November 5, 2014 — Did the federal government go overboard when it prosecuted a Florida fisherman for throwing undersized grouper off his boat?
Commercial fishing boat captain John Yates says he was wrongly convicted of destroying evidence — namely the fish — under a law passed in the wake of the Enron accounting scandal that was really meant to stop financial documents from being shredded.
The Supreme Court was to hear arguments Wednesday in a case that business groups and other critics have derided as an example of government overreach. The Obama administration says it simply was enforcing the plain language of a law that prohibits destruction of "any tangible object" during a federal investigation.
The case started in 2007 when a Florida fish and wildlife officer boarded Yates' boat in the Gulf of Mexico and discovered 72 grouper that appeared to be less than 20 inches long, the minimum length permitted by law. The officer ordered Yates to return to port so the fish could be seized.
But when the vessel arrived, the officer found only 69 undersized fish on board. The officer suspected these were not the same fish he had measured before. A crewmember later testified that Yates had ordered the undersized fish to be tossed overboard and replaced.
Prosecutors charged Yates under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, passed in response to the Enron accounting scandal when scores of documents were shredded to conceal wrongdoing. Part of the law prohibits knowingly altering or destroying "any record, document, or tangible object" with the intent to obstruct an investigation.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News and World Report