Supreme Court: Feds Abusing Identity Theft Law

Submitted by MacRonin on May 4, 2009 - 6:58pm

Supreme Court: Feds Abusing Identity Theft Law: Via Threat Level.

A unanimous Supreme Court ruled Monday the government has been overstepping the boundaries of identity theft legislation when targeting immigrants who use phony citizenship documents to acquire jobs.

The 2004 legislation, which typically carries a two-year maximum term, has also been threatened against illegal immigrants in exchange for them agreeing to be deported, like the 400 illegal immigrants working under false pretenses at an Iowa meatpacking plant last year.

The justices said that the government, in order to prove such charges, must demonstrate that a defendant “knowingly” hijacked the identity of somebody else. In the case before the justices, an Illinois illegal immigrant steelworker was charged under the statute after submitting a fake Social Security number that, without the worker’s knowledge, happened to match a real number.

The Obama administration argued (.pdf) against the high court’s position.

“The Government claims more forcefully that the word “knowingly” applies to all but the statute’s last three words, i.e., ‘of another person.’ The statute, the government says, does not require a prosecutor to show that the defendant knows that the means of identification the defendant has unlawfully used in fact belongs to another person. But how are we to square this reading with the statute’s language?” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote (.pdf)

Breyer said the decision would not have an impact on bread-and-butter ID theft cases. In those instances, persons hijacking someone’s identity for financial gain obviously know that such data belongs to a real person, Breyer wrote.

Photo: d70focus

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