Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/22-10_ifjn.pdf
Page Number: 23.0

Cite as:  599 U. S. ____ (2023) 

19 

Opinion of the Court 

is implausible would be an understatement.9  Because eve-
ryday overbilling cases would account for the majority of vi-
olations in practice, the Government’s reading places at the 
core of the statute its most improbable applications. 

Finally, the Government makes a familiar plea: There is
no reason to mistrust its sweeping reading, because prose-
cutors will act responsibly.  To this, the Court gives a just-
as-familiar response: We “cannot construe a criminal stat-
ute on the assumption that the Government will ‘use it re-
sponsibly.’ ”  McDonnell, 579 U. S., at 576 (quoting United 
States v. Stevens, 559 U. S. 460, 480 (2010)).  “[T]o rely upon
prosecutorial discretion to narrow the otherwise wide-rang-
ing  scope  of  a  criminal  statute’s  highly  abstract  general
statutory language places great power in the hands of the
prosecutor.”  Marinello,  584  U. S.,  at  ___  (slip  op.,  at  9). 
This  concern  is  particularly  salient  here.  If  §1028A(a)(1)
applies virtually automatically to a swath of predicate of-
fenses,  the  prosecutor  can  hold  the  threat  of  charging  an
additional 2-year mandatory prison sentence over the head 
of any defendant who is considering going to trial. 

III 

All the points above are different wells drawing from the 
same  source.    The  Court  need  not  decide  whether  any  of 
these points, standing alone, would be dispositive.  Taken 
together,  from  text  to  context,  from  content  to  common 
sense,  §1028A(a)(1)  is  not  amenable  to  the  Government’s
attempt to push the statutory envelope.  A defendant “uses” 
another  person’s  means  of  identification  “in  relation  to”  a
predicate offense when this use is at the crux of what makes 

—————— 

9 Even the Government had trouble stomaching some of these results, 
offering  inconsistent  accounts  of  certain  examples.    The  Government 
claimed,  for  example,  that  if  “an  applicant  for  a  bank  loan  . . .  slightly
inflates his salary while correctly identifying the co-signer,” “the inclu-
sion  of  the co-signer’s  name  is  not  ‘in  relation  to’  the  fraud.”    Brief  for 
United States 31–32 (some internal quotation marks omitted).  This can-
not be squared with the Government’s own “facilitates” standard.