Barrett and Jackson trade partisan positions in Jan. 6 case

Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson split from their respective conservative and liberal alignments Friday in a case that narrowed an obstruction charge used to prosecute defendants from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

The Supreme Court split 6-3 in a ruling that sided with Joseph Fischer, a former police officer who was accused of participating in the riot and who challenged the statute, Section 1512(c)(2), as being improperly applied to his case and scores of other rioters. The court concluded that the law was only intended to apply to more limited contexts involving forms of evidence tampering and not so much the broader array of circumstances that Department of Justice prosecutors said it covered.