Justices: Treaty can’t be invoked in assault case

• Agreed to consider challenges from Democratic lawmakers who say the Alabama Legislature packed minority voters into a few districts, diluting their voting power. In another case from Alabama last year, the Supreme Court had effectively struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required states to get permission from federal authorities before changing their voting maps in order to ensure minority voting power was preserved. But in the new case, the state argues that Section 5 partly justified the legislative maps, which were drawn using data from the 2010 census — a time when the provision still stood. The Alabama Legislative Black Caucus and other plaintiffs said Republican state legislators in drawing the maps had engaged in “racial gerrymandering” by packing black voters into a few districts, effectively keeping to a minimum the number where minority candidates have a chance of being elected.

— From news services

A unanimous Supreme Court ruled Monday that prosecutors may not use an international chemical weapons treaty to convict a woman who attacked her husband’s mistress with a toxic compound.

The justices threw out the conviction of Carol Anne Bond of Lansdale, Pa., who was prosecuted under a 1999 law based on the chemical weapons treaty. Bond served a six-year prison term after being convicted of using toxic chemicals that burned the thumb of a former friend who was having an affair with her husband.

The intent of the chemical weapons treaty was to prevent a repeat of atrocities like the use of mustard gas in World War I or toxic weapons in the Iraq-Iran war in the early 1980s, not “an amateur attempt by a jilted wife to injure her husband’s lover,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.

Pennsylvania laws are sufficient to deal with threats posed by in domestic disputes, he said.

“In sum, the global need to prevent chemical warfare does not require the federal government to reach into the kitchen cupboard, or to treat a local assault with a chemical irritant as the deployment of a chemical weapon,” Roberts said.

The case posed potentially significant questions about the federal government’s power to make and enforce treaties. The justices resolved the case without reaching that issue, although Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas said they would have ruled that the chemical weapons law covered minor crimes but that Congress had overstepped its constitutional authority by enacting it.

Bond, unable to bear any children of her own, was excited for her best friend Myrlina Haynes when Haynes announced she was pregnant. But that was before Bond learned the baby’s father was her husband of more than 14 years, Clifford.

Vowing revenge, Bond, a laboratory technician, stole a potentially deadly chemical from the company where she worked and purchased another on Amazon.com.

Bond’s efforts were obvious enough that Haynes noticed chemicals had been spread on her door handle and in the tailpipe of her car. Haynes suffered a minor burn.

Believing local police did not do enough to investigate, she called the U.S. Postal Service after finding more of the chemicals on her mailbox. Postal inspectors arrested Bond after they videotaped her going back and forth between Haynes’ car and the mailbox with the chemicals.

Instead of turning the case over to state prosecutors, a federal grand jury indicted Bond on two counts of possessing and using a chemical weapon. The grand jury based the charges on 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 pleaded guilty.