The Supreme Court and the Right to Bring Constitutional Challenges to Criminal Laws

Brian Walsh / February 22, 2011

Today the U.S. Supreme Court will consider the connection between an international convention to eliminate chemical weapons and a suburban Philadelphia love triangle. Remarkably, the first and apparently only person prosecuted under the United States’ implementation of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention is Carol Anne Bond, a Lansdale, Pennsylvania, woman who used chemical irritants to cause a slight burn on the thumb of Bond’s formerly close friend after the friend bore Bond’s husband’s love-child. Today the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case (Bond v. United States).

Neither Bond nor her attorneys dispute that what she did was wrongful and dangerous and that punishing her as a criminal is just. Indeed, she pled guilty to two counts of stealing some of her rival’s mail out of her mailbox, and she is not challenging those charges. Tampering with the U.S. mails has long been recognized as a proper subject for criminalization by the federal government. (more…)