Yates v. United States, decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2015, began not in a courtroom but on the Gulf of Mexico on 23 August 2007, when a fisheries officer boarded the commercial vessel Miss Katie and found its captain hiding undersized red grouper.
A Captain, a Crate of Grouper, and a Cover-Up
John Jones, a field officer with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission empowered to enforce federal fisheries laws, boarded the Miss Katie and measured the catch. He found 72 fish measuring under 20 inches, the legal minimum size for red grouper.
Jones placed the undersized fish in wooden crates, issued captain John Yates a citation, and told him the National Marine Fisheries Service would seize the fish when the vessel returned to port. Yates then instructed his crew to throw the 72 fish overboard and replace them with larger grouper from the rest of the catch.
The substitution was discovered when Jones returned four days after the Miss Katie docked and noticed that many of the fish he had previously measured were now longer than those he had recorded at sea. A crewmember confirmed to Jones that Yates had ordered the swap, according to the Harvard Law Review.
Yates was not indicted until 5 May 2010, more than 32 months after the incident. He faced two charges: destroying property to prevent a federal seizure under 18 U.S.C. § 2232(a), and destroying or concealing a tangible object to impede a federal investigation under 18 U.S.C. § 1519. He went to trial in August 2011.
At trial, Yates ran two arguments in his defence. First, he contended that Officer Jones had measured the fish with their mouths closed, which artificially shortened the measured length and meant the fish were not actually undersized. Second, and more consequentially for the law, he argued that § 1519 was never intended to cover fish at all.
That second argument drew on the statute’s origins. Section 1519, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years’ imprisonment, was enacted as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 in the aftermath of the collapse of Enron Corporation. Its purpose, Yates argued, was to protect investors and restore trust in financial markets by targeting the destruction of financial records and documents, not the disposal of seafood. The reference to a ‘tangible object’ in the provision, his defence contended, encompassed only objects used to store information, such as computer hard drives and logbooks.
The jury convicted him. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction under § 1519, holding at 733 F.3d 1059 (11th Cir. 2013) that fish, as objects with physical form, fall within the ordinary dictionary definition of ‘tangible object.’
The Ruling in Yates v United States
The Supreme Court reversed. In Yates v. United States, 574 U.S. 528 (2015), a plurality of the Court held that a fish is not a ‘record, document, or tangible object’ within the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 1519.
The plurality applied the canon of noscitur a sociis, the principle that a word takes colour from the words around it. Grouped alongside ‘record’ and ‘document,’ the phrase ‘tangible object’ in § 1519 should be read to cover objects used to record or preserve information, not physical evidence of any description. A grouper, whatever its dimensions, does not record or preserve anything.
The Court also applied the rule of lenity, under which ambiguous criminal statutes are construed in favour of the defendant. Given that § 1519 originated in a law designed to address corporate fraud and the shredding of financial records, extending it to cover fish thrown from a boat would criminalise conduct its drafters plainly never contemplated and expose defendants to a 20-year maximum for conduct that carries far lighter penalties under the fisheries laws Congress actually wrote for the purpose.
Yates v. United States remains a leading authority on the use of statutory context and surrounding text to limit the reach of broadly worded federal obstruction provisions. Subject to any further legislative intervention, § 1519 cannot be used to prosecute the destruction of physical objects that are not themselves records or information-bearing devices.
Whether Congress will act to close the gap the decision identified, or whether prosecutors will continue to press § 1519 against non-documentary evidence in other contexts, is a question the ruling left open.
