Judge dismisses charges against man in ricin poison case
A federal judge on Monday threw out criminal charges accusing a Little Rock man of making the deadly toxin ricin from a recipe found on the Internet, agreeing that the substance had been accidentally left off a list of prohibited biological agents at the time of the man’s arrest.
Until Monday, Alexander Joseph Jordan, 23, was scheduled for a jury trial beginning June 22 on charges of knowingly possessing an unregistered select agent — ricin. The crime is punishable by up to five years in prison.
Jordan told an FBI agent in 2018 that he got the idea from the television series Breaking Bad, about a chemistry teacher who makes and sells methamphetamine to help his family financially.
He called 911 on Feb. 22, 2018, from his home on Horseshoe Loop, saying he feared he may have accidentally ingested the toxin while mixing up two Mason jars full of liquid in a blender, using a recipe he found on the Internet after ordering the key ingredient — castor beans — from Amazon.com.
Emergency officials responded, and noted that Jordan appeared to be breathing hard. He was taken to a hospital, and some ricin was found in his home, where he lived with his parents. Ultimately neither he nor anyone else was injured from contact with the substance, which can be lethal in doses as small as a pinhead. Jordan said he didn’t intend to hurt anyone else but had been contemplating suicide.
In September, Jordan’s attorney, Assistant Federal Public Defender Nicole Lybrand, cited Chapter 18, section 175b(c) of the U.S. Code, which allowed prosecution for the unregistered possession of a “select agent,” as identified in the statute, or of “certain other biological agents and toxins” listed in federal regulations.
Lybrand argued that the indictment against Jordan failed to state a federal crime because ricin wasn’t a listed biological agent or toxin.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Stacy Williams responded by arguing that even if ricin wasn’t specifically listed as a
substance that had to be registered at the time Jordan was charged, the congressional intent behind the statute was to criminalize its unregistered possession.
Lybrand, who last week left her job in the Eastern District of Arkansas for a similar job in Charlotte, N.C., cited a similar question that arose in Georgia in 2017, prompting a federal judge there to note that Congress had had “ample opportunity” to amend the statute in the 14 years of its existence. After that judge dismissed charges against the Georgia man, Congress corrected the “clerical error” last July 25, with a notation that the omission of ricin was to “correct a scrivener’s error.”
Williams argued last year that because the Georgia case, U.S. v. Gibbs, was decided before the mistake was corrected, the Georgia case didn’t apply.
But in an order issued Monday, U.S. District Judge James Moody Jr. said that under the rules of statutory construction, “if the language of a statute is unambiguous, the statute should be enforced as written unless there is a clear legislative intent to the contrary,” citing the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees Arkansas’ federal cases.
“With the amendment in 2019, Congress made clear at that time that it intended to criminalize the knowing possession of unregistered ricin,” Moody said. “However, from 2004 when Congress last amended [the statute] until July 25, 2019, a plain reading of the statute was to the contrary — ricin was not a select agent under the statute. There is no ambiguity. The government should not be allowed to prosecute the Defendant for conduct that was not made illegal until after he committed the challenged acts.”
Noting that Congress had 15 years to amend the statute, Moody said, “The fact that it has now chosen to add ricin as a select agent pursuant to [the act] does not evidence a clear intent that it had intended to do prior to that time.”
In 2018, U.S. Magistrate Judge Beth Deere released Jordan from custody nearly four months after his arrest, saying a psychological report showed he was suffering from major depression when he manufactured the substance, and that she didn’t believe he posed a danger to himself or the community.
Looking at him that day in her courtroom, Deere said she noticed “a world of difference” in his appearance since he had been receiving mental health treatment. She also said, “The time has passed where we put severely depressed people away — lock them up.”