Abouammo v. United States (venue)

Send us Fan MailIn a unanimous opinion by Justice Kagan, the Supreme Court held that a prosecution for falsifying a document in violation of 18 U.S.C. §1519 must be brought in the district where the falsification occurred, not where the federal investigation that the defendant intended to obstruct was located. Ahmad Abouammo, while in Seattle, created and emailed a fake invoice to FBI agents conducting an investigation based in San Francisco, and was subsequently tried and convicted in the Northern District of California. The Court reversed, explaining that constitutional venue rules focus on the location of the offense’s “essential conduct elements,” and §1519 criminalizes only the act of falsifying a document with obstructive intent. Because the statute does not require any actual obstruction or effect on an investigation, the location of the investigation and any contemplated consequences are irrelevant to venue. Rejecting both the Ninth Circuit’s reliance on the statute’s intent element and the Government’s argument that §1519 is an inchoate obstruction offense, the Court concluded that the only conduct constituting the crime occurred in Seattle, making the Western District of Washington the proper venue for trial.Support the show