The question in the case, one that has divided the federal appeals courts, is whether workers who use false Social Security and alien registration numbers must know that they belong to a real person to be subject to a two-year sentence extension for “aggravated identity theft.” Put another way: Is it identity theft to pick nine random numbers out of the air and submit them as a Social Security number if that number turns out to belong to a real person?
In the case the court agreed to hear on Monday, Ignacio Flores-Figueroa, a Mexican citizen, used a counterfeit Social Security card bearing his real name and a false Social Security number to get work at a steel plant in East Moline, Ill. Though he did not know it, the number belonged to a real person, a minor.
The 2004 law makes it a crime to use knowingly, “without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person” in connection with a variety of other offenses. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, affirmed Mr. Flores-Figueroa’s conviction, saying that the government needed to prove only a knowing use of false information and not that the defendant knew the fake number belonged to a real person.
Two federal appeals courts — in Richmond, Va., and Atlanta — have agreed with the Eighth Circuit’s interpretation. Three — in Boston, San Francisco and Washington — have disagreed. They said prosecutors must prove the defendant knew the fake number belonged to someone else.
Knowledge requirements often give rise to difficult issues in interpreting criminal statutes. In a 1985 case, quoting a treatise on criminal law, the Supreme Court summed up the problem this way: “It is not at all clear how far down the sentence the word ‘knowingly’ is intended to travel.”
Kevin R. Johnson, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Davis, and an authority on immigration law, said the Supreme Court’s decision in the case, Flores-Figueroa v. United States, No. 08-108, is likely to have a big impact.
“This is the tool that the federal government has been using in the recent raid cases,” Professor Johnson said. Many of the illegal immigrants swept up in a raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, for instance, were offered a choice between pleading guilty to a lesser charge, resulting in five months in prison, followed by deportation without appearing before an immigration judge, or the possibility of a two-year mandatory sentence under the 2004 law.
“It’s given the federal government a huge lever,” Professor Johnson said of the law.
Also on Monday, the court turned down an appeal in a capital case, Walker v. Georgia, No. 08-5385. In the process, it prompted a debate between Justices John Paul Stevens and Clarence Thomas.
Though Justice Stevens agreed that the court should not have heard the case, he wrote that it pointed to an important issue. State courts, he said, have an obligation to review capital cases to make sure that death sentences are not being imposed arbitrarily.
To do this, he said, courts must compare the murders that gave rise to death sentences with how similar murders were treated. Lawyers call this “proportionality review.”
Justice Stevens criticized the Georgia Supreme Court for conducting “an utterly perfunctory review” in the case of Artemus R. Walker, who had been convicted of luring a man from his home, killing him for money and then trying to break into the home, where the man’s wife and daughter were. The court, he said, had considered only other cases in which the death penalty had been imposed to satisfy itself that the death sentence was warranted.
Justice Stevens said United States Supreme Court precedents required a broader comparison, one that includes cases in which juries had imposed life sentences and cases in which prosecutors had not sought death in the first place.
Justice Thomas, who also voted to deny the appeal, said Justice Stevens
had misread the court’s own cases. “Proportionality review is not
constitutionally required in any form,” he wrote. Indeed, he said, the
Georgia court had applied the United States Supreme Court’s decisions
“faithfully and without error.”