Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/13pdf/12-158_6579.pdf
Page Number: 23.0

20 

BOND v. UNITED STATES 

Opinion of the Court 

“illustrates  how  a  criminal  law  like  this  may  effectively 
displace a policy choice made by the State”).

As we have explained, “Congress has traditionally been
reluctant  to  define  as  a  federal  crime  conduct  readily
denounced as criminal by the States.”  Bass, 404 U. S., at 
349.  There  is  no  clear  indication  of  a  contrary  approach 
here.  Section 229 implements the Convention, but Bond’s
crime could hardly be more unlike the uses of mustard gas
on the Western Front or nerve agents in the Iran-Iraq war 
that form the core concerns of that treaty.  See Kenyon & 
Feakes 6.  There are no life-sized paintings of Bond’s rival 
washing her thumb.  And there are no apparent interests
of the United States Congress or the community of nations
in seeing Bond end up in federal prison, rather than dealt 
with (like virtually all other criminals in Pennsylvania) by 
the State.  The Solicitor General acknowledged as much at 
oral  argument.  See  Tr.  of  Oral  Arg.  47  (“I  don’t  think 
anybody  would  say  [that]  whether  or  not  Ms.  Bond  is 
prosecuted would give rise to an international incident”).  

This  case  is  unusual,  and  our  analysis  is  appropriately 
limited.  Our disagreement with our colleagues reduces to 
whether section 229 is “utterly clear.”  Post, at 5 (SCALIA, 
J., concurring in judgment).  We think it is not, given that 
the  definition  of  “chemical  weapon”  in  a  particular  case 
can  reach  beyond  any  normal  notion  of  such  a  weapon, 
that  the  context  from  which  the  statute  arose  demon-
strates a much more limited prohibition was intended, and
that  the  most  sweeping  reading  of  the  statute  would  fun-
damentally  upset  the  Constitution’s  balance  between 
national and local power.  This exceptional convergence of
factors gives us serious reason to doubt the Government’s
expansive reading of section 229, and calls for us to inter-
pret the statute more narrowly. 

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 chemi-