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Undersized Grouper Case Lands In Supreme Court
An anonymous reader writes The Supremes have decided to hear a case regarding whether groupers are 'tangible articles' under the Sarbanes-Oxley law. The issue is that the crew of the Miss Katie was caught with undersized fish. A marine fisheries officer wrote them a ticket and put the fish in a box that the captain was ordered to turn in when he got ashore. Rather than do this, they threw out the undersized fish and replaced them with bigger ones. Prosecutors, rather than charging them with offenses of catching undersized fish (which would have resulted in a fine and a small jail sentence), went after them under the Sarbanes-Oxley law which forbids the destruction of "any record, document, or tangible object" and which could result in a 20 year prison sentence, though the prosecutor only asked for two years on this one. Lawyers are arguing over whether "tangible object" here is something that could contain records, or whether it's any object whatsoever that might be evidence. So far in comments, many of the conservative justices, including Roberts, Alito and Scalia, have expressed skepticism as to whether this would lead to overcriminalization for petty crimes and would give prosecutors undue leverage given all the things Sarbanes-Oxley can apply to. They also question whether this was intended in the law, given that "tangible object" was listed in a context including documents and records and appears to have been only contemplated in terms of servers, DVDs, or other tangible objects that might contain documents or records. Meanwhile, Kagan and Kennedy appear amenable to a more literal reading of the statute, given that groupers are in fact touchable and that makes them "tangible objects" under the ordinary meaning of those words.
If they're going literal, then the groupers weren't destroyed. They were just placed in an indeterminate location. Hell, take it up a notch, and rely on the second law of thermodynamics.
Stupidly vague laws resulting in legislative over-reach is one of many reasons the law is an ass.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Something smells fishy.
Should have warned that the first link in the story points to something called the Christian Science Monitor.
I *much* prefer to get my information from the Atheist Superstition Monitor, you insensitive clod!
There was a bug with the fish, so they had to be refreshed. They were of the wrong scale. You can check the logs, those are in the forest. Yes, that sounds fishy but that's to be expected given the circumstances.
Eh, about as credible as "my harddrive crashed and all backups are for mysterious reasons unavailable". I have no sympathy for those who destroy evidence because they think it will be better for them at the trial.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Diana Ross was always my favorite.
Whoever wrote this article is just trawling.
Can a life-form be "evidence"? Can a Grouper be compelled to testify against itself? Where are we?
Everyone knows this is an overreach by the prosecutor and an abuse of the very intent of the law. All the Judges need to do is read up on the history of what lead to it's creation to understand that it was developed purely as a way to ensure that publicly traded corporations weren't reporting fictional financial statements. There is no way that this should have EVER reached the Supreme court, let alone this fisherman being convicted under this law. But, of course, we now have a legal system that prizes conviction over justice.
I also love the argument for why this conviction should be upheld. "The government replies that the "records only" argument would make it a crime for a murderer to destroy his victim's diary, but not the murder weapon." Um... The destruction of evidence to cover up a crime is already against the law (Tampering, Obstruction, etc.). Saying that the Sarbanes-Oxley law is needed for this is just plain silly..... I guess it's a good thing that I am not a Supreme court justice. If I were I would have laughed my head off at the pure stupidity...
FYI: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV... The above are my personal opinions...
Meanwhile, Kagan and Kennedy appear amenable to a more literal reading of the statute, given that groupers are in fact touchable and that makes them "tangible objects" under the ordinary meaning of those words.
Did they also appear to have their fucking derp faces on while doing this? SCOTUS is supposed to be the court of common sense, where nothing else matters except what makes sense in the light of the US Constitution and being a reasonable human being. What kinds of goddamn idiots are these we've allowed to sit on this court?
Thank goodness this fisherman didn't also throw his old Beatles albums overboard with the fish, since those are "records" under the ordinary meaning of the word. Maybe in all these confirmation hearings, instead of asking potential SCOTUS justices a bunch of stupid hypothetical questions they won't answer anyway, we should use the time to figure out if the person is a moron who will do stupid shit like this.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Many fisherman in the northeast are caught with overage amounts of lobsters and other catches outside of their licenses and they are forced to release their catches back to the sea. They may incur a fine as well, but no one goes to court or jail usually. The cops overreacted and he should have just been fined and required to release the Grouper back in the water instead of all of this mess. If the police tell you to take the bag of cocaine down to the precinct for processing instead of confiscating it and you just happen to lose it somehow, would that be obstruction too? The cops should have taken the fish if they were going to consider it evidence.
