WASHINGTON (AP) - A unanimous Supreme Court ruled Monday that prosecutors may not rely on an international chemical weapons treaty to convict a woman who attacked her husband's mistress.
The justices threw out the conviction of Carol Anne Bond of Lansdale, Pa., who was prosecuted under a 1999 law based on the chemical weapons treaty. Bond served a six-year prison term after being convicted of using toxic chemicals that caused a thumb burn on a friend who had become her husband's lover.
The intent of the chemical weapons treaty was to prevent a repeat of the use of mustard gas in World War I or toxic weapons in the Iraq-Iran war in the early 1980s, not "an amateur attempt by a jilted wife to injure her husband's lover," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.
Roberts contrasted John Singer Sargent's massive painting, "Gassed," with its depictions of men who have been blinded by mustard gas, with Bond's actions. "There are no life-sized paintings of Bond's rival washing her thumb," he said.