The Supreme Court voted 6–3 on June 26 to toss the conviction of James Snyder, a former small-town mayor in Indiana who was convicted of accepting an illegal gratuity.
The court held that federal law prohibits bribes to state and local officials but does not make it a crime for those officials to accept gratuities for their past acts. A bribe involves future behavior; a gratuity involves an act that has taken place.
In the United States, the law generally makes bribes to government officials illegal, but gratuities are treated differently. Some gratuities are seen as harmless, while others raise ethical concerns. Federal, state, and local governments have adopted varying rules about which gratuities are acceptable and which are not.
A federal official who accepts a bribe for an official act faces up to 10 years in prison, but one who accepts a prohibited gratuity faces up to two years behind bars.
The justices had appeared willing during oral arguments on April 15 to rein in the broad scope of a public corruption law that civil libertarians say has been used overzealously by prosecutors in recent years. The law criminalizes the receipt of gifts by certain government employees.
The court has been willing to overturn corruption convictions that involve acts by public officials that some consider normal political activities.
For example, in 2016, the Supreme Court vacated the conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell for taking gifts from a benefactor without actually taking action to benefit that person.
In 2020, the court overturned the convictions of two former political operatives who, as allies of then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, closed lanes at a toll plaza for part of the George Washington Bridge in 2013. The operatives altered the traffic pattern on lanes leading to the bridge as payback to the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, for not supporting Mr. Christie’s reelection campaign.
The court determined that even though the officials’ actions constituted an “abuse of power,” they didn’t run afoul of federal law because the “scheme ... did not aim to obtain money or property.”
In the current case, while Mr. Snyder, a Republican, was mayor of Portage, Indiana, the town awarded two contracts to a local truck business, Great Lakes Peterbilt, and bought five trash trucks from the company for about $1.1 million. The company then paid him $13,000.
Federal prosecutors suspected that the payment was a gratuity for the town’s trash truck contracts, but he said it was payment for his consulting services as a contractor for Peterbilt. Many small jurisdictions such as Portage allow elected officials to perform outside work.
Mr. Snyder was convicted by a federal district court jury in 2021 of soliciting and accepting the $13,000. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison. He was also convicted of defrauding the IRS but was acquitted on a separate bribery charge related to a tow truck contract.
On appeal, Mr. Snyder argued that federal law criminalizes bribes but not gratuities.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit disagreed and upheld the conviction regarding the gratuity.
The case concerns 18 U.S. Code Section 666(a)(l)(B), which makes it a crime for a state or local official to “corruptly solicit, demand ... or accept ... anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded in connection with any” government business involving anything valued at $5,000 or more.
In the majority opinion, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that Section 666 “prohibits state and local officials from accepting bribes that are promised or given before the official act.”
The issue here is whether Section 666 “also makes it a crime for state and local officials to accept gratuities—for example, gift cards, lunches, plaques, books, framed photos, or the like—that may be given as a token of appreciation after the official act.”
“The answer is no,” he wrote.
Although state and local governments often regulate the gifts that state and local officials are allowed to accept, Section 666 does not supplement those rules “by subjecting 19 million state and local officials to up to 10 years in federal prison for accepting even commonplace gratuities.” Instead, the provision leaves it to states and localities to regulate their officials, he wrote.
Not all gratuities smack of corruption, Justice Kavanaugh wrote, noting that those gratuities to public officials that raise concerns have long been regulated by Congress, states, and localities.
Many gratuities are given as tokens of appreciation, such as a holiday tip for a mail carrier or a college sweatshirt given by a college dean to a guest speaker, he wrote.
The text, history, federalism implications, and other factors related to Section 666 make it clear that the law is “a bribery statute and not a gratuities statute.”
The policy decisions that states and localities have made about gratuities would be “gutted” if the court were to accept the federal government’s interpretation of the section, according to Justice Kavanaugh.
In this case, the federal government asked the court “to adopt an interpretation of [Section] 666 that would radically upend gratuities rules and turn [Section] 666 into a vague and unfair trap for 19 million state and local officials.”
“We decline to do so,” he wrote.
The Supreme Court reversed the judgment of the Seventh Circuit and sent the case back to that court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson filed a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
“Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one [that] only today’s Court could love,” she wrote.
The Court’s decision “overrides the intent of Congress—and the policy preferences of the constituents that body represents—as unequivocally expressed by the plain text of the statute.”
Section 666 imposes criminal penalties on state, local, and tribal officials who “corruptly” solicit, accept, or agree to accept “anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded.”
“Snyder’s case is an easy one” if one accepts that the statute covers local officials “who corruptly solicit, accept, or agree to accept rewards in connection with official business worth over a certain amount,” Justice Jackson wrote.
