The Supreme Court Monday ruled unanimously, albeit under differing rationales, that Federal prosecutors went overboard when they charged a jilted lover with two counts of possessing and using a chemical weapon when she set out to give her husband’s lover an “uncomfortable rash.”
Engaging in some inane revenge tactics more reminiscent of Homer Simpson than Bashar al-Assad, the petitioner in Bond v. United States, on at least 24 separate occasions, coated easily observable chemicals on the door knobs and car door handles of her victim, ultimately resulting in one minor chemical burn which was treated with tap water.
Naturally, prosecutors responded by charging Bond under the Federal law which implements the Chemical Weapons Convention, a 190-nation international agreement concerned primarily with the proliferation and use of weapons of mass destruction.
The Justices were not willing to endorse the Obama administration’s “red-line” on wacky chemical door knob assaults.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in an opinion joined by five other Justices, decided to give a narrow reading to the law, concluding that they shouldn’t read the sloppily drafted text to “treat a local assault with a chemical irritant as the deployment of a chemical weapon,” the prevention of the latter obviously being the primary thrust of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by two other Justices who also wrote their own concurring opinions, agreed that Bond’s conviction should be overturned, but for entirely different reasons. The group held that the chemical weapons law explicitly covered Bond’s bizarre activity, and the Court didn’t have the power to rewrite it, but instead the law was an unconstitutional expansion of the Federal Treaty power into purely domestic affairs.
To paraphrase Scalia: It’s not the Supreme Court’s job to strike down stupid laws, just unconstitutional ones, and if Congress is using international treaties to do things it isn’t normally empowered to do, that’s a problem. Justice Clarence Thomas summarized in his own way: “I doubt the Treaty Power creates such a gaping loophole in our Constitutional structure.”
Chief Justice Roberts and the majority of the Court missed a golden opportunity to definitively rein in the Federal Government’s power in an area of Constitutional uncertainty. For example, last year gun-rights advocates worried that President Obama’s support of a United Nations’ arms treaty might be an end-run around Americans’ Second Amendment rights.
Perhaps the idea of domestic civilian gun restrictions via UN treaty is farfetched, but then again, who would have ever thought a chemical weapons treaty might be used to prosecute a simple assault?
