Snyder v. United States

JUSTICE GORSUCH, concurring.¶

Call it what you will. The Court today speaks of inferences from the word “corruptly,” the statute’s history and structure, and associated punishments. See ante , at 7. It discusses concerns of fair notice and federalism. Ibid. But the bottom line is that, for all those reasons, any fair reader of this statute would be left with a reasonable doubt about whether it covers the defendant’s charged conduct. And when that happens, judges are bound by the ancient rule of lenity to decide the case as the Court does today, not for the prosecutor but for the presumptively free individual. See United States v. Davis , 588 U. S. 445, 464–465 (2019).¶

Lenity may sometimes, as it does today, go unnamed. It may be deployed under other guises, too. “Fair notice” or “fair warning” are especially familiar masks. See, e . g ., ante , at 7, 11, 13; Marinello v. United States , 584 U. S. 1, 6–7, 910 (2018); McDonnell v. United States , 579 U. S. 550, 576 (2016). Cf. Wooden v. United States , 595 U. S. 360, 389 (2022) (GORSUCH, J., concurring in judgment) (“Lenity works to enforce the fair notice requirement”); Yates v. United States , 574 U. S. 528, 548 (2015) (plurality opinion) (same). Other times, we clothe lenity in its corollary—that courts cannot “rely upon prosecutorial discretion to narrow the” scope of an “otherwise wide-ranging” criminal law. Marinello , 584 U. S., at 11; see, e . g ., ante, at 13; Dubin v. United States , 599 U. S. 110, 131 (2023). And in still other instances, we do much the same when we speak of the “restraint” necessary “in assessing the reach of a federal criminal statute.” Id. , at 129 (internal quotation marks omitted); accord, Marinello , 584 U. S., at 6–7, 11; Arthur Andersen LLP v. United States , 544 U. S. 696, 703 (2005).¶

But make no mistake: Whatever the label, lenity is what’s at work behind today’s decision, just as it is in so many others. Rightly so. I am pleased to join.¶