Maslenjak v. United States

• Decision Date: 22 June 2017
• Docket Number: No. 16–309.,16–309.
• Citation: 137 S.Ct. 1918,198 L.Ed.2d 460
• Parties: Divna MASLENJAK, Petitioner v. UNITED STATES.
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

137 S.Ct. 1918

198 L.Ed.2d 460

Divna MASLENJAK, Petitioner

v.UNITED STATES.

No. 16–309.

Supreme Court of the United States

Argued April 26, 2017.

Decided June 22, 2017.

Christopher Landau, Washington, DC, for Petitioner.

Robert A. Parker, Washington, DC, for Respondent.

Christopher Landau, P.C., Patrick Haney, Jeff Nye, Kirkland & Ellis LLP, Washington, DC, for Petitioner.

Christopher Landau, P.C., Washington, DC, for Petitioner.

Robert A. Parker, Assistant to the Solicitor General, Washington, DC, for Respondent.

Jeffrey B. Wall, Acting Solicitor General, Kenneth A. Blanco, Acting Assistant Attorney General, Michael R. Dreeben, Deputy Solicitor General, Robert A. Parker, Assistant to the Solicitor General, John P. Taddei, Attorney, Department of Justice, