Matthew Cavedon
The federal government’s plea for effectively unbounded prosecutorial forum shopping is incompatible with the original meaning of the Constitution’s provisions limiting venue. Details of the case are presented below.
San Francisco-based FBI agents flew to Seattle to question petitioner Ahmad Abouammo at his home. They suspected Abouammo, a former Twitter employee, was involved in disclosing a Saudi dissident’s private Twitter account information to an associate of a Saudi royal. The government alleged that during the meeting at his home, Abouammo went upstairs, created a false invoice, and emailed it to the agents. Abouammo subsequently was indicted in the Northern District of California for falsifying records and convicted following a jury trial.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed Abouammo’s convictions, holding that venue for the prosecution was proper in California because the statute he violated “expressly contemplates the effect of influencing the action of another.” Accordingly, venue could be proper in either the district where Abouammo created the false invoice or “the district of the expressly contemplated effect—where the investigation [this] was intended to stymie [was] ongoing or contemplated.”
Abouammo could be tried in California because the invoice he made “was received by FBI agents working out of the FBI’s San Francisco office.” This was so even if Abouammo never “specifically foresaw effects” of his actions happening in California.
The Ninth Circuit’s decision allows for anyone who allegedly falsifies documents to be tried in any district where the relevant government investigators are based—even if the defendant has never been to that district and intends no harm to reach it. Virtually every federal entity has investigating agents located in the nation’s capital, who could be appended to virtually any federal falsification inquiry. In effect, then, the government argues that it can turn the District of Columbia, or any other district hosting a significant part of the federal bureaucracy (such as San Francisco), into the universal venue for trying federal crimes.
The Cato Institute filed a brief supporting Abouammo’s cert petition at the Supreme Court. Cato argues that the government’s plea for effectively unbounded prosecutorial forum shopping is incompatible with the original meaning of the Constitution’s provisions limiting venue.
Abouammo carried out his crime entirely in his Seattle home, using an upstairs computer to create and send a false invoice to the agents waiting on the first floor, so the Western District of Washington was the only constitutionally permissible venue for prosecuting him.