Sekhar v. United States
The Supreme Court threw out a Hobbs Act extortion conviction against a fund manager who used anonymous emails threatening to expose an affair to pressure a state pension fund's lawyer into recommending an investment.
The Court held that a recommendation, or the right to make one, cannot be 'obtained' because it cannot be transferred from one person to another, drawing a firm line between the crime of extortion and the separate, lesser wrong of coercion.
How it got here: A jury convicted the fund manager of attempted extortion; the Second Circuit affirmed; the Supreme Court agreed to review the conviction.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A managing partner at an investment firm wanted New York's public pension fund to invest in his firm's fund. After the fund's in-house lawyer recommended against the investment, the lawyer received anonymous emails threatening to reveal an alleged affair to his wife, officials, and the media unless he reversed his recommendation. Investigators traced the emails to the fund manager's home computer.
The question before the Court
Could a man be convicted of extortion for pressuring a government lawyer, through blackmail threats, to recommend a particular investment?
Why it matters
Federal prosecutors cannot use the Hobbs Act's extortion provision to charge people who merely coerce someone into taking an action or making a decision, if nothing transferable changes hands. This narrows the reach of a commonly used federal anti-corruption and anti-racketeering statute, pushing similar blackmail-style pressure campaigns toward other criminal charges instead.
What changes now
The reversal is final and ends this Hobbs Act prosecution on this theory of the case; the opinion notes the government might have pursued a different legal theory but did not. Because the Court found the underlying conduct doesn't meet the statute's definition of extortion, there is no remand for further proceedings on this charge. The ruling now guides how prosecutors nationwide charge similar blackmail-based pressure campaigns.
What this does not decide
The Court left open whether threatening a government employee to secure actual government property — such as money or a contract — could still count as extortion, and it did not decide whether the same facts might have supported a conviction under a different legal theory not charged here.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Alito
Justice Alito agreed the conviction should be reversed but on a narrower ground: he would hold simply that an internal recommendation to a government decision-maker is not 'property' at all, rather than reaching the majority's separate question of whether it is 'transferable.' He found no precedent treating such recommendations as property and invoked the rule of lenity as an additional reason to reject the government's theory.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began from the presumption that Congress uses common-law crime terms, like 'extortion,' in their traditional legal sense unless it says otherwise, so historical extortion cases and definitions guide how the modern statute should be read.
- Reviewing English, federal, and state cases predating the Hobbs Act, the Court found extortion always involved obtaining something of value, typically money, directly from the victim — never merely forcing someone to take or refrain from an action.
- The Court read the statute's phrase 'obtaining of property' to require both that the victim give up something and that the wrongdoer actually acquire it, meaning the property at issue must be capable of passing from one person to another.
- Tracing the Hobbs Act's history to a 1909 New York statute, the Court noted that Congress copied that law's extortion definition but deliberately left out its separate misdemeanor crime of 'coercion,' which covered forcing someone to act or not act without any property changing hands — showing Congress meant to keep the two crimes distinct.
- Applying its own precedent in Scheidler v. National Organization for Women, which held that interfering with a clinic's ability to operate wasn't extortion because nothing transferable was obtained, the Court found the same reasoning fatal here: a legal recommendation is not something that can be exercised, transferred, or sold by anyone but the recommender.
- Because the general counsel's recommendation, or his right to make it, could never be handed over to the fund manager, the Court concluded the alleged conduct amounted at most to coercion, not extortion under the statute.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Scheidler v. National Organization for Women, Inc. (537 U. S. 393)
Relied on as controlling: obtaining property requires acquiring something transferable, not just depriving someone of a right.
Reaffirms Cleveland v. United States (531 U. S. 12)
Cited to support that a government-held license or recommendation isn't property that can be 'obtained.'