## Facts

- James William Hill III and Curtis Tibbs worked at an Amazon fulfillment center in Chester, Virginia.
- While Tibbs was preparing packages for interstate sale and shipment, Hill suddenly attacked him, causing bodily injury.
- The assault disrupted operations: packages were knocked to the floor, work in the area stopped for about 30–45 minutes, and blood was cleaned from the floor.
- Hill told an Amazon investigator and police that he attacked Tibbs because Tibbs was gay.
- Because Virginia’s hate-crime statute did not cover sexual-orientation-based crimes, state authorities requested federal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 249(a)(2).

## Issues

1. Whether 18 U.S.C. § 249(a)(2), as applied to a bias-motivated workplace assault that temporarily halted packaging goods for interstate shipment, is a valid exercise of Congress’s Commerce Clause power.

## Decision

- The Fourth Circuit reversed the district court’s post-verdict judgment of acquittal and remanded with instructions to reinstate the jury’s guilty verdict.
- The court held § 249(a)(2) constitutional as applied because the charged conduct interfered with commercial or economic activity in which the victim was engaged at the time.
- The majority concluded the statute’s jurisdictional element limited federal reach to cases with a direct commercial nexus, distinguishing it from statutes invalidated in Commerce Clause cases addressing noneconomic conduct without such a limiting element.
- Judge Agee dissented, viewing the regulated conduct as noneconomic violence with an insufficient connection to interstate commerce and would have affirmed the acquittal.

## Legal Principles

- Congress may regulate (1) channels of interstate commerce, (2) instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and (3) activities that substantially affect interstate commerce.
- A criminal statute with an express jurisdictional element requiring a concrete connection to commerce may be sustained as applied when the offense directly interferes with ongoing commercial or economic activity.
- Under 18 U.S.C. § 249(a)(2)(B)(iv)(I), the government must prove that the defendant’s conduct interfered with commercial or other economic activity in which the victim was engaged at the time of the assault.
- Bias-motivated violence, though not itself economic, may fall within Commerce Clause authority when it directly disrupts contemporaneous commercial activity and Congress could rationally find such disruptions substantially affect interstate commerce in the aggregate.

## Conclusion

The Fourth Circuit held that the Hate Crimes Act validly reached Hill’s assault because it directly interrupted Tibbs’s ongoing work packaging goods for interstate shipment, satisfying the statute’s commerce-based jurisdictional requirement and placing the prosecution within Congress’s Commerce Clause authority.


United States v. Hill, 927 F.3d 188 (4th Cir. 2019)