Supreme Court Jan. 6 ruling: How a Pennsylvania cop’s challenge upended hundreds of Capitol riot cases and may end up helping Trump

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday threw a significant hurdle in the Justice Department’s ongoing effort to prosecute hundreds of Americans who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, ruling that a key charge lodged against hundreds of defendants may not apply to the rioters’ conduct that day.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court held that prosecutors had misapplied the federal charge of “obstruction of an official proceeding” to the congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

The decision — in a case brought by Joseph W. Fischer, a former police officer from North Cornwall Township in Lebanon County — could force the resentencing of hundreds of convicted Capitol riot defendants and have implications for the federal election interference case against former President Donald Trump.

But its effects could also be limited. The majority of Capitol riot defendants found guilty of the obstruction charge have also been convicted of other felonies related to the attack. And the high court left open the possibility that some of the obstruction convictions could still stand, if prosecutors can provide additional evidence.

Here’s what you need to know:

Fischer, 57, of Jonestown, Pa., was a patrolman with the North Cornwall Township Police Department, when FBI agents arrested him in February 2021 in connection with his role in the riot.

Prosecutors say he was at “the front of the pack pushing against police” during the melee and was caught on police body cam video yelling “Charge!” to the mob of angry supporters of former President Donald Trump. Several rioters standing nearby engaged in a scuffle with officers, knocking at least one to the ground. A man investigators believe to be Fischer can be heard on the video shouting “let him up … let him up … I am a cop, too.”

Before the riot, Fischer sent text messages in which he told acquaintances that members of Congress ‘[c]an’t vote if they can’t breathe … lol” and that he might need his police chief “to post my bail … It might get violent.”

Afterward, Fischer joked on Facebook that his chief had confronted him after learning about his role in the attack and wrote that he “may need a job.”

“I told him if that is the price I have to pay to voice my freedom and liberties which I was born with and thusly taken away, then [that] must be the price,” Fischer said, according to the charging documents in his case. “I told him I have no regrets.”

Fischer was charged with felonies including obstruction of an official proceeding, assaulting officers, and interfering with police during a civil disorder.

But before his case could go to trial, he challenged the obstruction charge against him, taking his argument all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. His case has been on hold since June 2022.

The obstruction of an official proceeding statute makes it a felony crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison to “obstruct, influence or impede any official proceeding.”

Government lawyers believed the law, first passed in response to the 2001 Enron scandal, loosely defined what constitutes an official proceeding and what conduct would constitute an illegal effort to obstruct one. The Justice Department has applied it in roughly 350 Jan. 6 cases.

But Fischer and lawyers for several other Capitol riot defendants have argued that the statute was intended instead to criminalize only the type of destruction of physical evidence and documents that stymied congressionalinvestigators during their investigation of the Enron collapse. It was not meant, they argued, to apply to any form disruptive conduct that interferes with any act of Congress.

The Jan. 6 lawyers suggested that under the government’s theory, protesters who interrupted a congressionalhearing could end up sentenced to decades behind bars for something as relatively minor as shouting from the House gallery.

On the case’s way to the Supreme Court, a federal appellate court in Washington had ruled that the statute’s language is vague enough to encompass the type of disruption that brought congressionalcertification of the 2020 electoral vote to a halt during the Jan. 6 riot.

In its opinion Friday, the court sided with Fischer’s interpretation, limiting the obstruction charge to efforts to destroy or tamper with documents or other physical evidence.

”The government’s theory would ... criminalize a broad swath of prosaic conduct, exposing activists and lobbyists to decades in prison,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote.

Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan dissented, arguing that a better reading of the law would be that, after the problems that arose during the Enron investigation, Congress sought to criminalize any acts that would interfere with official proceedings.

The court’s ruling complicates hundreds of Capitol riot prosecutions and will tie up the federal judge overseeing the cases in Washington, D.C. for months.

The Justice Department has charged more than 20% of the roughly 1,400 Capitol riot defendants it’s charged since 2021 with the “obstruction” offense, including at least 28 of the roughly 150 people from Pennsylvania and New Jersey who have been arrested so far.

More than 180 of those defendants from across the country — and at least 20 from Pennsylvania and New Jersey — have already been convicted of obstruction and, in some cases, sentenced to prison.

Many of them will now have to be resentenced.

Their ranks include high-profile Capitol riot defendants like Zach Rehl, former head of the Philadelphia Proud Boys, who was convicted along with three other leaders of the militant far-right organization with plotting the violence that erupted that day. But because he and many others convicted on the obstruction count were also convicted of other serious felonies, their sentences are not likely to change significantly.

For others, the ruling could mean an early release from prison. In the case of self-styled dating coach and social media influencer Patrick Stedman, of Haddonfield, who is currently serving a four-year prison sentence, the obstruction count was the most serious charge he faced. Tossing out his sentence for that count would cut his prison time from his conviction on lesser charges down to 12 months — a period of incarceration he has already served.

And in rare cases — like that of Richard Michetti, 31, of Ridley Park, who was turned in by an ex-girlfriend after calling her a moron for not believing Democrats had stolen the 2020 election — it could undo a conviction entirely.

As part of a deal struck with prosecutors, Michetti pleaded guilty to only one count of obstruction of an official proceeding and was sentenced in 2022 to nine months behind bars. The government dismissed the other lesser counts with which he was originally charged.

But the court’s ruling Friday does not necessarily mean that all Jan. 6 defendants charged with obstruction are now off the hook.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that if prosecutors could prove that rioters like Fischer specifically interfered — or sought to interfere — with documents used by Congress during the certification of the 2020 vote, like the certificates of electors each state submits that are tallied during those proceedings, the obstruction charge could still apply under the majority’s ruling Friday.

“It might well be that Fischer’s conduct, as alleged here, involved the impairment (or the attempted impairment) of the availability or integrity of the things used during the Jan. 6 proceeding,” Jackson wrote. “If so, then Fischer’s prosecution [on the obstruction charge ] can and should proceed.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland, in a statement, said the ruling would not deter the Justice Department’s efforts to hold rioters responsible.

“For the cases affected by today’s decision, the Department will take appropriate steps to comply with the Court’s ruling,” Garland said. “We will continue to use all available tools to hold accountable those criminally responsible for the January 6 attack on our democracy.”

Possibly, but that is less clear. Trump, who was charged last year by a federal grand jury in Washington with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, faces two counts of obstruction of an official proceeding.

His lawyers have maintained that, as in the cases of the Jan. 6 rioters, the charge in his case has also been misapplied and they will almost certainly push to have those counts thrown out. But there are factors that distinguish Special Counsel Jack Smith’s use of the charge in Trump’s case from those involving Capitol riot defendants.

For instance, the charges against Trump rest in part on his attempts to have fraudulent certificates of electors from battleground states like Pennsylvania submitted during Congress’ Jan. 6 proceedings. And those certificates appear to be the type of congressionalrecords that the Supreme Court said Friday are central to bringing an obstruction charge.

That argument is sure to continue if Trump’s D.C. prosecution moves forward. But the Supreme Court, meanwhile, is weighing an even more consequential question involving that case.

Trump has argued he has absolute immunity from criminal charges for anything that occurred during his presidency — a position that, if affirmed by the justices, could tank the D.C. prosecution and, potentially, the other felony cases he’s facing in Florida and Georgia.

The justices are expected to issue their ruling on that question Monday.