Ninth circus says fraudulant claims of valor OK
Image via WikipediaWhy do we lie? Let Alex Kozinski, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco, count the ways.Alvarez was perpetrating a fraud upon the voters in the belief they would be more likely to vote for a hero. That should not be considered and inconsequential thing.
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Kozinski’s entertaining treatise was in service to his point about the Constitution.
“If all untruthful speech is unprotected . . . we could all be made into criminals, depending on which lies those making the laws find offensive,” he wrote. “And we would have to censor our speech to avoid the risk of prosecution for saying something that turns out to be false."
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Kozinski’s is the first appeals court to examine a law that seems likely to be on the way to the Supreme Court: the Stolen Valor Act, passed by Congress in 2005 to deal with an apparent proliferation of people falsely claiming to be military heroes.
The act allows a fine and/or a six-month prison term for someone who “falsely represents himself or herself, verbally or in writing, to have been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the Armed Forces of the United States.”
The penalty increases to a year in prison if the person lies about a Purple Heart, a Medal of Honor or another particularly high honor.
There’s no question Alvarez lied. After winning a seat on Southern California’s Three Valleys Municipal Water District board of directors in 2007, he introduced himself by saying: “I’m a retired Marine of 25 years. I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got wounded many times by the same guy.”
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I once prosecuted a guy for falsely claiming that he had been a POW. He had made the claim to induce some returning POWs from Vietnam into turning over their back pay for an investment in virtually worthless bonds. The jury convicted him and gave him the maximum sentence under Texas law. This was before there was a Stolen Valor Act. But the point of the fraud was to induce others to invest with him and it would have been absurd to follow Kozinsky's reasoning.
On another point Kozinsky says, "...we would have to censor our speech to avoid the risk of prosecution for saying something that turns out to be false." No we wouldn't because a statement that is later shown to be inaccurate is not a lie unless the person telling it knew it was untrue at the time he said it. It is clear that one usually knows for a fact whether they were awarded a Purple Heart or a Congressional Medal of Honor. Those are events that are usually remember.
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