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What do sexting and identity theft have in common?
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There are few things that are more “American” than our collective sense of right and wrong. Although progress is often extremely slow and subject to the usual political winds, our judicial system, over the long haul, generally reaches sensible decisions. This has been no more apparent than with the recent Ignacio Flores-Figueroa case.
Ignacio, an illegal alien was caught with counterfeit papers that included a valid social security number of an actual person, on a card with his name. The prosecutor decided not only to charge him with illegal entry but also with identity-theft, despite the fact that Ignacio had no prior knowledge the social security number was real. In this case, an overzealous prosecutor could add two more years to Ignacio’s sentence if he could get a conviction on this count.
This reminds me of the recent flap over adolescent “sexting”. Here, girls were caught sending semi-nude pictures of themselves to their boyfriends. Prosecutors, using only the kind of logic that the Taliban would appreciate, decided to charge these students with sex crimes if they did not follow blanket requirements for counseling--deserved or not. Of course, being charged for a sex crime is something that could follow a person for the rest of their life, and the punishment for that would be so far out of proportion to the “crime” as to be preposterous.
It turns out that threatening defendants with an oversized crime is a common bludgeon used in our courts to get guilty pleas or to otherwise coerce defendants. Although we wish prosecutors would reserve the use of heavy-handed approaches for John Gotti-types, bad prosecutorial apples usually get away with this behavior—but not this time.
The Supreme Court called a halt to identify-theft charges in these cases, ruling 9 to 0 that the federal identity-theft law does not apply. Instead, Ignacio was charged with attempting to work in the United States without proper documentation. Yes, a crime, but a far less serious one.
What do you think? Should we “throw the book” at illegals?
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