So Slashdot is now a law esoterica blog?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
of his fish.
Next week: 7 supreme court justices die of laughter when presented with the case.
So the judges think two years in jail is a suitable punishment for throwing away a fish. One can be convicted of aggravated assault and be released in two years.
They meant to criminalize the destruction of evidence in federal criminal investigations and that's what they did.
In a way that's now turning out to cause over-reach. If you mean to get rid of this here mosquito and you hit it with a cannon, then surely you've gotten rid of the mosquito. But done a lot of unnecessary damage too. Laws that do that are bad laws.
Only one thing to do really: Repeal the law, then try and reach your goal in a less over-reaching way. I'd even go as far as to say that lawmakers who recognise their laws as bad law and fail to even try and repeal them, are being criminally irresponsible themselves.
They may incur a fine as well, but no one goes to court or jail usually.
Wouldn't have gone to court or jail if they hadn't knowingly tried to destroy the evidence. Such a stupid move...
If the police tell you to take the bag of cocaine down to the precinct for processing instead of confiscating it and you just happen to lose it somehow, would that be obstruction too?
Well, bad analogy since cocaine trafficking is not a minor crime, but if one of your employees admitted to destroying the evidence on your orders, yes, in fact it *would* be obstruction...
The whole case is pretty absurd from a European perspective. I would guess the marine fisheries officer didn't simply "wrote them a ticket and put the fish in a box that the captain was ordered to turn in when he got ashore" but he probably had the box shut with tape and sealed it. Breaking such seal is a very serious offence in Europe and would land you in prison for years in any EU country (intentional alteration of crime scene to hinder investigation is considered equally serious to intimidating witnesses). Noone would do that, because the punishment would be more serious than the punishment for the crime the scene preserves.
On the other hand, if SCOTUS is looking for legal precedence about the particular case, they could go to Venice, Italy for inspiration. In many of the water-borne city's squares, those marble plaques embedded in walls, proclaiming the legal minimum size of fish and sea fruits, still survive. During her 1100 years of history, the Most Serene Republic had so many laws and by-laws about fishing, angling and clamming and related legal disputes, that it would fill a dual-sided DVD disc easily.
This cuntry needs to be overthrown.
tangible
tan(d)b()l/
adjective
adjective: tangible
1.
perceptible by touch.
object
noun
noun: object; plural noun: objects
bdkt,-dkt/
1.
a material thing that can be seen and touched.
A fish is a material thing that can be seen and touched.
Voila, decision rendered.
Fucking American legal bullshit idiot judges wasting time on this when they should be listening to more important cases.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
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...these morons destroyed evidence (technically) which is a criminal act.
Plus, they are douches.
Should get double time.
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When it was found the captain attempted to destroy the evidence, as evidenced by the crew member(s) testifying, the captain should have been shot.
His catching, and keeping, of undersized fish was deliberate as was the destruction of the evidence. He knew what he was doing in both cases.
It's people like him who are destroying what little is left of the fisheries (along with fishermen from various Asian countries). Size restrictions and fishing limits are in place for a reason. People who deliberately go out of their way to subvert them don't deserve to kept around.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The Myth of the Rule of Law
"The fact is that there is no such thing as a government of law and not people. The law is an amalgam of contradictory rules and counter-rules expressed in inherently vague language that can yield a legitimate legal argument for any desired conclusion. For this reason, as long as the law remains a state monopoly, it will always reflect the political ideology of those invested with decisionmaking power. Like it or not, we are faced with only two choices. We can continue the ideological power struggle for control of the law in which the group that gains dominance is empowered to impose its will on the rest of society, or we can end the monopoly."
It's extremely well written and makes the above points through illustrative examples.
Obviously this law is poorly written. So the question becomes whether the government is required to apply the law the way they think it should be seen or the way it is actually written. This becomes critical in the instance of the congress approving Supreme Court judges. The law says that congress should advise and consent the president as to the wisdom of accepting the applicant. Nowhere does the law suggest that congress has ever had the power to reject the applicant but it has always been taken as if it did. In other words congress can recommend that the applicant be rejected but the president is really under no obligation to accept the advice given by congress. In essence as usual we don't really believe in truth, justice or law at all. Our justice system and laws are simply a formal dance during which the prejudices of the community are brought to bear on a defendant.
