencing.
The ruling’s impact will be most pronounced for a subset of the rioters charged: the roughly 50 people who have been convicted and sentenced on that charge and no other felony. Of those, 27 people are currently incarcerated.
In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the department would take steps to comply with the ruling.
Two of the four charges Trump faces in a related criminal case also rely on portions of the same obstruction statute. On Friday, he declared the ruling a “BIG WIN!” in a Truth Social post.
The former president is accused of trying to fraudulently alter the Electoral College certificates that Congress was tasked with certifying during the joint session on Jan. 6, a factor that could distinguish his case from others, but would require prosecutors and Trump’s defense team to spend weeks or months litigating what it means.
“Special Counsel Jack Smith can say that Trump’s actions absolutely did involve impairing the integrity of documents, based in part on his unsuccessful plan to submit slates of fake electors,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School.
The ruling in particular turned on one word in the statute, “otherwise,” and whether it was meant to encompass all kinds of obstruction, or those closely associated with documents and evidence. Roberts likened the question to a zoo sign that read, “do not pet, feed, yell or throw objects at the animals, or otherwise disturb them.”
“If a visitor eats lunch in front of a hungry gorilla, or talks to a friend near its enclosure, has he obeyed the regulation? Surely yes,” he said, extending that reasoning to argue the statute was meant to primarily apply more narrowly than the government’s interpretation of it.
The case at issue involves a Pennsylvania man, Joseph Fischer, who worked as a police officer in a small Pennsylvania town near Harrisburg at the time of the riot. Video evidence shows he entered the Capitol building for about four minutes, at one point yelling to others that they should charge at police officers trying to protect the building. He faces seven criminal charges in total, including assaulting police and disorderly conduct. He lost his job as a small-town police officer and has pleaded not guilty.
In a brief to the high court, Justice Department lawyers said it is common sense that the obstruction law would apply to someone who “obstructs an official proceeding by physically blocking it from occurring—as happened here when [Fischer] and others violently occupied the Capitol for several hours and thereby prevented the joint session of Congress from doing its work.”
For a Virginia man convicted of the obstruction charge and five misdemeanors, the timing of the ruling was particularly fortuitous.
Luke Bender, 24, surrendered in July 2023 to serve a 21-month sentence after climbing the scaffolding erected for the inauguration and later snapping selfies from the Senate floor on Jan. 6, 2021. But in March, Judge Beryl Howell said he could leave prison on July 7—after completing his yearlong sentence on the misdemeanor offenses—pending the outcome of the Fischer case.
Bender is now expected to leave his North Carolina prison next week and avoid the additional time from the felony obstruction charge. After his release, he will likely have a resentencing where his felony conviction will be vacated and he will be placed on probation, said his lawyer, Christopher Macchiaroli.
The Supreme Court’s decision didn’t fully follow ideological stereotypes. Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the majority along with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Dissenting on Friday, Barrett observed that the allegations against Fischer include trespassing and a physical confrontation with police as “part of a successful effort to forcibly halt the certification of the election results.” The case that Fischer could be tried for “obstructing, influencing, or impeding an official proceeding,” as the statute sets out, “seems open and shut,” she wrote.
The opinion came during what is traditionally the last week for the Supreme Court to issue rulings before a summer break. But the court has extended its schedule until Monday, when a more dramatic decision is expected—on Trump’s claims of immunity from prosecution.
Rizzy Qureshi, a former federal prosecutor in Washington, said: “At the end of the day, what’s going to ultimately be most relevant to Trump is the larger immunity case that we’re all waiting on.”
Jess Bravin contributed to this article.
Write to Jan Wolfe at [email protected] and C. Ryan Barber at [email protected]