Commentary

Court watchers are awaiting a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court in Flores-Figueroa v. U.S., Docket No. 08-108, which may become a leading case on the evolving issue of identity theft. The Court decided to accept the case for review on October 20, 2008, in order to consider the question:  Whether an individual who used a false means of identification but did not know it belonged to another person can be convicted of “aggravated identity theft” under 18 U.S.C. 1028a(A)(1).   Stay tuned... Kendall Coffey on Flores-Figueroa v. U.S.

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"It was enacted in 2006, a new federal law that makes anonymous cyber-abuse a crime potentially prosecutable for two years hasn’t been tested by the courts yet, but if you ever wanted to see a case where that kind of law ought to apply, this might be the case. It’s come up before in the context, for example, of a very similar law that dealt with anonymous phone calls that were used to harass, to intimidate, to threaten. Those laws were largely validated. Again, it is unclear here but if you take words like abuse, if you take words like harass, if you take words like threats, and then you look at what was done to this little girl, I think the court is going to find that the First Amendment doesn’t protect that kind of conduct."  Kendall Coffey on Megan Meier case.  

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