Kebodeaux Argument Preview

The oral argument for the Fifth Circuit decision United States v. Kebodeaux, a SORNA case, is scheduled for this Wednesday, April 17th.  SCOTUSBlog offers a detailed argument preview in the post by Steven Schwinn, Can Congress punish a former sex offender for failure to register?, concluding with this analysis:

This is a narrow case. It involves a defendant who represents a relatively small and, with time, diminishing class of individuals (those with sex-offender convictions pre-SORNA). It involves a defendant who is subject to SORNA by virtue of his military conviction, and not his interstate travel. And it involves a challenge to SORNA’s penalty provision, and not its other provisions (including its registration provision, although it may be hard to separate the two here).

Moreover, the Fifth Circuit ruling is by its own terms quite narrow, striking SORNA only as it applies in these “specific and limited facts.” The government sought review on, and the parties argue, even narrower questions. And both parties offer potential ways for the Court to dodge the core constitutional question. The government argues that the Court could simply correct the Fifth Circuit’s erroneous premise that Kebodeaux was not under a continuing federal registration obligation pre-SORNA and remand for further proceedings. Kebodeaux, for his part, argues that his failure to register occurred before SORNA applied to him, and therefore that he could not be validly convicted for failing to register under SORNA. (He says that the Attorney General had not yet issued valid regulations specifying that SORNA applied to pre-SORNA offenders when he failed to register.)

In short, this is no broadside challenge to congressional authority to require sex-offender registration. Instead, it is a very narrow case. And we can expect the Court to address it that way.

The LII Supreme Court Bulletin also offers a summary of the case.