The Supreme Court docket on Friday overturned a Chicago politician’s conviction for making statements to financial institution regulators that had been deceptive however not false.
The case involved Patrick Daley Thompson, a former Chicago alderman who’s the grandson of 1 former mayor, Richard J. Daley, and the nephew of one other, Richard M. Daley. He conceded that he had misled the regulators however mentioned that didn’t make his statements felony.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for a unanimous courtroom, mentioned the case turned on elementary logic. The regulation in query prohibited making “any false assertion or report.”
“False and deceptive are two various things,” the chief justice wrote. “A deceptive assertion might be true. And a real assertion is clearly not false. So primary logic dictates that at the very least some deceptive statements will not be false.”
The case, Thompson v. United States, No. 23-1095, began when Mr. Thompson took out three loans from Washington Federal Financial institution for Financial savings from 2011 to 2014. He used the primary, for $110,000, to finance a regulation agency. He used the subsequent mortgage, for $20,000, to pay a tax invoice. He used the third, for $89,000, to repay a debt to a different financial institution.
He made a single cost on the loans, for $390 in 2012. The financial institution, which didn’t press him for additional funds, failed in 2017.
When the Federal Deposit Insurance coverage Company and a mortgage servicer it had employed sought compensation of the loans plus curiosity, amounting to about $270,000, Mr. Thompson informed them he had borrowed $110,000, the quantity of solely the primary mortgage. That assertion was true in a slim sense however incomplete.
After negotiations, Mr. Thompson in 2018 paid again the principal however not the curiosity. Greater than two years later, federal prosecutors charged him with violating a regulation making it a criminal offense to offer “any false assertion or report” to affect the F.D.I.C.
Mr. Thompson, who was elected to the Chicago Metropolis Council in 2015, representing a district on the South Facet, resigned after he was convicted in 2022 and ordered to repay the curiosity, amounting to about $50,000. He served 4 months in jail.
Chief Justice Roberts famous that many federal legal guidelines prohibit “false or deceptive statements,” suggesting that the omission of deceptive statements from the regulation at concern in Mr. Thompson’s case was significant.
The chief justice gave examples of true however deceptive statements.
“If a tennis participant says she ‘gained the championship’ when her opponent forfeited, her assertion — even when true — could be deceptive as a result of it may lead individuals to assume she had gained a contested match,” he wrote.
Equally, if a physician says he has “finished 100 of those surgical procedures” when 99 of the sufferers had died, the chief justice wrote, “the assertion — even when true — can be deceptive as a result of it would lead individuals to assume these surgical procedures had been profitable.”
The Supreme Court docket returned the case to the appeals courtroom, ordering it to look at a separate query: whether or not Mr. Thompson’s statements, in context, had been certainly false versus merely deceptive.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. agreed that context mattered, giving an instance that he mentioned illustrated the purpose.
“After noticing {that a} plate of 12 fresh-baked cookies has solely crumbs remaining,” he wrote, “a mom asks her daughter, ‘Did you eat all of the cookies?’”
“If the kid says ‘I ate three’ when she really had all 12, her phrases can be actually true in isolation however false in context,” he wrote. “The kid did eat three cookies (then 9 extra). In context, nonetheless, the kid is implicitly saying that she ate solely three cookies, and that’s false.”
In a second concurring opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the jury had already discovered that Mr. Thompson’s statements had been false and that the appeals courtroom ought to affirm his conviction on that floor.