The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against an Alabama man whose trade secrets theft conviction in Florida for stealing proprietary fishing information from a Florida-based website was vacated because his trial took place in the wrong state.
The ruling means that the government is free to retry an already convicted defendant even if he was tried in the wrong venue.
For centuries the law has mandated that a criminal defendant must be tried where the crime was committed. And nowadays when crimes take place over the internet, as allegedly happened here, the legal rules determining where the crime took place are often unclear.
The new ruling may help courts lay down clearer jurisdictional rules regarding cyber crimes in which the location of the commission of the offense cannot be easily ascertained. A criminal defendant and the victim of an online crime are often in different jurisdictions, which can make prosecutions difficult.
The court’s 9–0 decision in Smith v. United States, court file 21-1576, was issued on June 15. The petitioner is software engineer Timothy S. Smith of Mobile, Alabama.
While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and 8th Circuit both require an acquittal when the government fails to meet its burden of establishing proper venue, the 6th, 9th, 10th, and 11th Circuits “hold that a defendant can be re-tried for the same offense in other venues—indeed, that they can be serially re-tried in as many venues as the government wishes,” according to Smith’s petition.
The Biden administration took the position that there was no circuit split and that the precedents from the 5th and 8th Circuits that Smith argued support his position do not actually require acquittal for cases tried in the wrong venue.
Having the conviction vacated was not enough for Smith because he doesn’t consider himself guilty of a crime. Whatever Smith did, it wasn’t done in Florida, where he was convicted, his lawyers argued.
Smith wanted to be acquitted, that is, legally declared not guilty, but vacating doesn’t go far enough as it only erases the conviction from court records.
Smith, who claims he fishes more than 1,000 hours a year, allegedly hacked his way into Pensacola, Florida-based StrikeLines, a website that sells location information about artificial fishing reefs to subscribers. He allegedly obtained data from the website and on social media offered the coordinates to others. He was charged with extortion in Florida after allegedly telling the website management he would take down his posts if the company were to provide coordinates for deep-water grouper fishing.
Smith was indicted in the Northern District of Florida. Before trial he moved to dismiss the indictment for lack of venue, citing two provisions of the U.S. Constitution. He argued he should not be tried in that district because he accessed data from Mobile, Alabama, in the Southern District of Alabama, and the servers the company used to store its data were located in Orlando, in the Middle District of Florida. The U.S. district court decided to leave factual disputes related to venue to the jury to decide and denied the motion.
The jury in the Northern District of Florida ended up convicting Smith of theft of trade secrets and transmitting a threat through interstate commerce with intent to extort a thing of value.
The judge sentenced him in 2020 to concurrent 18-month terms in federal prison on each count plus one year of supervised release. The court denied a subsequent motion for a judgment of acquittal based on improper venue by Smith, reasoning that the venue was proper regarding the trade secret theft conviction because StrikeLines, according to the new Supreme Court decision, “felt the effects of the crime at its headquarters in the Northern District of Florida.”
The venue should be “in the place where the owner of the trade secret is located and feels the loss of its trade secret” because “the essential conduct of theft or misappropriation is necessarily defined in terms of its effects, i.e., the owner’s loss of the trade secret,” the district court stated.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit vacated the trade secrets theft conviction on venue grounds, but affirmed the extortion conviction, and remanded the case for sentencing.
“When a conviction is reversed because of a trial error, this Court has long allowed retrial in nearly all circumstances,” Alito wrote.
“We consider in this case whether the Constitution requires a different outcome when a conviction is reversed because the prosecution occurred in the wrong venue and before a jury drawn from the wrong location. We hold that it does not.”
The constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy, which provides that no person can be convicted twice of the same offense, does not apply here, the court also held.
“In this case, then, the Eleventh Circuit’s decision that venue in the Northern District of Florida was improper did not adjudicate Smith’s culpability. It thus does not trigger the Double Jeopardy Clause,” Alito wrote.
The Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.
