Supreme Court Considers Customs Declarations

It is pretty rare for customs-related issues to come before the Supreme Court. The last cases to do so dealt with fundamental questions of administrative law and the degree to which the Courts had to defer to Customs' legal interpretations. Those cases were Haggar in 2000 and Meade in 2001. Consequently, I'll always take note when something involving customs gets to the Supreme Court.

That happened this week, although in the context of a terrorism case. The case involves the 1999 plot to attack LAX airport. You may remember that the would-be terrorist was stopped by the then Customs Service (now Customs and Border Protection) when he drove in from Canada in a car full of explosives. One charge against the defendant was carrying an explosive in the commission of a felony. The underlying felony in this case was lying to Customs when making the customs declaration at the time of entry. [Side note: keep that in mind the next time you load up on jewelry or watches while on a foreign trip.] The lower court threw out the charge because there was no link between the explosives and the false declaration. Apparently, Customs did not specifically ask "Are you carrying any explosives." The question for the Court is whether the statute requires a link between the felony and the explosives. I'm not sure how it will come out and I try not to prognosticate on what are essentially criminal law matters.

The reason this got into the papers (see NYT article) is that the government was represented by Attorney General Mukasey. This restores a tradition of having the AG argue at least one case before the Supreme Court.

Another interesting NYT article has nothing to do with CBP, but I pass it on anyway. It seems that before Edison invented the phonograph, a Frenchman invented a similar device only with the intention of graphically recording sounds as images on paper. Apparently, he figured someone might be able to reproduce the sound at some point in the future. Well, someone has. A group of audio engineers have reconstructed the sounds from the paper records making those papers now the oldest known recorded sounds. You can listen to an excerpt at the link. Pretty cool.

Comments

Anonymous said…
How did the justices rule? Thanks!
Aug 27, 2008, 11:28:00 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CAFC Decision in Double Invoicing Case

The Federal Circuit has issued a decision on the merits in United States v. Inn Foods, Inc.  There had been a previous decision on jurisdiction, which was followed by a trial at the Court of International Trade and then this appeal on the substance. The initial issue is whether Inn Foods' invoicing practice amounts to fraud.  Inn Foods had been receiving an invoice from growers in Mexico that had a relatively low sales prices on it.  Subsequent to entry, Inn Foods created a second invoice at something more similar to market value, retaining the original invoice number, and paid at that higher amount.   Superficially, this looks like a standard-issue double-invoicing scheme.  But, in the age of reconciliation, is it really more like a provisional pricing mechanism?  It might have been possible to make that argument had Inn Foods adjusted its entries accordingly.  It didn't and the loss of revenue was approximately $624,000.  Based on testimony and evidence indicating both knowl
Read more

Target on Finality

Image
In the last post , about the Federal Circuit’s very important decision on due process and allegations of evasion of antidumping duties, I made a snarky, offhand comment that the government believes “liquidation is magic.” That was in the context of the government arguing that Customs’ liquidation of entries mooted an appeal, thereby taking away the importer’s right to further judicial review. I said that knowing full well that I still needed to write this post summarizing Target Corp. v. United States in which Target made what I want to be a valid and righteous argument that Customs’ improper liquidation of entries at a favorable rate of antidumping duty prevents the Court of International Trade from ordering Customs to collect the legally applicable duties. But it turns out that while liquidation is an important legal step, in at least one unusual circumstance it is not sufficiently powerful to overcome the full force of an Article III court. Understanding this case requires a lot
Read more

CAFC: EAPA Process Really Does Violate Due Process

Image
Hot on the heels of my complaining about how the EAPA law and process is stacked against importers, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has issued an important decision that will have a major impact on how those cases work. If you are unfamiliar with evasion cases under the Enforce and Protect Act and how Customs and Border Protection handles them, go back and look at these two posts: Part 1 , Part 2. Royal Brush Manufacturing, Inc. v. United States , is the decision in an evasion case against Royal Brush involving pencils allegedly transshipped from China through the Philippines. Customs determined that there was evasion of an antidumping duty order based in part on evidence that was not disclosed to Royal. Specifically, Customs sent a representative to the facility in the Philippines to photograph the interior and provide a report. Customs refused to disclose all the photographs to Royal. Moreover, CBP's report concluded that the facility did not have sufficient capacit
Read more