Hobbs Act & Falmouth Wind Turbines

The Hobbs Act, the Travel Act, and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) have been upheld under the Commerce Clause

The Hobbs Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1951, provides, in relevant part:

(a) Whoever in any way or degree obstructs, delays, or affects commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce, by . . . extortion or attempts or conspires so to do . . . shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.(b) As used in this section . . .(2) The term “extortion” means the obtaining of property from another, with his consent, induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened . . . fear, or under color of official right.

The Hobbs Act’s definition of “extortion” was “copied from the New York Code substantially.

The New York extortion law provided: “Extortion is the obtaining of property from another, or the obtaining the property of a corporation from an officer, agent, or employee thereof, with his consent, induced by a wrongful use of force or fear, or under color of official right.

Blackstone described extortion as “an abuse of public justice, which consists of an officer’s unlawfully taking, by colour of his office, from any man, any money or thing of value that is not due to him, or more than is due, or before it is due.

Several statutes, mostly codified in Title 18 of the United States Code, provide for federal prosecution of public corruption in the United States.

Federal prosecutions of public corruption under the Hobbs Act (enacted 1934), the mail and wire fraud statutes (enacted 1872), including the honest services fraud provision, the Travel Act (enacted 1961), and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) (enacted 1970) began in the 1970s.

The federal official bribery and gratuity statute, 18 U.S.C. § 201 (enacted 1962), the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) (enacted 1977), and the federal program bribery statute, 18 U.S.C. § 666 (enacted 1984) directly address public corruption.

The statutes differ in their jurisdictional elements. The species of official actions that are cognizable, whether or not non-public official defendants can be prosecuted, and in the authorized sentence. The statutes most often used to prosecute public corruption are the Hobbs Act, Travel Act, RICO, the program bribery statute, and mail and wire fraud statutes.

These statutes have been upheld as exercises of Congress’s Commerce Clause power, or in the case of the mail fraud and program bribery statutes, the Postal Clause and the Spending Clause, respectively.