I wouldn’t say that the Supreme Court has restored my faith in Washington. 

But it clearly has displayed a sense of proportion in a case involving a Florida commercial fisherman.

In 2007 John L. Yates’ vessel Miss Katie was boarded by a Florida fish and wildlife officer who examined the catch and wrote Yates up for possessing undersized grouper.

The fish cop sent Yates ashore under orders to preserve the evidence.

Instead, Yates did what any number of us would have done – he told his crew to throw the undersized fish overboard.

He no doubt regrets not having one of his crewmen thrown over as well – the one who later confessed to authorities.

In their wisdom, the federales charged Yates not with a fisheries violation but with violating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which arose out of the Enron scandal and was intended to prevent the destruction of “any record, document, or tangible object” that was the subject of a federal investigation.

Yates was sentenced to 30 days in prison, a sentenced that was upheld on appeal.

Justice department prosecutors allowed that they brought the charges under Sarbanes-Oxley because it carries a maximum sentence of 20 years as opposed to the fisheries statute, which would have been worth a maximum of five years.

The outrageousness of this was not lost on Justice Antonin Scalia. “What kind of mad prosecutor would try to send this guy up for 20 years?” he asked. “Who do you have out there that exercises prosecutorial discretion?”

Or common sense. It costs the taxpayers about $30,000 a year per inmate in federal prison. We’d have been on the hook for upward of $600,000 if Yates had drawn the maximum sentence, for tossing overboard a handful of fish. Does that seem proportionate to you?

Supreme Court reporters note that this case has the prosecutorial trappings of Bond vs. United States, a farce in which the feds charged a woman under a chemical weapons treaty for applying irritants to a former friend’s car, mailbox and doorknob in an effort to provoke a rash. (The ex-friend was carrying the woman’s husband’s baby, but not as a surrogate mom.)

Only in America.

The Yates case is amusing because it’s clear that the justices are convinced Sarbanes-Oxley is far too broad. There is nothing funny about prosecutors who contrive to send American citizens to prison for decades in cases that are at best, in the words of Justice Samuel Alito, “trivial matters.”