Stars and Stripes
Published: June 28, 2012
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday tossed out a 2006 law making it a federal misdemeanor to lie about receiving a military service medal, but left the door open for Congress to try again with a more finely tuned law.
In a 6-3 ruling, the court said the Stolen Valor Act violated First Amendment free-speech protections, ruling in favor of Xavier Alvarez, a California man prosecuted for false claims in 2007 that he had received the Medal of Honor.
Alvarez, a former member of the Three Valleys Municipal Water District Board, speaking at his first meeting as a board member, said: “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.”
His conviction was later thrown out by the federal Ninth Circuit Court, a decision the Supreme Court upheld Thursday. Under the invalidated law, the lie could have earned him a year in jail, while maximum sentences for lies about lesser medals were shorter.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan favored striking down the law. Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.
The law was too broad a limitation on speech and sought “to control and suppress all false statements on this one subject in almost limitless times and settings. And it does so entirely without regard to whether the lie was made for the purpose of material gain,” Kennedy wrote in the ruling.
Kennedy added that “enacting a similar but more finely tailored statute” could result in a law that both protects the dignity of true military medal recipients and passes the test of constitutionality.
A current bill in the House of Representatives aims to do just that. The Stolen Valor Act of 2011, introduced by Nevada Republican Joe Heck, makes it a crime to benefit from a lie about military service, rather than illegalizing certain kinds of lies........
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