Abouammo v. United States

The right to be tried where the crime was committed is one of the oldest protections in American law - and it exists because the British Crown tried to strip it away.

After the Boston Massacre in 1770, Parliament passed a series of laws allowing British soldiers and officials accused of crimes in the colonies to be shipped back to England for trial. The message was clear: if you can move the trial far enough from the community that witnessed the crime, you can control the outcome. Colonial juries who saw what happened would never get to judge it.

The Founders remembered. When they wrote Article III, they required that "the Trial of all Crimes . . . shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed." When that wasn't specific enough, they added the Sixth Amendment's Vicinage Clause: trial "by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed."

The question in Abouammo is whether the government did exactly what the British tried to do - moved the trial to a district hundreds of miles from where the defendant actually acted, because the forum was more favorable to the prosecution. Abouammo created and sent the documents in Seattle. He was charged in San Francisco. The government's theory: because the statute's intent element "contemplates" effects in California, venue is proper there. The defense says that reasoning would let the government charge anyone, anywhere an email lands.

Under the conduct elements test, the crime in § 1519 was completed in Seattle - not California. The conduct elements are the verbs: "alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry." Abouammo did every one of those things at his desk in Seattle.

The government pointed to the word "knowingly" and to the intent element - "with the intent to impede . . . the investigation" - to argue the crime reached California because the investigation was based there. But "knowingly" is a mens rea element, not a conduct element. The fact that "knowing" was an element of the offense doesn't transform what the defendant knew about into conduct of its own. Abouammo's knowledge of the San Francisco investigation didn't move his hands from Seattle to California. He still typed the invoices in Seattle and pressed send in Seattle.

If mens rea could fix venue, any defendant charged with a federal "knowing" or "willful" crime could be hauled into any district the government connects to the defendant's state of mind. That is exactly the kind of prosecutorial forum-shopping the Vicinage Clause was written to prevent.

This ruling turns on a critical detail: Congress never defined venue in § 1519. The statute says nothing about where a prosecution must be brought. Because Congress was silent, the Court fell back on the default rule from Johnson - look at the conduct elements, find the district where they occurred, and that is the proper venue.

This means the holding is narrow in one important sense. If Congress had written a venue provision into the statute - specifying, for example, that prosecution is proper in any district where the investigation is conducted - the Court would have deferred to that choice. The conduct elements test only fills the gap when Congress doesn't speak.