Whoever… Whatever… that’s what captions the legal battle between the DoJ and the US-NH. It was sparked by the recent reinterpretation of the Wire Act, and will all hinge on semantics and grammar. Meanwhile, the US First Circuit Court will attempt to decipher the original intent of the law’s author, back in 1961.
At a hearing earlier this month, Judge Paul Barbadoro described the disputed opening passage of the Wire Act as “a mess of a statute”. He also noted that sometimes people who write laws are “imperfect grammarians.”
Meantime, the Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling (CSIG) has offered its own two cents to the semantics debate. There definition of the word “whoever” defies hundreds of years of legal precedent. Hayley Hintze at Flushdraw.net reports that a supplemental filing by CSIG was all about the legal meaning. Particularly, the very first word of the Wire Act: “whoever.”
Whoever… Whatever…
The DOJ’s recent reinterpretation of the Wire Act, which New Hampshire is seeking to have overruled by the court, reversed an Obama-era declaration that paved the way for state-sanctioned online gambling operations.
However, the new opinion, in stating the act’s prohibitions are “not uniformly limited to gambling on sporting events or contests,” jeopardizes not only the online lottery operations of New Hampshire but online gaming markets across the United States.
In its filing, CSIG claims that “whoever” means everyone and everything, including governments and states, as well as private persons and entities. Here’s why that’s important in the opening Wire Act paragraph.
Whoever being engaged in the business of betting or wagering knowingly uses a wire communication facility for the transmission in interstate or foreign commerce of bets or wagers or information assisting in the placing of bets or wagers on any sporting event or contest, or for the transmission of a wire communication which entitles the recipient to receive money or credit as a result of bets or wagers, or for information assisting in the placing of bets or wagers, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
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CSIG seeks to highlight that states are breaking the law by offering online gambling. However, as Hintze points out, this definition breaks with legal tradition. “Whoever” has never historically referred to government entities. That is why lawsuits against governments name prominent individuals associated with the entity in question. Example, “New Hampshire Lottery vs William Barr, in his official capacity as Attorney General of the United States of America.”
In this specific case, for example, you cannot imprison a government or a state for “not more than two years,” which would seem to make a nonsense of the CSIG claim, irrespective of the correct legal definition of the word.
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