Facts of the Case

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Lebene Konan, a Black property owner, leased two rental residences in Euless, Texas, and retrieved business and tenant mail from a central mailbox daily. In May 2020, United States Postal Service (USPS) employee Jason Rojas changed the lock on the mailbox at one of Konan's properties without her approval, halted mail delivery, and demanded ownership verification. Even after USPS’s Inspector General confirmed Konan’s ownership, Rojas and another USPS employee, Raymond Drake, allegedly continued marking mail addressed to Konan and her tenants as undeliverable. Konan claims this refusal of service extended to her second property and was racially motivated, causing loss of rental income and disruption of essential communications.

Konan sued USPS, Rojas, Drake, and the United States, raising claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) and alleging violations of the equal protection guarantees of 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981 and 1985. The district court dismissed her FTCA claims for lack of subject matter jurisdiction under the postal-matter exception, and her equal protection claims for failure to state a claim. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of the equal protection claims but reversed on the FTCA claim, holding that sovereign immunity did not bar claims based on intentional acts of mail non-delivery.

Questions

  1. Does a claim that Postal Service employees intentionally refused to deliver mail to a designated address arise out of “the loss” or “miscarriage” of postal matter under the Federal Tort Claims Act’s postal-matter exception?

Conclusions

  1. The Federal Tort Claims Act's postal exception — which bars lawsuits against the government for claims "arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter" — shields the United States from liability even when postal workers intentionally fail to deliver mail, because both "loss" and "miscarriage" cover any deprivation or failure of mail to reach its destination, regardless of the postal worker's intent. Justice Clarence Thomas authored the 5–4 majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Statutory terms carry the ordinary meanings they held when Congress enacted them, and the FTCA became law in 1946. At that time, "miscarriage" of mail meant any failure of mail to arrive at its intended destination — dictionaries of the era defined it simply as mail that "failed to reach its destination," without limiting that failure to accidents or careless mistakes. Ordinary speakers of the period used "miscarried" to describe mail stolen, burned, or otherwise deliberately kept from a recipient. Similarly, "loss" meant any deprivation of mail, however caused. Dictionaries defined it as "the act or fact of losing or suffering deprivation," and people commonly described mail stolen by a carrier as "lost." Because the statute describes categories of harm — not categories of postal-worker behavior — a claim "arises out of" a loss or miscarriage of mail whether a worker dropped the letter in a puddle or deliberately threw it away. Two additional arguments for a narrower reading both fail. First, the word "negligent" in the phrase "negligent transmission" does not quietly import a negligence requirement into "loss" and "miscarriage" — under basic grammar rules, an adjective modifies only the word it directly precedes, not earlier words in a list. Congress added "negligent" before "transmission" specifically to prevent that category from sweeping in every mail-related claim regardless of whether anything actually went wrong during delivery; it was not signaling that the other two terms require carelessness. Second, the fact that "loss" and "miscarriage" overlap with each other in many cases does not make either word surplus — Congress routinely uses broad, overlapping terms to cast a wide net, and the canon against redundancy yields to the more fundamental rule that statutes mean what they say. Justice Sonia Sotomayor authored a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, arguing that the ordinary meanings of "loss" and "miscarriage" both connote inadvertence rather than deliberate wrongdoing, that Congress's choice to limit only "transmission" with the word "negligent" signals an intent to leave intentional misconduct outside the exception's scope. In the dissent’s view, the majority's reading effectively gives the Postal Service the blanket immunity Congress deliberately withheld.