WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned the bribery conviction of a former Indiana mayor, the latest in a series of decisions narrowing the reach of federal law on government corruption.
According to the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the law criminalizes bribes given before an official act, but not those doled out afterward.
“Some tips can be problematic. Others are mundane and may be harmless,” Justice said Brett Kavanaugh wrote. The boundaries aren’t always clear, especially because many state and local officials have other jobs, he said.
The Supreme Court sided with James Snyder, a Republican who was convicted of taking $13,000 from a trucking company after prosecutors said he steered about $1 million in city contracts to the company.
In a sharply worded dissent, joined by her liberal colleagues, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the distinction between bribes and gratuities ignores the wording of the law aimed at eradicating government corruption.
“Snyder’s absurd and a-textual reading of the statute is one that only the current court could love,” she wrote.
The decision continues a pattern in recent years of the court limiting the government’s ability to use broad federal laws to prosecute government corruption cases. The justices also overturned the bribery conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell in 2016 and in 2010 imposed a sharp ban on prosecutors’ use of an anti-fraud law in the case of ex-Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling.
The decision also comes as the Supreme Court itself has faced ongoing criticism over secret trips and gifts from wealthy benefactors to some justices, prompting the high court to adopt its first ethics code, though it lacks an enforcement mechanism.
Snyder was elected mayor of Portage, a small Indiana city near Lake Michigan, in 2011 and was removed from office when he was first convicted in 2019. He has maintained his innocence and said the money he received was payment for consultancy work. His lawyers said prosecutors had not proven there was a “quid pro quo” barter agreement before the contracts were awarded.
The Justice Department countered that the law was clearly intended to cover gifts “corruptly” given to government officials as a reward for preferential treatment.
Kavanaugh, writing for the majority of the high court, disagreed, arguing that the interpretation would “create traps for unwary state and local officials” and “subject 19 million government employees to a new regulatory regime,” though he said tipping could be unethical or illegal under other laws.
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