The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday sided with former Chicago Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson, finding that a law he’d been convicted under outlaws false statements but not misleading ones, as his attorneys have long argued.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the unanimous opinion, which does not overturn Thompson’s conviction but undoes a later ruling from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirming it. Roberts on Friday sent the case back to the appellate court and told it to give it another look.
A jury found Thompson guilty in February 2022 of two counts of lying to regulators and five counts of filing false income tax returns. The conviction ended his tenure as the 11th Ward’s representative on the Chicago City Council.
Thompson is the grandson of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley and the nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley. Thompson’s uncle, William Daley, served as chief of staff to President Barack Obama.
U.S. District Judge Franklin Valderrama sentenced the heir to the Daley political dynasty to four months in prison. Thompson has already served his time, and his appeal revolved only around claims that he made false statements to regulators.
“We’re very gratified that the Supreme Court adopted the arguments that we’ve been trying to convince the Justice Department of all along, and maybe they’ll take this to heart,” said Chris Gair, Thompson’s defense attorney.
The question Thompson raised at the Supreme Court basically amounted to “when is a lie a lie?” On Friday, Roberts used the case to continue the high court’s trend of putting restraints on federal prosecutors.
“In casual conversation, people use many overlapping words to describe shady statements: false, misleading, dishonest, deceptive, literally true, and more,” Roberts wrote. “Only one of those words appears in the statute. [The law] does not criminalize statements that are misleading but true.
“Under the statute, it is not enough that a statement is misleading. It must be ‘false.’”
In a concurrence, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that while the high court rejected an appellate ruling in Thompson’s case, the jury that originally convicted Thompson was properly instructed.
“Whether Thompson’s statements were, in fact, false is a question for the jury — and here, one the jury has already answered,” Jackson wrote.
The case against Thompson revolved around $219,000 he received between 2011 and 2014 from Washington Federal Bank for Savings in Bridgeport. Thompson received a $110,000 loan from the bank in November 2011. He then received an additional $20,000 in March 2013 and $89,000 in January 2014.
The bank was shut down in December 2017 amid allegations of massive fraud, days after its president was found dead in a bank customer’s $1 million home.
Thompson paid no interest on the loan, according to the feds. But he falsely claimed deductions for mortgage interest purportedly paid to the bank on his tax returns for the years 2013 through 2017. He was also convicted for lying in early 2018 as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. sought to recover the money he borrowed.
The FDIC hired Planet Home Lending to collect on Thompson’s loans, records show. It sent him an invoice in February 2018 stating his balance was $269,120 — the principal of $219,000 plus interest.
Thompson called the customer service line and said, “I borrowed $100,000. … I mean, I borrowed the money, I owe the money — but I borrowed $100 thou—$110—I think it was $110,000. … I want to quickly resolve all this, and — and — you know, what I owe.”
Thompson read the amount on the invoice and said, “I dispute that.”
When he was convicted, the jury found that Thompson falsely stated that he “only owed $110,000,” records show.
“Patrick Thompson was convicted … for stating that he borrowed $110,000 and that he disputed owing $269,000,” Gair and lawyer Stuart Banner told the Supreme Court. “These statements were not false. He did borrow $110,000 and he did dispute owing $269,000.”