In a unanimous decision in the consolidated cases of Whitfield v. U.S. (docket 03-1293) and Hall v. U.S. (03-1294), the Court ruled that a money laundering conspiracy count does not require proof of an overt act to further the plot. The ruling, written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, relied primarily upon the Court's decision in U.S. v. Shabani in 1994. The Shabani decision found there was no need to show an overt act to prove a conspiracy to commit drug crimes. That law and the money laundering conspiracy statute involve nearly identical language, the Court noted.

The law at issue can be traced back to the Money Laundering Control Act of 1986. It criminalizes the intentional transfer of money from unlawful activity, and transactions involving property that was obtained during a crime if the value is more than $10,000. As originally enacted, neither of those sections included a conspiracy provision, so the government relied on a general conspiracy statute. But, in 1992, Congress wrote into the Money Laundering Control Act a provision making it a crime to conspire to commit any offense under that Act. That was the provision at issue in Tuesday's ruling.

In the Court's prior rulings in Shabani, as well as in earlier rulings (Singer v. U.S. in 1945 and Nash v. U.S. in 1913), the Court had ruled that, where Congress omitted from a conspiracy law any language expressly requiring an overt act, the Court would not read such a requirement into the statute. That concept controlled the ruling Tuesday, O'Connor wrote.

Some experts are wondering, as we did here, what Congress' response will be to the decision. Will we become not just America, prison nation, but America, mandatory minimum nation?