§ 5.04 STRICT CONSTRUCTION OF STATUTES (RULE OF LENITY)

• Jurisdiction: United States

§ 5.04. Strict Construction of Statutes (Rule of Lenity)⁵⁸

When the language of a statute is clear and unambiguous, "there is no room for judicial construction and the courts must give the statute its plain and definite meaning."⁵⁹ When a statute is unclear or ambiguous, however, a court's primary function is to ascertain the intent of the legislature that enacted the law.⁶⁰ To do this, a court may seek assistance by all "appropriate means and indicia, such as the purposes appearing from the statute taken as a whole, the phraseology, the words ordinary or technical, the law as it prevailed before the statute, the mischief to be remedied, . . . statutes in pari materia, the preamble, the title, and other like means."⁶¹ In the effort to divine the legislative intent, courts will often turn to dictionaries, to legislative debates, and to careful parsing of the language, and even punctuation, used in the statute.

What does a court do, however, if, after such careful analysis, the meaning of a statute remains uncertain? In response to a "vast and irrational" expansion in the number of capital offenses in eighteenth-century England, British courts developed the rule, carried over to the United States, that when a criminal statute is subject to conflicting reasonable interpretations, the statute (including sentencing provisions thereto) should be interpreted in favor of the defendant.⁶² This so-called rule of lenity (the "junior version of the vagueness doctrine"⁶³) is not constitutionally compelled, but is said to support the principle of legality by preventing a court from inadvertently enlarging the scope of a criminal statute through its interpretive powers.

Although the lenity doctrine requires strict construction of statutes, it should be observed that many modern courts, sometimes including the United States Supreme Court in its interpretation of federal statutes, strictly construe the lenity doctrine itself. The lenity doctrine, the high court said recently, "only applies if, after considering text, structure, history, and purpose, there remains a grievous ambiguity . . . , such that the Court must simply guess as to what Congress intended."⁶⁴ In essence, the lenity doctrine serves as a tie breaker;⁶⁵ but it only comes into play if there truly is a "tie" — two or more equally reasonable interpretations of a statute.

Even the most well-drafted criminal statutes are often susceptible to multiple, reasonable interpretations. Overuse of the lenity doctrine...