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Selected obstruction statutes
Obstruction of justice offenses are frequently charged crimes, both because the offenses are broadly defined and because of the nearly universal human tendency to try to conceal wrongful conduct, or avoid responsibility for it, by lying or otherwise impeding investigations and legal proceedings. Reprinted below are several federal statutes define (sometimes overlapping) obstruction offenses in across a wide range of settings and types of behaviors: 18 U.S.C. ยงยง 1503, 1505, 1512, and 1519; section 1515 provides definitions for some key terms in the other statutes. These statutes, unfortunately (but not unusually) pose a host of interpretive issues for courts, especially on questions of mens rea, both because of sometimes-infelicitous drafting and because it is inevitably hard for the law to draw clear distinctions between
wrongful conduct and regular adversary behavior. Most of the cases that follow deal in some way with such definitional and line-drawing problems.
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