Supreme Court affirms Washington venue in falsification trial
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision on Thursday, ruled that an individual charged with falsification of a document, must be tried in the district where the falsification occurred.
The case, Abouammo v. U.S., focused on Ahmed Abouammo, an employee at Twitter’s San Francisco office who provided confidential information about Saudi dissidents to a high-level Saudi official. He used information obtained through his job at Twitter to aid the Saudi official in tracking the dissidents and was paid $300,000.
Abouammo later moved to Seattle, where FBI agents confronted him on charges of acting as a foreign agent. He denied the accusations and provided a false invoice to claim he received the payment for consulting work.
He was charged in the Northern District of California on falsification and acting as a foreign agent. Abouammo argued he could not be charged in California because the falsification happened in Seattle.
Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Abouammo. Justice Elena Kagan said the Constitution safeguards a defendant’s rights to a proper venue.
“The only prohibited act is the falsification of a document; once a person has committed that act with the requisite intent, he need do nothing more to violate the law,” Kagan wrote in the court’s majority opinion. “Because the only proscribed conduct is falsification, venue must be where falsification occurred.”
Even though Abouammo provided information to a foreign official in California, Kagan argued the charges of falsification were only relevant in Washington. She said the trial could only proceed in Washington if it focused on falsification charges.
“The trial should not have occurred in the Northern District of California because no ‘conduct constituting the offense’ happened in that location,” Kagan wrote.
In 2022, Abouammo was sentenced to 42 months in prison for acting as a foreign agent.
The case will likely go back to lower courts where Abouammo will be tried in the Western District of Washington on the specific falsification charges.
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