This is like charging hookers with tax evasion for not filing. If prosecutors can't come up with a real charge then they need to be asking for a change in the law instead of this kind of bullshit.
Just another day in Paradise
"tangible goods" may be necessarily broad to limit actual criminals' ability to do an end-run around whatever limits S-O sets. Likewise for RICO, PATRIOT Act, etc. The problem isn't in how you use them to *catch* criminals, the problem is how you can destroy someone's life for committing a petty crime, or worse, punish an innocent because the law is so powerful that the accused can't properly mount a defense or cops a plea to avoid even larger sentence.
Should the captain and/or crew go to jail? Probably; destruction of evidence needs to carry a serious punishment. Is 20 years an appropriate punishment? Certainly not compared to the crimes the 20-yr option was intended to prosecute.
tl;dr
If these laws are necessarily broad, then they need limitations as to when the full weight of punishment is appropriate.
When all of your wishes have been granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed - Marilyn Manson
This video explains why we *should* catch small fish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9YOVuEQugE
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Had this been fishing in rivers and lakes, then MAYBE your logic MIGHT apply.
These are groupers. Ocean fish. As such, it is NOT states that control these, but feds. That is why coast guard is all over the coast. These are FEDERAL territory.
The real question here isn't whether the grouper is tangible or not, but whether it's fungible - just to confuse the issue, of course, because that's what lawyers do.
The first stupid error was giving the ship's captain custody of the evidence. So much for "chain of custody of the evidence". Then again, the captain was obliged to do as ordered, and didn't, in an attempt to get away with having undersized fish. But there must be laws wrt evidence tampering that don't require invoking Sarbanes-Oxley.
I guess when it comes to marine law, why not go overboard?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Based on my "extensive" knowledge of commercial fishing (from watching TV shows like Deadliest Catch), it seems that lobsters and crabs are stored in live holding tanks, while fish like grouper are stored dead, on ice. Releasing a dead grouper back into the water doesn't really accomplish the goal.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You left a box of fish on my deck...the box tipped over and all the fish "fell" overboard, and hey, I tried to replace the fish. You should've taken the box with you.
Total overreach, and I don't understand why they couldn't have gone with some simpler "destruction of evidence" charge (which I'm sure is still fairly serious and would turn a fine into a prison sentence).
Because previous laws aren't applicable to this situation. To my knowledge, and according to the two surveys of federal obstruction of justice statutes, all previous laws (like 18 U.S.C. 1503 and 1505) only apply when there is judicial or grand jury proceeding at the time. The purpose of 18 U.S.C. 1512(c) and 1519 (enacted by Sarbanes-Oxley) were to expand the scope of obstruction laws to apply when an investigation was underway but charges had not yet been filed. That is what the prosecutor means when saying the intent of these sections was to close a loophole or fill gaps in the current law. I have to agree that it needed to be filled, and this was the correct statute to apple to this case.
In both the new and old statutes cases the offender must be aware of the proceedings or investigation and act with intent in order for the law to apply, so they can't be abused in that manner. Sarbanes-Oxley also doubled the maximum penalties for these laws, which increases the potential for abuse. Personally, I would feel better if the statutes explicitly stated that the maximum penalty should be proportional to the penalty of the crime being covered up. That is currently up to judicial discretion and precedence, AFAIK.
Old Maryland Joke: The marine police catch a guy with a bushel of crabs out of season. They tell him he will get a ticket and he tells them he is not catching crabs, but training his pet crabs. He says he lets them loose and then calls them back and they swim back to the boat to go home. The police officer, being no dummy, does not believe a word of it. He demands to see these pet crabs in action. The crabber dumps them overboard and they swim away. The police officer then demands the crabs be called back. The old times looks at the police officer and says "What crabs"
Thanks, Enron.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The fish could not be used in a criminal trial, only a civil fine. Evidence once obtained by law enforcement requires a chain of custody to be admissible. It can not be turned over to the perpetrator for safekeeping.
The intent of the law was simply to fine the fishermen. They should have simply accidentally dropped the box overboard and this would not have gone anywhere. Instead they attested that the larger fish were the ones that they had originally caught.
Supremes will kick this one to the curb.