Snyder v. United States
The Supreme Court ruled that a key federal anti-corruption law (18 U.S.C. § 666) reaches only bribes — payments tied to a pre-act agreement — and does not make it a federal crime for state and local officials to accept gratuities, which are gifts given after the fact as a reward or thank-you.
The 6-3 decision resolves a longstanding split among federal appeals courts, withdraws federal prosecution as a tool against post-act payments to roughly 19 million state and local officials, and leaves regulation of such gifts to state and local governments.
“Section 666 is a vital statute, but its focus is targeted: Section 666 proscribes bribes to state and local officials, while allowing state and local governments to regulate gratuities to state and local officials.”
The majority's bottom-line statement of what § 666 does and does not cover.
How it got here: A federal jury convicted Snyder; the district court sentenced him to nearly two years in prison; the Seventh Circuit affirmed, relying on circuit precedent that § 666 covers gratuities; the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case to resolve a split among federal appeals courts.
The Case in Depth
What happened
James Snyder served as mayor of Portage, Indiana. While in office, he steered roughly $1.1 million in city garbage-truck contracts to a local dealership, Great Lakes Peterbilt. After the contracts were awarded, the dealership cut Snyder a $13,000 check. Federal prosecutors charged him with accepting an illegal gratuity under a federal law covering state and local officials. Snyder maintained the payment was for consulting services he had agreed to provide the dealership.
The question before the Court
Does federal law make it a crime for state and local officials to accept gratuities — payments given as thanks after an official act — or does it cover only bribes agreed to before an act?
The Court's answer
No — federal law (18 U.S.C. § 666) prohibits state and local officials from accepting bribes but does not make post-act gratuities a federal crime. A bribe requires an agreement made before an official act — money in exchange for taking that act. A gratuity is a payment given afterward as thanks, with no prior deal required. The Court found six reasons to treat § 666 as a bribery-only statute: its text mirrors the federal bribery law rather than the federal gratuities law; Congress deliberately removed gratuities language in a 1986 amendment; bribery and gratuities are kept as distinct crimes throughout federal law; covering gratuities would create irrational sentencing disparities (10 years for local officials vs. 2 years for federal officials accepting the same gift); it would override states' carefully calibrated ethics rules for their own officials; and it would leave 19 million officials unable to know what conduct crosses the federal criminal line.
The government's central argument — that the word "rewarded" in § 666 proves gratuities are covered — did not persuade the Court. The majority read "rewarded" instead as closing off potential bribery defenses, such as a claim that because payment came after an act, no prior "influence" occurred.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
State and local officials — from mayors to school board members to snow plow drivers — can no longer face up to 10 years in federal prison solely for accepting a gift after completing official business. Federal prosecutors retain the power to charge bribes (pre-act agreements) but must now rely on state and local ethics rules, which vary widely, to police post-act gratuities.
What changes now
The Seventh Circuit's decision affirming Snyder's conviction is reversed and the case is sent back for further proceedings. On remand, the lower courts may consider whether evidence of a pre-act bribery agreement could support a conviction under § 666 as the Court has now construed it. More broadly, federal prosecutors can still charge state and local officials with bribery under § 666, but post-act gratuities are now a matter for state and local law alone — unless Congress rewrites the statute.
What this does not decide
The ruling does not decide whether Snyder could be convicted of bribery — the district court found there was circumstantial evidence of a pre-act agreement, a question left open for the lower courts. The Court also does not rule on whether Snyder's conduct violated Indiana or Portage law, nor does it define what "corruptly" means for future § 666 prosecutions.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Gorsuch
Justice Gorsuch joined the majority opinion in full but wrote separately to argue that the real engine driving the decision is the ancient rule of lenity — when a criminal statute is genuinely ambiguous, courts must resolve that ambiguity in favor of the defendant, not the government. He argued the majority's reasoning about text, history, structure, federalism, and fair notice are all variants of that principle, and expressed satisfaction that lenity, whatever label it travels under, reached the right result here.
Dissent — Justice Jackson
Justice Jackson, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, argued that § 666's plain text — criminalizing officials who act 'corruptly' intending to be 'influenced or rewarded' — unambiguously covers both bribes and gratuities. She contended that 'rewarded' is ordinary English for a post-act payment, that Congress used 'expansive, unqualified language' deliberately, and that the statute's built-in limits (the $5,000 threshold, the 'corruptly' mens rea, and the requirement that payments relate to official business) adequately guard against prosecution of innocent gift-giving. She would have affirmed Snyder's conviction and left refinement of what makes a gratuity 'corrupt' to future cases.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began with the statutory text of § 666, which makes it a crime to 'corruptly' accept payment 'intending to be influenced or rewarded.' Those defining characteristics — a corrupt state of mind and intent to be influenced — track the federal bribery statute (§ 201(b)) word for word. By contrast, the federal gratuities statute (§ 201(c)) has no corrupt-intent requirement and simply bars accepting payment 'for or because of' any official act. Section 666's text therefore signals a bribery statute, not a gratuities statute.
- The statutory history reinforced that reading. When Congress first enacted § 666 in 1984, it borrowed language from the gratuities statute. Just two years later, Congress overhauled § 666 and replaced that language with text mirroring the bribery statute. Reading the amended statute to mean the same thing it meant before the amendment would disregard Congress's deliberate 1986 choice.
- The Court then looked at statutory structure. Bribery and gratuities have always been 'two separate crimes with two different sets of elements' (quoting the Court's 1999 Sun-Diamond decision). Congress keeps them in separate provisions for federal officials (§ 201(b) for bribes; § 201(c) for gratuities). The absence of any separate gratuities provision in § 666 strongly suggests it was not meant to double as both.
- Sentencing disparities sealed the structural argument: if § 666 covered gratuities, a local school board member accepting an unlawful gift would face up to 10 years in prison, while a Cabinet secretary accepting the identical gift would face only 2 years. The Court found no rational explanation for Congress to have authorized punishing state and local gratuities five times more severely than the same conduct by a federal official.
- Federalism reinforced the narrow reading. States and localities have each drawn their own lines on acceptable gifts to officials — some allowing gifts under $50, others permitting certain ceremonial items, others imposing criminal penalties. Reading § 666 to override all of those rules would subject all 19 million state and local officials to a single federal regime, encroaching on a core area of state and local self-governance without a clear congressional statement to that effect.
- Finally, the Court invoked fair notice. The government could not identify any clear federal line separating an innocuous gratuity from a criminal one, beyond opining that 'wrongful' gratuities were prohibited. That vague standard leaves officials unable to know whether a gift card, a steak dinner, or a sports ticket is a federal felony — exactly the kind of trap federal criminal law must not set for ordinary people trying to follow the rules.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms United States v. Sun-Diamond Growers of Cal. (526 U.S. 398)
Confirmed as the controlling authority establishing bribes and gratuities as two separate crimes with different elements.
Reaffirms McDonnell v. United States (579 U.S. 550)
Reaffirmed that states have the prerogative to regulate interactions between their own officials and constituents.