New CRS document explores “Supreme Court’s Narrow Construction of Federal Criminal Laws”

The Congressional Research Service has this notable new “Legal Sidebar” reviews past and recent Supreme Court rulings that limit the scope of federal criminal statutes. This six-page document gets started this way:

Criminal law marks a boundary between conduct that society deems permissible and behavior that it deems worthy of punishment.  Those who cross the line may be subject to penalty and social disapproval.  In addition to punishment, transgressors may face wide-ranging collateral consequences, among other things.

Defendants charged with criminal offenses have mounted various legal challenges to the line drawn by criminal law itself.  One category of legal challenge centers on arguments related to where or how the boundary between lawful and unlawful conduct is established.  For example, defendants have argued that certain criminal statutes are unclear and fail to give fair notice to the public as to what conduct is wrongful; that other criminal statutes improperly reach those with no awareness that they have crossed the line and thus fail to reserve criminal punishment for those who are truly culpable; and that the application of particular criminal statutes in individual circumstances strays beyond what Congress intended or clashes with countervailing constitutional values.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has issued a series of decisions agreeing with defendants that have raised each of these arguments, narrowly construing some criminal statutes in the process.  A federal appellate judge described these rulings as “nearly an annual event.”  In the Court’s latest term, the Justices again issued opinions limiting the reach of specific criminal statutes.  This Sidebar addresses this apparent Supreme Court trend, identifying the substantive reasons why the Court has limited the scope of criminal statutes and offering examples from historic and modern cases.  The discussion and examples are not comprehensive but are representative in nature.  The Sidebar also summarizes four cases from the recently concluded 2022 Supreme Court term — Counterman v. Colorado, Dubin v. United States, United States v. Hansen, and Twitter v. Taamneh — in which the Court narrowly construed the criminal laws and concepts at issue.  The Sidebar closes with considerations for Congress.