Comment by DeepSeaTortoise | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeepSeaTortoise | Hacker News Reader

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DeepSeaTortoise

Not really, because that's the core issue had hand, but I might not have made my intention with the argument sufficiently clear.

The question the court looked at: Did Congress intend "receiving gifts as a bribe" and "receiving gifts as gratitude" to be two separate crimes for non-federal employees as it is the case for federal ones (In which case handling the issue would have been left up to the states)?

The majority opinion refused to consider the moral argument (although they snuck it in in their argument on a lack of fair notice), but IMO that's by far the most intuitive one, when you allow yourself to look at the problem from the legislative perspective. By looking at the extremes it becomes very clear that there are two very different problems:

Imagine a group of students doing much better than their peers on their final exam thanks to the efforts of their teacher and they gift him a "Best teacher ever" mug.

But now reverse the causality:

Imagine a teacher demanding to be gifted a "Best teacher ever" mug before putting extra effort into preparing his students for their final exam. The group that gifted him the mug does much better than their peers as a result.

IMO these should be two very different crimes, but there is also a valid argument that they are about equivalent, as pursued by the dissenting opinion.

But that's not something a court should legislate.

No, it's already in the law that it only applies if it is intended to and corruptly accepted as an influence on official decision-making.

A gift as a thank-you, post-hoc, where the prosecution cannot prove the gift was part of an effort to "corruptly" influence a prior decision, was always fine under any interpretation.

If students said "if you give us a good grade, then we'll give you a Best Teacher Ever mug," that is functionally identical to a bribe but is now legal.

> it only applies if it is intended to and corruptly accepted as an influence on official decision-making.

The majority opinion argues that this is one of the primary differences between a bribe and a gift of gratitude.

> A gift as a thank-you, post-hoc, where the prosecution cannot prove the gift was part of an effort to "corruptly" influence a prior decision, was always fine under any interpretation.

No, which is a large part of this whole argument. The interpretation the government used and was (indirectly) backed by the minority opinion, was, that the statute would not cover "innocuous or obviously benign" gratuities. But what counts as "innocuous or obviously benign" was never established. And this "innocuous or obviously benign" line is EXACTLY what distinguished between whether a gratitude was accepted with a corrupt state of mind.

And that's where we arrive back at the core of the problem.

For a bribe, the question of whether or not a corrupt state of mind existed can be judged at minimum by if the official act was corrupted. Usually this standard doesn't exist for gratitudes. These do not require a corrupt state of mind to be criminal, but their criminality derives solely from the heightened standard of responsibility of an official when performing official duties. Just like a heightened standard of responsibility when operating a motor vehicle or carrying.

> If students said "if you give us a good grade, then we'll give you a Best Teacher Ever mug," that is functionally identical to a bribe but is now legal.

Not really a good example, because unless that's something like a theater performance there is basically no way forward from this, which could end with the teacher handing out good grades and receiving a mug from these students without this scenario becoming bribery.

And gratitudes do not become legal in general. It's just that the involvement of the federal government ends and states are now free to handle such cases however they think is appropriate.

> But what counts as "innocuous or obviously benign" was never established. And this "innocuous or obviously benign" line is EXACTLY what distinguished between whether a gratitude was accepted with a corrupt state of mind.

Easy: someone would complain and a court would decide based on the specifics of the situation. Most laws work this way and cannot actually resolve based on a programmatic list of facts.

> Not really a good example, because unless that's something like a theater performance there is basically no way forward from this, which could end with the teacher handing out good grades and receiving a mug from these students without this scenario becoming bribery.

Are you arguing that grading (outside of "something like a theater performance") is fully objective? Because... it's not.

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