Supreme Court Considering a Case That Might Upend Hundreds of January 6 Prosecutions
By Rick Moran 10:28 AM on July 13, 2023
Prosecutorial overreach is not uncommon in high-profile cases. The prosecutors pile on the charges to frighten defendants with the prospect of long prison terms so they plead out. The state also hopes to throw enough charges against the wall to see what sticks.
But the danger of overreach is that a judge may want to smack a prosecutor down for bringing unnecessary charges. Such is the case in the January 6 prosecutions.
One of the rioters, Edward Lang, is facing 11 charges and pleaded not guilty to all of them. But a district court judge threw out the charges relating to “obstruction of an official proceeding” concerning Lang and two others accused of violence at the Capitol.
The law in question sentences a guilty party to up to 20 years in prison for anyone who “corruptly alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document,” or “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” Lang is questioning whether the Sarbanes-Oxley statute fits the behavior of hundreds of rioters.
Sarbanes-Oxley was passed in response to financial malfeasance in the 2002 bankruptcies of telecom giant Worldcom and Enron, an energy company based in Houston. Lang argues that the obstruction defined in Sarbanes-Oxley bears no relationship to the violence that occurred on January 6, 2021.
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