The Supreme Court ruled Monday that people can be convicted of lying to a federal agency when they falsely answer "no" to an incriminating question.
This verdict comes less than one week after the court ruled that federal agencies can punish employees who lie while being investigated for employment-related misconduct.
The 7-2 decision upholds a New York man's conviction for lying to federal investigators in a probe of cash payments he received as a union official.
In October 1993, federal agents questioned James Brogan about his service as an officer of a New York City local of the Service Employees International Union. When asked if he had ever accepted cash payments from a real estate management firm that employed union members, he falsely said "no."
Brogan was later convicted of making false statements to government investigators under a law that criminalizes knowingly making false statements to the government.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the false-statement conviction, but did say that six other federal appeals courts would not have done so due to an exception called the "exculpatory 'no' doctrine," which says someone cannot be prosecuted under the law for "merely denying criminal conduct."
Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the court's opinion, found that the law itself makes no exception for lying.
"Neither the text nor the spirit of the Fifth Amendment confers a privilege to lie," he wrote. "It is well established that the fact that a person's silence can be used against him ... does not exert a form of pressure that exonerates an otherwise unlawful lie."
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