On Friday, the Supreme Court canceled a political conviction in Chicago to make statements to banking organizers who were misleading but not wrong.
The case was related to Patrick Dali Thompson, a former in Chicago Aldurman, the grandson of a former mayor, Richard J. Dali, my nephew, Richard M. Dali. He acknowledged that he had misled the organizers, but said that this did not make his criminal statements.
The senior judge John J. Roberts Junior, who wrote before a unanimous court, was the case turned into a primary logic. The relevant law prohibits “any false statement or report.”
“Flee and misleading are two different things.” “It can be a correct misleading statement. It is clear that the real statement is not a mistake. So the basic logic dictates that at least some misleading data is not wrong.”
The case started, thompson v. UNIDSTES, No. The next loan, for $ 20,000, used to pay a tax bill. The third, for $ 89,000, used to pay debts to another bank.
He paid at one payment on loans, for $ 390 in 2012. The bank, which was not pressed for more payments, failed in 2017.
When the Federal Deposit Insurance and Loan Service Corporation requested that it had been paid for loans in addition to the interest, which amounted to about 270,000 dollars, Mr. Thompson told them that he borrowed $ 110,000, which is only the first loan amount. This statement was true in the narrow but incomplete sense.
After the negotiations, Mr. Thompson paid the director, not the benefit. After more than two years, Federal Public Prosecutors accused him of violating a law, which makes the crime of providing “any statement or report” to influence FDIC
Mr. Thompson, who was elected to the Chicago City Council in 2015, resigned and represents an area on the southern side, after being convicted in 2022 and ordered the payment of interest, amounted to about $ 50,000. He served four months in prison.
The head of judges, Roberts, indicated that many federal laws prohibit “false or misleading data”, indicating that the neglect of the misleading data of the law in the discussion in the case of Mr. Thompson was meaningful.
The head of the judges gave examples of real but misleading statements.
“If a tennis player says she” won the championship “when her opponent won, her statement – even if it is true – may be misleading because people may lead to the belief that she won a disputed match.”
Likewise, if the doctor said that he had “performed hundreds of these surgeries” when 99 patients died, the chief of judges wrote, “The statement – even if it was true – would be misleading because it may lead people to believe that these surgeries were successful.”
The Supreme Court returned the case to the Court of Appeal, and ordered it to study a separate question: whether Mr. Thompson's statements, in the context, are already wrong instead of mere misleading.
In a simultaneous opinion, Judge Samuel A. Alto Junior as important, with an example he said explains this point.
“After I noticed that a plate of 12 fresh correlation files contain only crumbs,” Books, “The mother asks her daughter,” Have she ate all cookies? “
“If the child said,” I ate three “when she already had 12, her words would be literally correct in isolation, but she is wrong in the context.” “The child ate three cookies (then nine others). However, in the context, the child implicitly says that she only ate three cookies, and this is wrong.”
In a second simultaneous opinion, Judge Kitanji Brown Jackson wrote that the jury had already found that the statements of Mr. Thompson were wrong and that the Court of Appeal must confirm his conviction for these areas.
