Last term, in the now-infamous Yates [1] case, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Department of Justice’s outrageous contention that an undersized Red Grouper thrown overboard by a commercial fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico was a “record, document, or tangible object” under the “anti-shredding” provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. By so doing, the Court prevented a law passed in the wake of corporate accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom from becoming an all-purpose hammer for prosecutors. Yates quickly became the poster child for the “overcriminalization [2]” phenomenon. Unfortunately, it appears that DOJ has not learned its lesson. Although the phrase “tangible object” at issue inYates was overbroad and ambiguous, in other cases the problem of overcriminalization arises when the government seeks to attribute a new, nonobvious meaning to long-understood, perfectly plain statutory language. Nowhere is that problem better epitomized than in the federal government’s utterly bizarre ongoing criminal prosecution of FedEx [3] FDX -1.48% [3], which is slated for trial next month in federal court in San Francisco.
