The high-profile decision was made in the Snyder v United States case.

According to the case file, James Snyder, mayor of a small Indiana city of Portage with the population of 38 thousand people, concluded two contracts with the local transportation company Great Lakes Peterbilt to buy five garbage trucks for a total of around $1.1 million in 2013. A year later, the official got $13 thousand from Peterbilt which, in Snyder’s interpretation, was a reward for his work as consultant for the company: the local laws do not prohibit officials from having remunerated part-time activities.

In 2019, the court of first instance issued a guilty verdict under 18 US Code § 666 (theft or bribery concerning programs receiving Federal funds) and sentenced him to 21 months of imprisonment. Snyder appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (that declined his arguments) and then to the US Supreme Court: in the view of the accused, the Federal law criminalises only “bribes”, i.e. payments, made or agreed upon before the act is committed within the mandate of the official in the interest of the bribe-giver, but not “gratuities”, i.e. payments received after the official performed the respective act.

The US Supreme Court took Snyder’s side, overturning the rulings of the lower courts.

In taking the decision, the Court scrutinized the language, record of adoption and structure of § 666 which is often used by prosecutors against state and local officials presumably involved in corruption, as well as 18 US Code §201 (bribery of public officials and witnesses), the basis for § 666 establishing the prohibition for federal officials to accept “anything of value” to influence an “official act”.

In total, the Court identified six reasons for adopting the decision in favour of Snyder:

1. § 201 has two substantive parts: Section 201(b) concerns bribes, Section 201 (c) is about gratuities; the Court stressed that the difference between them consists in the fact that bribery implies that the official has “a corrupt state of mind” and accepts (or agrees to accept) a payment intending to be “influenced in an official act”; according to the Court, from this point of view § 666, as well as Section 201(b) is only about bribery;
2. Initially, when § 666 was adopted, it employed the language of Section 201(c), i.e. the respective provision concerned the acceptance of gratuities; two years later, Congress amended § 666 with the aim to employ the wording of Section 201(b) in it. Consequently, it would be illogical to interpret § 666 as the one reproducing the provisions of Section 201(c), while ignoring the amendments made;
3. The structure of legislation confirms the fact that § 666 is a provision about bribery rather than about bribery and gratuities: there is no other provision of the US Code that prohibits both bribes and gratuities in the same norm, including § 201, because bribes and gratuities are “two separate crimes” with “two different sets of elements”;
4. As regards federal officials, the bribes and gratuities were separated in § 201 for good reason: these crimes are punishable by different sanctions that “reflect their relative seriousness”: the acceptance of a bribe by a federal official is punishable by imprisonment of up to 15 years, whereas the acceptance of an illegal gratuity by a federal official is punishable by imprisonment of up to two years;
5. State and local government bodies can use different approaches towards regulating such ex post facto rewards, which means that the interpretation of § 666 as the one concerning not only bribes but gratuities as well would considerably hamper the federalism principles. In particular, the states generally have the “prerogative to regulate the permissible scope of interactions between state officials and their constituents”. If assumed that § 666 introduces a general prohibition of gratuities, “19 million state and local officials would be suddenly subject to a new and different regulatory regime for gratuities”;
6. A broad interpretation of the statute would create traps for “unwary state and local officials”: the defendant represented by the Government says that the statute would not cover “innocuous” or “obviously benign” gratuities, but the Government does not identify any remotely clear lines separating such a gratuity from a criminal gratuity. This approach “would leave state and local officials entirely at sea to guess about what gifts they are allowed to accept under federal law, with the threat of up to 10 years in federal prison if they happen to guess wrong”.

As a result, the Court came to the conclusion that “a state or local official can violate § 666 when he accepts an up-front payment for a future official act or agrees to a future reward for a future official act”, but “a state or local official does not violate the respective section if the official act is taken before any reward is agreed to”.

At the same time, the Court stresses that “even if a state or local official does not violate § 666 if the official act is taken before any reward is agreed to, much less given, a gratuity or reward offered and accepted after the official act may be unethical or illegal under other federal, state, or local laws”.

For now, the impact of this precedent on the fight against corruption in the country allows only to make speculations.

Pending the decision of the Supreme Court on the Snyder case, a number of high-profile corruption cases in other states were suspended. However, it is already quite obvious that the adoption of this decision is another step of the judiciary towards further narrowing the notion of corruption and “raising the bar of what is necessary to prove corruption”.

Some experts also believe that this decision can subsequently affect not only the enforcement of § 666, but also the interpretation of other legal acts by courts. For example, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) prohibits, inter alia, the “use of the mails or any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce corruptly in furtherance of an offer, payment, promise to pay, or authorization of the payment of any money, or offer, gift, promise to give, or authorization of the giving of anything of value to any foreign official for purpose of influencing any act or decision of such foreign official in his official capacity,” or “any person, while knowing that all or a portion of such money or thing of value will be offered, given, or promised, directly or indirectly, to any foreign official […]for the purpose of influencing any act or decision of such foreign official […] in his official capacity”. This means that the FCPA prohibits payments to foreign officials, but like § 666 it covers only the payments aimed at influencing an official in his/her official capacity. As in the Snyder case, it actually means that gratuities provided to an official after a certain act (decision) is made will not be considered as an offence.