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Federal Prosecutors Charged Woman With Using WMA–Weapon Of Mass Adultery—Supreme Court Sides With Alleged Mistress Poisoner: Feds Stretched Anti-terrorism Poison Statute Too Far (Picture And Video)
A Pennsylvania woman’s federal chemical-weapons conviction for attempting to poison her husband’s mistress was invalid, the Supreme Court held unanimously Monday.
But a majority of the court’s justices declined pleas from conservatives to rule on the precise reach of Congress’s power to punish crimes usually considered part of the bread-and-butter of local law enforcement.
The case was brought to the court by Carol Bond, a Pennsylvania microbiologist arrested in 2007 for allegedly trying to poison her husband’s pregnant mistress by repeatedly spreading mildly toxic chemicals on her doorknob and car-door handles. The victim spotted most of the chemicals and suffered only a minor burn to her thumb, but Bond was sentenced to six years in prison for violating a federal statute passed to implement the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for himself and five of his colleagues, said federal prosecutors’ interpretation of the chemical weapons statute stretched Congress’s authority so far that the court would not read the law that way absent clearer indications that was lawmakers’ intent.
“The global need to prevent chemical warfare does not require the Federal Government to reach into the kitchen cupboard, or to treat a local assault with a chemical irritant as the deployment of a chemical weapon,” Roberts wrote, joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. “Bond’s crime could hardly be more unlike the uses of mustard gas on the Western Front or nerve agents in the Iran-Iraq war that form the core concerns of that [chemical weapons] treaty. Read more:
Everythiig’s a federal terror crime
