Opinion ID: 2422541
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Reliance on punctuation

Text: The foregoing legislative history demonstrates beyond peradventure that the Council had no intention in 1980 of limiting tenants' rights to purchase when an owner sought to sell an accommodation. The owners, nevertheless, argue that because the emphasized phrase   for purposes of demolition or discontinuance of housing use   is offset by commas, this limitation modifies each and every preceding clause, not just the [immediately] preceding clause. See, e.g., 2A NORMAN J. SINGER & J.D. SHAMBIE SINGER, Sutherland Statutory Construction, § 47.33, at 491-92 (2007) (Evidence that a qualifying phrase is supposed to apply to all antecedents instead of only to the preceding one may be found in the fact that it is separated from the antecedents by a comma); cf. Hargrove v. District of Columbia, 5 A.3d 632, 634 (D.C. 2010) (explaining the rule of the last antecedent). If the placement of this comma were the sole evidence of legislative intent, the owners' position might not be implausible, although as we show below, the statute as so construed would not be workable. But in this instance, in addition to the legislative history summarized above, which in this case is surely dispositive alone, there is also other compelling evidence that the Council did not intend the provision to mean what the owners claim that it means. The proper construction of a writing does not begin and end with the placement of a comma. A misplaced comma cannot be used to distort the meaning of a statute. 2A Sutherland, § 47.15, at 345. No more than isolated words or sentences is punctuation alone a reliable guide for discovery of a statute's meaning. United States Nat'l Bank of Oregon v. Indep. Ins. Agents of Am., Inc., 508 U.S. 439, 455, 113 S.Ct. 2173, 124 L.Ed.2d 402 (1993). Indeed, as this case surely demonstrates, [a] purported plain meaning analysis based only on punctuation is necessarily incomplete and runs the risk of distorting the statute's true meaning. Id. at 454, 113 S.Ct. 2173. It has long been recognized in this jurisdiction that [p]unctuation is a most fallible standard by which to interpret a writing; it may be resorted to when all other means fail; but the court will first take the instrument by its four corners, in order to ascertain its true meaning. MacFarland v. Elverson, 32 U.S.App.D.C. 81, 87 (1908) (citation omitted). We turn to those four corners.