Montco poisoning case goes back to Supreme Court

A tale of poison, payback, and one pregnant paramour heads back to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, as justices are set to hear oral arguments in the case of a Lansdale woman whose attempts to kill her husband's mistress landed her on the wrong side of U.S. antiterrorism law.

Carol Anne Bond, 42, admits she tried to poison her romantic rival seven years ago by spreading toxic chemicals around the woman's Norristown home.

But, she argues, federal prosecutors in Philadelphia overreacted by inflating what was essentially a domestic drama into a federal crime tied to a 1997 chemical weapons treaty.

Her story may be worthy of a soap opera, but Bond's case poses constitutional questions that could result in one of the most significant high court rulings in years on the reach of federal power.

"This one has the potential to be really important," said Kermit Roosevelt, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. "It could set new limits on Congress' power to enact international treaties."

Bond's lawyers argue she was improperly charged under the 1998 Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act, a law passed by Congress to bring the United States into line with a treaty signed the year before banning the development and stockpiling of dangerous toxins.

She has been joined in her fight by a number of conservative and libertarian groups as well as by a handful of state attorneys general who see the case as government overreach.

The U.S. Justice Department, meanwhile, defends Bond's prosecution, saying she and others like her can and should be prosecuted alongside more dangerous terrorists. They claim Supreme Court precedent paved the way for Congress to supersede state jurisdiction when it comes to enforcing a treaty.

"In more than two centuries of American history, this court has never invalidated Congress' implementation of a treaty on federalism grounds," Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. argued in his brief.

Before she became the latest darling of the states' rights set, Bond began her twisted path through the legal system simply as a woman scorned.

She was overjoyed in 2006 to find out her best friend Myrlinda Haynes was pregnant - all the more so because Bond herself had recently learned she could not conceive.

Elation quickly turned to rage, however, when she discovered that Clifford Bond, her husband of more than 14 years, was the father.

Vowing revenge, Bond, a laboratory technician for the chemical maker Rohm & Haas, stole a bottle of an arsenic-based compound from the company and mixed it with another toxic chemical, potassium dichromate, she had ordered from Amazon.com.

Over the next several months, she tried to poison Haynes 24 times by smearing the concoction on the woman's car-door handles, door knobs, and mailbox.

But the plan was more foolhardy than foolproof. Because of a tendency for the poison to turn bright orange when it comes into contact with metal, Haynes later said she frequently noticed it and found it easy to avoid. She did once burn her thumb while trying to wipe it off the handle of her car door.

Local police suggested Haynes take her vehicle in to a car wash. So she turned to the feds - the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, which set up surveillance on her mailbox and eventually caught Bond in the act.

In 2007, Bond pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia to two counts of using a chemical weapon and was sentenced to six years in prison. She was released from a federal prison in West Virginia in August 2012, but remains under court-ordered supervision.

But in an unusual move, her lawyers reserved the right to appeal her case not on her guilt but on the question of whether she had been improperly charged under federal law.

Had she been prosecuted for assault in state court, where her lawyers say her case belonged, she would have faced a maximum sentence of just over two years, said Paul Clement, President George W. Bush's former solicitor general, who will argue Bond's case Tuesday.

"Instead of leaving this decidedly local crime to local law enforcement, federal authorities stepped in and not only charged [Bond] with a federal crime, but quite astonishingly charged her with violating a federal statute . . . designed to eradicate chemical weapons," he wrote in a court brief earlier this year.

He underlined that argument during a 2011 hearing, saying: "There is something sort of odd about the government's theory that says, 'I can buy a chemical weapon at Amazon.com.' "

But the Justice Department has fought Clement at every step.

It challenged Bond's attempts to appeal her conviction as unconstitutional in 2011, arguing that only the state of Pennsylvania had standing to claim the federal government had waded too far into its jurisdictional waters.

The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, setting the stage for Tuesday's showdown.

On Tuesday, Verrilli is expected to rely heavily on a 1920 high court precedent, Missouri v. Holland, in which the justices ruled Congress could overstep state laws to enforce a pact with Canada on the treatment of migratory birds.

The solicitor general has argued Bond's case is not an "appropriate vehicle" to explore such a question of federalism.

Roosevelt, the Penn professor, says he suspects the court may agree and duck the constitutional question.

The justices could throw out Bond's conviction by interpreting the chemical weapons law as applying only to easily identifiable acts of terrorism, he said.

"They might well say that this treaty just isn't about jealous wives trying to poison their rivals," he said.

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