In 2007, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer John Jones boarded the Miss Katie in federal waters and found some of the 3,000 fish in Yates’s catch were smaller than the 20-inch minimum required at the time for catching red grouper. The case was brought by John Yates, a commercial fishing boat captain operating out of Cortez, Fla. “Whatever the wisdom or folly” of the act, she said, “this court does not get to rewrite the law.” She agreed the law was “too broad and undifferentiated, with too-high maximum penalties, which give prosecutors too much leverage and sentencers too much discretion.”īut that did not mean the court could ignore that a tangible object “is an object that’s tangible,” she said. Kagan said the majority’s “real issue” with the law was that it seemed like overkill and reflected “overcriminalization and excessive punishment in the U.S.

They do not get better in the combining.”

Of Alito’s argument, Kagan wrote: “The sum total of three mistaken arguments is. Justice Elena Kagan wrote a punchy and sarcastic dissent, which was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. agreed with the outcome but filed a separate opinion.Īlito did not say exactly what he found objectionable in Ginsburg’s opinion, but agreed that three things - the “statute’s list of nouns, its list of verbs and its title” - led to the conclusion that the term tangible objects should not be stretched to include fish. Ginsburg’s opinion was joined by Chief Justice John G. Seuss’s “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.” But the court seemed to have trouble finding the right answer, and the decision divided the justices three ways. “But may one falsify, or make a false entry in the sea dwelling creatures?”Īs at the oral argument, the justices could not resist having fun with the case. In explaining the court’s decision, Ginsburg noted from the bench that the law covers “falsifying” any tangible object. The decision was a blow to the government - not because of the case of fishing captain John Yates - but because prosecutors have used the “tangible object” language to go after other activities meant to cover up crimes, such as moving a corpse and painting over blood splatter.īut Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said within the confines of Sarbanes-Oxley, which was passed after Enron’s outside auditor Arthur Andersen had systematically destroyed potentially incriminating documents, tangible objects cover “only objects one can use to record or preserve information.” The court ruled 5 to 4 that Congress did not mean for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which prohibits the destruction of “any document, record or tangible object” meant to impede a federal investigation, to include “all objects in the physical world.” A divided Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that prosecutors should not have used a far-reaching federal law passed in the wake of the Enron scandal to go after a Florida fisherman convicted of tossing undersized grouper off his boat.

Sarbanes oxley convictions list