Students in all three of my courses this semester have been or will soon be exposed to American concepts of statutory. The U.S. Supreme Court recently also had to tackle these concepts in a case dealing with what the word "accompanying" means. According to the New York Times:
After
a botched bank robbery in 2008 in North Carolina, Larry Whitfield
entered the home of a 79-year-old woman, telling her he needed a place
to hide. He directed the woman, who was upset and crying, to move with
him from her living room to another room some nine feet away.
Those
few steps exposed Mr. Whitfield to prosecution under a federal law that
calls for a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence when a criminal “forces
any person to accompany him” during a bank robbery or while fleeing.
They also gave rise to a lively Supreme Court argument on Tuesday, one largely concerned with the meaning of the word
“accompany.”
Read the rest of the article to see some of the questions the Justices asked as they struggled to find meaning for this commonly used word.
