WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Thursday that a jilted woman can challenge the use of an anti-terrorism law to prosecute her for spreading deadly chemicals around the home of her husband’s mistress.
The high court, in a unanimous decision, said Carol Anne Bond can challenge her conviction despite arguments from federal prosecutors and judges that she shouldn’t even be allowed to appeal the verdict that has left her in federal prison since 2007.
Bond, who is unable to bear children, was excited for her best friend Myrlina Haynes when the woman announced her pregnancy. But later, the excitement turned to pain when Bond found out that her husband of more than 14 years, Clifford Bond, had impregnated Haynes.
Vowing revenge, Bond, a laboratory technician, stole the chemical 10-chloro-10H phenoxarsine from the company where she worked and purchased potassium dichromate on . Both can be deadly if ingested or exposed to the skin at sufficiently high levels.
Bond spread the chemicals on Haynes’ door handle and in the tailpipe of Haynes’ car. Haynes, noticing the chemicals and suffering a minor burn, called the local police, who didn’t investigate to her satisfaction. She then found some of the chemicals on her mailbox and called the U.S. Postal Service, which videotaped Bond going back and forth between Haynes’ car and the mailbox with the chemicals.
Postal inspectors arrested her.
But instead of turning the domestic-dispute case over to state prosecutors, a federal grand jury indicted her on two counts of possessing and using a chemical weapon, using a federal anti-terrorism law passed to fulfill the United States’ international treaty obligations under the 1993 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction.
Bond, from Lansdale, Pa., almost 30 miles northwest of Philadelphia, challenged her conviction on 10th Amendment grounds, saying the federal government’s decision to charge her under a chemical-weapons law was an unconstitutional reach into a state’s power to handle what her lawyer calls a domestic dispute.
But the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia threw out her appeal, saying that only states — not individuals — can use 10th Amendment arguments that the federal government cannot encroach into matters reserved for the states.
The high-court decision overturned that ruling, allowing her to go back and challenge use of the terrorism law.
“The individual, in a proper case, can assert injury from governmental action taken in excess of the authority that federalism defines. Her rights in this regard do not belong to a state,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the opinion for the court.
Other court action Thursday
• Miranda rights: The court ruled 5-4 in the case of a 13-year-old special-education student that police and courts must consider age when examining whether a child is in police custody and required to be read Miranda rights.
• Illegal search: By a 7-2 vote, the justices upheld the criminal conviction of an Alabama man even though the vehicle search that produced the incriminating evidence against him was illegal.
• Drug case: The court unanimously ruled that a class-action lawsuit over Bayer’s anti-cholesterol drug, Baycol, could go forward. The drug has been withdrawn from the market.
• Rehabilitation: The justices ruled, again unanimously, that judges cannot give a convict extra time in prison in the hope it will be used to get into and complete drug treatment or other rehabilitative programs.
The Associated Press
