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Page Number: 21

Cite as:  603 U. S. ____ (2024) 

1 

GORSUCH, J., concurring 

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 

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No. 23–108 
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JAMES E. SNYDER, PETITIONER v. UNITED STATES 

ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF 
APPEALS FOR THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT 

[June 26, 2024] 

JUSTICE GORSUCH, concurring. 
Call it what you will.  The Court today speaks of infer-
ences from the word “corruptly,” the statute’s history and 
structure, and associated punishments.  See ante, at 7.  It 
discusses concerns of fair notice and federalism.  Ibid.  But 
the bottom line is that, for all those reasons, any fair reader
of this statute would be left with a reasonable doubt about 
whether  it  covers  the  defendant’s  charged  conduct.    And 
when that happens, judges are bound by the ancient rule of 
lenity to decide the case as the Court does today, not for the
prosecutor but for the presumptively free individual.  See 
United States v. Davis, 588 U. S. 445, 464–465 (2019). 

Lenity may sometimes, as it does today, go unnamed.  It 
may be deployed under other guises, too.  “Fair notice” or 
“fair warning” are especially familiar masks.  See, e.g., ante, 
at 7, 11, 13; Marinello v. United States, 584 U. S. 1, 6–7, 9– 
10 (2018); McDonnell v. United States, 579 U. S. 550, 576 
(2016).  Cf.  Wooden  v.  United  States,  595  U. S.  360,  389 
(2022)  (GORSUCH,  J.,  concurring  in  judgment)  (“Lenity
works  to  enforce  the  fair  notice  requirement”);  Yates  v. 
United States, 574 U. S. 528, 548 (2015) (plurality opinion) 
(same).  Other times, we clothe lenity in its corollary—that
courts cannot “rely upon prosecutorial discretion to narrow 
the”  scope  of  an  “otherwise  wide-ranging”  criminal  law. 
Marinello, 584 U. S., at 11; see, e.g., ante, at 13; Dubin v. 
United States, 599 U. S. 110, 131 (2023).  And in still other