The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the prosecution must show that an undocumented worker knew that the Social Security number he used to obtain employment belonged to another person, in order to convict him of identity theft.

A federal law forbidding “aggravated identity theft” imposes a mandatory two-year prison term if, during or in relation to the commission of other crimes, the offender “knowingly . . . uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person.” After an undocumented worker gave his employer counterfeit Social Security and alien registration cards containing his name but other people’s identification numbers, he was arrested and charged with two immigration offenses and aggravated identity theft.

The unanimous Court overturns his conviction on identity theft, saying that Congress itself distinguished between identity fraud and identity theft, and says that proving knowledge in identity theft cases would not be difficult: “For one thing, in the classic case of identity theft, intent is generally not difficult to prove. For example, where a defendant has used another person’s identification information to get access to that person’s bank account, the Government can prove knowledge with little difficulty. The same is true when the defendant has gone through someone else’s trash to find discarded credit card and bank statements, or pretends to be from the victim’s bank and requests personal identifying information. Indeed, the examples of identity theft in the legislative history (dumpster diving, computer hacking, and the like) are all examples of the types of classic identity theft where intent should be relatively easy to prove, and there will be no practical enforcement problem.” Flores-Figueroa v. U.S.