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SCotUS Smacks Down DoJ
May. 4th, 2009 03:16 pmHere's the deal: Ignacio Flores-Figueroa used a false name, social security number, and resident alien card to obtain employment. Trouble is, the SSN he used was already assigned to somebody. The Bush administration's Department of "Justice" decided to throw the book at him, specifically the "aggravated identity theft" law.
But the Supreme Court unanimously decided (PDF) that to commit aggravated identity theft, you have to know that it's someone's identity that you're stealing. Flores-Figueroa's legal team insisted all along that he had no idea that the papers weren't merely fraudulent, and the government never even tried to prove that he knew that he was stealing the identity of anyone in particular. So Chief Justice Roberts assigned Justice Breyer to write the smack-down, which is pretty dry.
The government is still allowed to prosecute bearers of false paper for fraud, but if they want to use the bigger hammer of "aggravated identity theft", they have a higher prosecutorial standard to meet.
Now I flip to page 16 of the 18-page decision to find Junior Justice Alito's addendum:
For fans of heavy pedantry only. Geezum crow.
But the Supreme Court unanimously decided (PDF) that to commit aggravated identity theft, you have to know that it's someone's identity that you're stealing. Flores-Figueroa's legal team insisted all along that he had no idea that the papers weren't merely fraudulent, and the government never even tried to prove that he knew that he was stealing the identity of anyone in particular. So Chief Justice Roberts assigned Justice Breyer to write the smack-down, which is pretty dry.
The government is still allowed to prosecute bearers of false paper for fraud, but if they want to use the bigger hammer of "aggravated identity theft", they have a higher prosecutorial standard to meet.
Now I flip to page 16 of the 18-page decision to find Junior Justice Alito's addendum:
While I am in general agreement with the opinion of the Court, I write separately because I am concerned that the Court’s opinion may be read by some as adopting an overly rigid rule of statutory construction. The Court says that “[i]n ordinary English, where a transitive verb has an object, listeners in most contexts assume that an adverb (such as knowingly) that modifies the transitive verb tells the listener how the subject performed the entire action, including the object as set forth in the sentence.” [...] Examples of sentences that do not conform to the Court’s rule are not hard to imagine. For example: “The mugger knowingly assaulted two people in the park—an employee of company X and a jogger from town Y.” A person hearing this sentence would not likely assume that the mugger knew about the first victim’s employer or the second victim’s home town. What matters in this example, and the Court’s, is context.
For fans of heavy pedantry only. Geezum crow.
