Love, Betrayal…and Chemical Weapons? The Curious Case of Bond v. United States

Karen Larson, a cultural anthropologist and college professor who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California-Berkeley, said in 2004, “Since 9/11, concepts of crime and terrorism have been merging in American consciousness. In the wake of anthrax and snipers, the two ideas can no longer be completely distinguished.” The thing is, they can and should be. The problem is that too often they are not, or at least not in time to avoid the negative repercussions of a terror-driven response.

Just this past week, on June 2^nd, 2014 in the case of Bond v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Carol Anne Bond, a Pennsylvania microbiologist initially sentenced to six years in federal prison under the Chemical Weapons Implementation Act of 1998 for a domestic assault in which she smeared caustic potassium dichromate and an arsenic-based chemical on the door knob, car door and mailbox of a friend who had become pregnant through an affair with Bond’s husband. Bond’s lawyers argued on appeal that the federal government had exceeded its 10^th Amendment statutory powers under the Act by making a federal case out of what was a personal offense.

At its close, the Justices declined to address the Constitutional issue, but instead determined that the Act simply did not apply to “an amateur attempt by a jilted wife to injure her husband’s lover, which ended up causing only a minor thumb burn readily treated by rinsing with water.” Recognizing that the power to prosecute such acts rests entirely in the hands of the states, the Court concluded, “There is no reason to think the sovereign nations that ratified the [Chemical Weapons] Convention were interested in anything like Bond’s common law assault.” This application of the law sparked considerable debate regarding constitutional limitations on the authority of Congress to implement treaties, yet it did not do the same regarding the broader and more important basis for the Supreme Court’s decision, which was the potential ramifications of an over-zealous legal response to personal crimes. In the opinion given by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Obama administration’s “boundless” interpretation of the chemical weapons law “would transform the statute from one whose core concerns are acts of war, assassination, and terrorism into a massive federal anti-poisoning regime that reaches the simplest of assaults.”

So does this mean that jilted ex-lovers and experimental types with an eye for danger need no longer fear being treated like terrorists by law enforcement or charged with war crimes by prosecutors? Or, do you agree with Justice Scalia’s assessment that the broad but unambiguous legal definition of “chemical weapon” indeed made Ms. Bond a practitioner of chemical warfare and, as such, gave cause to strike down the law rather than reinterpret it?

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