Political Watch

[Angrboda]

The case involves a former Twitter employee, Ahmad Abouammo, who gave confidential information to Saudi Arabia in 2015 to help it crack down on dissidents. After sharing that information, Abouammo left his job at Twitter in San Francisco and moved to Seattle.

In 2018, FBI agents came to interview him at his house, and he produced a false document to mislead them about his culpability. He was later convicted of acting as a foreign agent, among other crimes, during a trial in San Francisco. Most of his convictions were not at issue in this case.

The question for the justices was whether he could also be convicted in San Francisco of an obstruction charge based on his falsification of a document in Seattle.

The justices unanimously agreed that the obstruction conviction was invalid, overruling lower courts. After all, the Constitution of 1789 required that defendants face trial “in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed,” and the Bill of Rights added a requirement that the trial be in the same “district” as well.

As Justice Elena Kagan explained for the court, this wasn’t just a minor detail. “Venue in criminal cases mattered more than might be supposed to the Nation’s Founders,” she wrote. “Prior to the Revolution, Parliament enacted measures to try allegedly treasonous colonists in England, rather than in their home colonies. The legislation was so roundly despised as to make it into the Declaration of Independence.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...secutions/