Airing The Bush Administation's Dirty Laundry

Even this Supreme Court occasionally finds itself to the left of the Bush Administration. The Court on Monday heard argument on what exactly should be the limit of the Money Laundering Control Act, which has been aggressively invoked  in recent years by the Justice Department. In fact, in the last two years, more than 2000 defendants have been charged under the Act, but such charges often stemmed from the  mere concealment of money not trying to make it clean.

         Officers had stopped Humberto Cuellar in Schleicher County, Texas, about a hundred miles from Mexico. When Cuellar pulled out rolled-up cash, police said it smelled of marijuana and searched his car finding more than $80,000 in cash in a secret compartment in the car. Cuellar was convicted of international money laundering and sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison.

          A Bush Administration lawyer tried to answer tough questioning on why the mere concealment of cash in a car headed for Mexico meets the standard for an international money laundering charge, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Justice Scalia, hardly a friend of criminal defendants, complained: "All you have here is transporting cash and concealing it.”

 When the Justice Department attorney responded by arguing that putting money in a suitcase in a car’s trunk might be evidence of a “design to conceal,” Chief Justice Roberts said: “When I use a suitcase, I’m using it to carry my clothes, not to conceal them.”

          This is the second money laundering case the Court has heard this term. Four months ago, the Justices considered the government's use of the money laundering law in a gambling case.  In that case, a defendant convicted of running an illegal lottery operation was sentenced to five years in prison for gambling and 17 1/2 years for money laundering. Prosecutors had argued that the act of compensating employees and paying off the winning bettors constituted money laundering. “Come on," Scalia told a Justice Department lawyer. "Nobody runs a gambling operation without paying off the winners. It's not going to last very long. To make the paying off of the winners a separate crime from running the gambling operation seems to me quite extraordinary." Indeed.

Alan Milstein