April 28, 2014 — Monday morning the U.S. Supreme Court granted cert in Yates v. United States, a case challenging the application of a provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley law to a fisherman’s destruction of illegally caught fish. Yates is a potentially important case concerning statutory interpretation and the expansion of federal criminal law.
At issue in Yates is 18 U.S.C. §1519 which makes anyone who “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object” with the intent to impede or obstruct an investigation guilty of a federal crime. The provision is often referred to as the “anti-shredding” provision because it was intended to criminalize the destruction of records that could reveal fraudulent activity by corporate managers and the like.