Gulf Coast fisherman John L. Yates received a 30 day jail sentence and 3 years of probation after being convicted of breaking a federal law designed to prevent Enron-style document destruction. Authorities accused Yates of destroying a number of undersized fish after being issued a citation for having caught them. He was convicted under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, according to ABA Journal.
When Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, in the wake of the Enron scandal, a key provision was aimed at making a federal crime the type of conduct committed by the energy company's auditors: rampant destruction of documents, computer drives and email that detailed Enron's fraud on its investors.
Few would have predicted that the corporate-responsibility law would be used to prosecute a commercial fisherman in Florida over the destruction of six dozen undersized red grouper.
But the Gulf Coast fisherman, John L. Yates, was convicted in 2011 of violating the "anti-shredding provision" of Sarbanes-Oxley, which makes it a crime to knowingly destroy, mutilate, conceal, falsify or make a false entry in "any record, document or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct or influence" a federal investigation.
Now Yates' case is headed to the Supreme Court. Many legal experts find the case to be outrageous.
"This is an uncommonly silly prosecution," says Paul J. Larkin Jr., a former federal lawyer (who served in the solicitor general's office and as an environmental protection agent) and now a senior legal research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
"Nobody stores information in a fish," he says. "It seems to me when the law talks about tangible objects, it is talking about objects such as hard drives, cellphones, thumb drives and CDs—not fish."
Federal authorities disagree.
But U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. argues that the anti-shredding provision of Sarbanes-Oxley covers all types of physical evidence.
Verrilli argues in a brief that under Yates' arguments, the provision would prohibit "a murderer from destroying his victim's diary, but not the murder weapon."
Others see the prosecution as an example of overcriminalization.
Stephen Smith, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, says prosecutors' expansive use of the anti-shredding provision of Sarbanes-Oxley is "another example of overcriminalization at work."
The statute was aimed at document destruction arising out of the Enron scandal, "but the Department of Justice applies it to broader situations that Congress did not remotely have in mind," says Smith, who joined an amicus brief by 18 criminal law professors on Yates' side.