In a lively Supreme Court argument Tuesday that included references to cookies, cocktails and poisonous mushrooms, the justices drew the line between misleading statements and outright lies in the case of a Chicago politician convicted of making false statements to banking regulators. I tried to find .
The case concerns former Chicago City Council member Patrick Daley Thompson, the grandson of former mayor Richard J. Daley and the nephew of another mayor, Richard M. Daley. He acknowledged he misled regulators, but said his statements fell short of the outright falsehoods needed to make them criminal.
Judges peppered lawyers with colorful questions to determine the difference between false and misleading statements.
John G. Roberts Jr. The Chief Justice asked whether a driver who was pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving made a false statement by stating he had had one cocktail while omitting the fact that he had had four glasses of wine.
Caroline A. Flynn, an attorney for the commonwealth, said the jury could find the statements false “because the officers asked for a full accounting of how much alcohol the man had consumed.”
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned a child who admitted he ate three cookies when he had 10.
Mr. Flynn said context was important.
“If you say, ‘Did you eat all the cookies?’ or ‘How many cookies did you eat?’ and the child says, ‘I ate 3 cookies’ when he ate 10, that’s a false statement,” Flynn said. “But mom. “If you ask ‘Did you eat a cookie?’ and the child says three, that is not an understatement in response to a specific numerical question.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked whether labeling poisonous mushrooms as “100% natural” was false. Mr. Flynn did not provide a direct response.
Thompson v. filed in court. The United States case (No. 23-1095) began when Mr. Thompson took out three loans from the Federal Savings Bank of Washington between 2011 and 2014. He used his first loan, $110,000, to finance his legal affairs. solid. He used his next loan, $20,000, to pay his taxes. He used the third money, $89,000, to pay off a debt to another bank.
He only made one payment of $390 on the loan in 2012. The bank, which did not ask him to pay more, went bankrupt in 2017.
When the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the loan servicer he hired demanded repayment of the approximately $270,000 loan plus interest, Mr. Thompson said he had borrowed $110,000 from them. This is true in a narrow sense, but it is incomplete.
After negotiations, Mr. Thompson repaid the principal in 2018 but not the interest. More than two years later, federal prosecutors charged him with violating a law that makes it a crime to make “false statements or reports” to influence the FDIC.
He was found guilty and ordered to repay interest amounting to approximately $50,000. He served four months in prison.
Mr. Thompson’s attorney, Chris C. Gair, said his client’s statements were contextually accurate, a claim that was met with skepticism. Justice Elena Kagan said the jury found the statements to be false and noted that to rule in Mr. Thompson’s favor, the court would have to find that a reasonable jury could not have reached that conclusion.
Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh said the issue did not arise before the court, which had agreed to decide the legal question of whether federal law generally covers misleading statements. They said lower courts could decide whether Mr. Thompson was properly convicted.
Samuel A. Alito Jr. The judge asked for examples of statements that were misleading but not false. Mr. Gair, who was presenting his first Supreme Court argument, responded with his own story.
He said, “If you change your homepage and write ‘40 years of litigation experience’ and ‘Supreme Court lawyer’ in bold capital letters, that will be a true statement from today onwards.” This could be misleading to anyone considering whether to hire me.”
Justice Alito said such statements were, at best, somewhat misleading. But Justice Kagan was impressed.
“But that’s the most humble answer I’ve ever heard from the Supreme Court podium,” she said with a laugh. “That looks really good.”
