(Breitbart) Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley opined at the Hill saying that Friday’s Supreme Court decision holding that the most severe law cited in January 6 prosecutions does not apply to riots or protests effectively means that the oft-repeated accusations of “insurrection” have been downgraded to mere trespassing.
As Breitbart News reported this past Friday, the Supreme Court decided in Fischer vs. U.S. that the “Department of Justice had taken too broad a view of [18 U.S.C.] 1512(c)(2), a law that prohibits destruction of evidence but was not intended for protests.”
It should be noted that there is a federal insurrection statute, found at 18 U.S.C. 2383, but few if any January 6 rioters were ever charged with that. Instead, the most serious charge they were hit with was under Section 1512(c)(2), which is about obstructing an official proceeding by destroying or hiding documents meant for use in that proceeding.
“Unless the defendants could be shown to have interfered with the delivery of documents to Congress, they could not be prosecuted under the statute — as hundreds of people, including former President Donald Trump, have been,” noted the report.
Most strikingly, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — a liberal judge appointed by President Joe Biden — sided with the conservatives, while Justice Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by former President Donald Trump, sided with the liberals.
As Turley argues in his lengthy op-ed, the decision will have ramifications that could affect hundreds of cases pertaining to January 6:
