Ruling Against Type

As two decisions show, 'conservative' and 'liberal' don't mean everything at the Supreme Court.

TWO SUPREME Court decisions handed down yesterday point to the difficulty of predicting outcomes based on political leanings.

The justice who wrote a four-member plurality opinion in one case concluded that defendants were entitled to leniency; as a result, the lengthy money laundering sentences of two men who ran an illegal gambling operation in Indiana were thrown out. The justice writing in the second case concluded that the money laundering statute had been improperly used to convict a man trying to cross from the United States into Mexico with $81,000 hidden under the floorboards of a car. Both cases were defeats for the government.

What gives? Has there been a liberal coup on the court? Not quite. Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch conservative, authored the decision in United States v. Santos in the case of the gambling duo; Justice Clarence Thomas, another conservative, penned the decision in Cuellar v. United States involving the cash-carrying driver. Both justices reached "liberal" results using arguably "conservative" approaches.

In Santos, the justices were asked to decide the meaning of "proceeds." The government argued that it should be read as "receipts" from a transaction -- a definition that gave it wide latitude in applying the law. Justice Scalia concluded that because Congress failed to define the word -- and because "proceeds" could be read either as receipts or, more narrowly, as "profits" -- that the "rule of lenity" mandated that it be interpreted as "profits," which is more favorable for defendants. The opinion was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, as well as Justice Thomas.

In Cuellar, Justice Thomas wrote for a unanimous court that the fact that Humberto Fidel Regalado Cuellar was hiding a large amount of cash in a secret compartment did not prove that he broke the money laundering law, particularly the provision that prohibits transporting illicitly obtained funds out of the United States in a scheme "designed" to "conceal or disguise the nature, the location, the source, the ownership or the control" of the funds. Justice Thomas and the rest of the court interpreted the text of the statute literally and concluded that the government had failed to establish Mr. Cuellar's actions were "designed" to hide the money's source or ownership.

Apart from making certain money laundering prosecutions more difficult for the government, these two cases remind that the perceived political leanings of justices are not perfectly reliable predictors of how they will vote.