Reviewing legal complications for Jan 6 rioters convicted of federal charge SCOTUS might overturn

I have discussed briefly in some prior posts some of the legal intricacies that certain Jan 6 defendants could face if the Supreme Court in Fischer v. US were to reverse a key statutory charge brought by federal prosecutors or many cases.  Helpfully, Law360 has this new lengthy discussion of these issues under the headline “If High Court Upends Jan. 6 Conviction, What Happens Next?”.  These issues are potentially so complicated, it is hard to map out or summarize all the particulars.  But this article provides an effective overview and gets started this way:

In the coming weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether prosecutors overstepped by using a felony obstruction charge against a rioter who stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.  In oral arguments in April, a majority of justices seemed poised to side with the defendant, a man named Joseph Fischer, who shouted, “Charge!” as he ran into the Capitol building and then assaulted a police officer.

If Fischer prevails, results will likely be mixed for the more than 350 other defendants charged under the same statute for their role in the riot on Jan. 6, in which a mob of former President Donald Trump’s supporters seized the Capitol and interrupted the electoral ballot count that would eventually declare Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election.  For more than 120 defendants who have already been sentenced under the statute, challenging their convictions would depend on whether they’ve preserved their right to appeal, whether they’ve already used their shot at vacating a sentence and what other charges would remain.

It’s not unusual for the high court to find prosecutors were overbroad in their interpretation of a criminal statute — in recent years, justices have limited the applicability of honest services fraud, aggravated identity theft and computer fraud statutes.  Nor is it unusual for people who have been convicted under an outdated interpretation of the law to face procedural hurdles in getting resentenced, criminal defense attorneys say. 

Time bars on criminal appeals and limits on post-conviction motions point to the federal courts’ “very, very strong preference for finality,” according to Erica Zunkel, a former federal public defender and a law professor who teaches in the University of Chicago Law School’s Criminal and Juvenile Justice Clinic.  “There are different rules and regulations for how you can challenge convictions, how long you have to appeal, what issues you can raise and not raise,” she said. “It wouldn’t be novel for the Supreme Court to say the interpretation of this statute is overbroad. Truly, this is what happens day in and day out in the criminal system. And then the question is, what to do when the Supreme Court has changed the law.”