Prosecutor Plans Superseding Indictment to Change ‘And’ to ‘Or’

A defense lawyer indicted on a charge of assaulting two U.S. marshals argues the case should be dismissed because the government used the word “or” instead of “and.”

Lawyer Ning Ye was charged with assaulting the marshals during a federal hearing in Washington, D.C., in 2007, according to The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times.

The federal indictment says Ye “did unlawfully and knowingly forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, or interfere” with U.S. marshals. Ye maintains in a motion to dismiss the indictment (PDF posted by Legal Times) that the grand jury should have listed the different types of offenses in the conjunctive rather than the disjunctive.

“Because the case was indicted in the disjunctive, there is no way to know if a sufficient number of grand jurors found probable cause to believe that any one of these specific alleged activities occurred,” the motion says. “More specifically, some grand jurors may have voted to indict based on the ‘assault’ allegation, while others may have voted to indict based on ‘resist’ or ‘impede’ allegations.”

The government says in its response (PDF posted by Legal Times) that it plans to file a superseding indictment “to correct the typographical error.”