On Monday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case set to decide whether a defendant has to actually “steal an identity,” under at least common understanding of what that means, to be convicted of aggravated identity theft under federal law.
The federal aggravated identity theft statute applies to anyone who “knowingly transfers, possesses, or uses without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person” in relation to certain felonies, Daniel Harawa reports for SCOTUSBlog.
In Dubin v. United States, a man convicted of health care fraud, one of the felonies accounted for in the law, used a patient’s name on a Medicaid claim and allegedly submitted that claim with “three material falsehoods” related to the service his practice provided in order to overbill the man. Now, the court is set to decide if that qualifies as identity theft under the law. The government argues it does, and a panel of judges in the 5th Circuit agreed in a split decision, 9-8.