The Supreme Court’s June 2 opinion in Bond v. United States, No. 12-158, is a great example of how a court can alter the plain meaning of a
statute—in this case, the federal law that makes it a crime to use a “chemical
weapon.” The case involves “an amateur
attempt by a jilted wife to injure her husband’s lover, which ended up causing
only a minor thumb burn readily treated by rinsing with water.” Bond, the revengeful wife, attempted to cause
her husband’s pregnant paramour (her best friend) to develop an uncomfortable
rash by repeatedly spreading commercially available chemicals on her car door,
mailbox, and doorknob. As Justice Scalia
explained in his separate opinion, the government “made a federal case out of
it” by prosecuting the wife under the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act, rather than leaving the matter to state law. But the Court, in an opinion written by Chief
Justice Roberts, held that Congress could not possibly have intended that
statute, which implements a treaty about chemical warfare and terrorism, to
reach such a “purely local crime.” The
Court admonished that the federal government would interpret the broadly defined term “chemical
weapon” in a way “that would sweep in everything from the detergent under the
kitchen sink to the stain remover in the laundry room.”
According
to Justice Scalia, who would have held the statute unconstitutional as applied to Bond,
the majority’s “result-driven antitextualism befogs what is evident:” The “meaning of the Act is plain;” “it is clear beyond doubt that it covers what
Bond did;” “we have no authority to amend it.”
Indeed, Justice Scalia asserted that “the Court shirk[ed] its job and
perform[ed] Congress’s” by performing “gruesome surgery” on the statute based
on “interpretative principles never before imagined that will bedevil our
jurisprudence (and proliferate litigation) for years to come.”
What's the moral of this story about a mildly irritated thumb? Watch out when a court (especially the Supreme Court) leaves its thumbprint on a statute's otherwise transparent text.