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High court rules defendant must know he's stealing a real person's information
Published on Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Associated Press
WASHINGTON: A unanimous Supreme Court said Monday that undocumented workers who use phony IDs can't be considered identity thieves without proof they knew they were stealing real people's Social Security and other numbers.
The court's decision limits federal authorities' use of a 2004 law, intended to get tough on identity thieves, against immigrants who are picked up in workplace raids and found to be using false Social Security and alien registration numbers.
Advocates for immigrants had complained that federal authorities used the threat of prosecution on the identity theft charge, which carries a two-year mandatory prison term, to win guilty pleas on lesser charges and acceptance of prompt deportation.
''These prosecutions have been taken off the table,'' said Nina Perales, southwest regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
The court, in an opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer, rejected the government's argument that prosecutors need only show that the identification numbers belong to someone else, regardless of whether the defendant knew it.
Breyer said intent is often easy to prove in what he called classic identity theft. ''Where a defendant has used another person's information to get access to that person's bank account, the government can prove knowledge with little difficulty,'' Breyer said.
But immigrants without proper documentation need identity documents and often buy them from forgers, never knowing if they belong to anyone.
Such was the case with the undocumented worker on the winning side Monday. Ignacio Carlos Flores-Figueroa, a Mexican immigrant employed at a steel plant in East Moline, Ill., traveled to Chicago and bought numbers from someone who trades in counterfeit IDs.
Unlike earlier fictitious numbers Flores-Figueroa used, these numbers belonged to actual people.
Flores-Figueroa had worked at the plant under a false name for six years. His decision to use his real name and exchange one set of phony numbers for another aroused his employer's suspicions.
He was arrested in 2006 and convicted on false document and identity theft charges.
He appealed his conviction as an identity thief, but the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis upheld the conviction. With appeals courts divided on the issue, the Supreme Court stepped into the case.
The Bush administration used the identity theft law hundreds of times last year. Workers accused of immigration violations found themselves facing the more serious identity theft charge as well, without any indication they knew Social Security and other identification numbers belonged to real people.
Juvenile sentences
Also Monday, the Supreme Court announced that it will decide whether sentencing juveniles to spend the rest of their lives in prison without hope of ever being released can be considered a cruel and unusual punishment.
The justices are taking up two cases from Florida challenging life sentences for teenagers. In the first case, a judge determined that 17-year-old Terrance Graham took part in an armed home-invasion robbery while he was on probation for a violent crime.
Joe Harris Sullivan, 33 and in prison at the Santa Rosa Correctional Institution in Milton, Fla., was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole for the rape of Lena Bruner in 1989.
Bryan A. Stevenson, Sullivan's lawyer, said Sullivan was one of only two 13-year-old children sentenced to life without parole for a non-homicide crime in the United States and only one of eight with that sentence for any crime in prison.
The cases will not be heard until the fall term. The Supreme Court is expected to have a new justice by October following the retirement of David Souter.
In other actions, the court ordered the federal appeals court in Philadelphia to consider reinstating a $550,000 indecency fine against CBS Corp. over Janet Jackson's breast-baring performance at the 2004 Super Bowl.
Get the full article here.
Comments
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Akron, , OH
Posted 08:16 AM, 05/05/2009
Fools in the system again!!!!! They rule and rear their ugly heads.
