The Supremes Take on the Toxic Avenger
Her name’s Bond. Carol Bond. She has no license to kill. On the contrary: She was caught and convicted of attempting to burn her husband’s lover with toxic chemicals. And there the story may have ended, a tawdry act of violent vengeance culminating in a prison sentence.
Instead, the jealous Pennsylvania woman has become an unlikely protagonist in a landmark legal case taken up by conservatives to prove that in prosecuting her, the federal government overreached its constitutional powers. Now Carol Anne Bond’s case is headed for the Supreme Court, the latest round in the ongoing battle between big government and states’ rights.
“It’s a constitutional dispute wrapped up in a sad soap opera,” said Elizabeth Wydra, chief counsel at the liberal Constitution Accountability Center. But the melodrama belies the importance of the issues at stake: The case of Bond v. United States could tip the scales in the right-left struggle over the role of government.
When Bond learned that her best friend was having an affair with her husband and was pregnant by him, she began to suffer from what a psychiatrist would later call an “intense level of anxiety and depression.” She plotted her revenge.
At first, she engaged in garden-variety revenge schemes, sending her friend, Myrlinda Haynes, defaced pictures of her and threatening her over the phone. “I’m going to make your life a living hell” and “Dead people will visit you,” she told Haynes. Bond’s antics landed her a harassment conviction in state court in 2005. But rather than back off, she took her plot to a whole new level.