On March 30, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Abouammo v. United States. The case asks whether venue can lie in a district where no criminal conduct occurred. More importantly, perhaps, the case challenges the modern relevance of the right to trial by a local jury—a principle the Framers envisioned as judgment by the conscience of the community.
The case itself turns on a pretty unusual set of facts. October 20, 2018, Ahmad Abouammo sat at his upstairs computer in Seattle, Washington, while FBI agents who had flown in from Palo Alto and a federal prosecutor from the Northern District of California waited downstairs. The government alleged that, while they were there, Abouammo created a false invoice and emailed it to them. This single electronic transmission, sent entirely from Abouammo’s Seattle home, served as the basis for a federal charge of falsifying documents.
When the case went to trial, however, the proceedings did not take place in front of a Seattle jury. Instead, the trial was held 800 miles away, in San Francisco. Why? This was the district in which the investigators were based, not where the alleged act occurred—a move that directly contradicts constitutional requirements.
Trying a defendant far from where the alleged crime occurred touches upon a principle that predates the Republic. For centuries, the law held that a person must be tried by the community where the act took place. During the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence specifically condemned King George III for “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses,” a tactic used to strip colonists of a jury that knew their community and shared their values. To prevent such overreach, the Framers built two explicit safeguards: Article III, which requires trials to be conducted by jury and held in the state where the crime was committed, and the Sixth Amendment, which mandates an impartial jury drawn from the “state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”
Yet the ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Abouammo established a troubling new standard. The court suggested the government could bring charges in any district where the effects of a crime might be felt. Because the FBI agents were based in the Northern District of California, the court ruled that San Francisco was a proper venue—even though Abouammo remained in Washington and never intended for his conduct to reach California.
If this “contemplated effects test” stands, the constitutional right to a local trial becomes a mere suggestion, open to prosecutorial gamesmanship. Because federal agencies maintain offices in nearly every major city, the government could effectively forum-shop. By anchoring cases to the massive federal footprint in the nation’s capital or other federal hubs, the government can funnel politically sensitive cases into home courts where juries may be more sympathetic to the government.
The danger of this shift is equally stark in the context of the Trump administration’s prolific use of the Justice Department to target political adversaries and its aggressive immigration enforcement tactics. When the government conducts large-scale sweeps or worksite raids, the local community acts as the vital check on those actions. Moving a trial away from the locality leaves jurors disconnected from the situation and unable to reflect the community’s conscience—as the Framers envisioned they would. Moving cases to distant enclaves prevents the local residents from deciding whether the government’s tactics were appropriate or abusive.
The Framers did not design a national jury system; they designed a local one. They recognized that a jury drawn from the Northern District of Texas may evaluate facts differently than one in the District of Minnesota. This regional variation was a deliberate feature intended to ensure justice remained connected to the place of the event. Whether the defendant is a tech worker, a prominent political figure, or an immigrant, the principle remains: justice is not a commodity to be shipped 800 miles to find a more convenient audience.
History proves the necessity of the local check. In 1735, a New York jury freed dissident publisher John Peter Zenger from the wrath of the British Crown. In 1851, a local Boston jury freed abolitionists who helped Shadrach Minkins escape the Fugitive Slave Act. Had Zenger been tried in England or the abolitionists in Virginia—far from the communities in which they acted—the outcomes assuredly would have been tragically different.
The jury trial was designed specifically for neighbors to shield one another from ill-conceived prosecutions and to blunt the arbitrary application of the law. To preserve the integrity of the criminal justice system, the Court should reaffirm the basic constitutional tenet that a defendant must be tried where the alleged act occurred, before the people of that community. Without this local grounding, the jury ceases to be a legitimate check on power and becomes a mere tool open to prosecutorial manipulation.
