The highest court in the land ruled in favor of Capt. John L. Yates of Holmes Beach.
In a Feb. 25 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court determined a law aimed at corporate fraud should not be applied broadly — and not to the facts of Yates’ case.
“It’s been a long time coming, but I think it was appropriate,” said Yates the day after the decision.
“We’re quite pleased,” said his wife, Sandy Yates, who spent hundreds of hours researching her husband’s case.
“They won’t be prosecuting Sarbanes over fish,” she added.
The federal prosecutor had waged an obstruction case against Yates based on stiffer criminal penalties in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
Yates’ attorney, assistant Federal Defender John Badalamenti of Tampa, had argued it was implausible for Congress to have intended “an all-encompassing obstruction statute buried within the altering-documents provision” of the act.
Yates said the criminal law should not been applied to him because “fishing is supposed to be civil.”
Passed in the wake of the Enron scandal and Arthur Anderson LLP’s document shredding, the law prohibits tampering with “any record, document or tangible object” in an attempt to impede a federal investigation, and the breadth of its application was before the Yates’ court.
Yates was running a grouper boat out of Cortez when federal agents boarded the Miss Katie in August 2007 about 100 miles offshore in federal waters and cited him for short-fishing.
After six days at sea, agents sorted through a 3,000 pound catch of grouper and found 72 fish about an inch short of the then 20-inch minimum.
They ordered Yates to bring the fish to a Cortez dock where the agents re-measured the fish about four days later, and found three fewer short fish. The agents were told by one of Yates’ crew that Yates had ordered the fish replaced with others from his catch.
Thirty-two months later, the Tampa federal prosecutor levied criminal charges against Yates.
A jury convicted him on two of three charges, including the one based on the Sarbane-Oxley Act. Yates was sentenced to 30 days and served the time in December 2010.
Yates appealed the Sarbanes-Oxley conviction to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the trial court’s ruling in August 2013.
The highest court heard oral arguments in November 2014 and based its reversal on the rules of statutory construction.
Five justices sided with Yates’ argument that a “tangible object,” as stated in the context of the act, was not meant to include ensnarled fish.
The four others agreed with the dissent by Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote, “A fish is, of course, a discrete thing that possesses physical form,” citing generally to Dr. Seuss’ “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.”
Yates took his case to the high court on principal — that he didn’t do what the prosecutors charged and to fight against over-criminalization of fishing industry regulations.
“For reasons not disclosed in the record before us, more than 32 months passed before criminal charges were lodged against Yates,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority.
The decision is being interpreted as a warning to prosecutors not to use the law for obstruction cases other than those dealing with paper and electronic files.
The majority opinion was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Samuel Anthony Alito Jr., wrote a concurring opinion. Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas joined Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent.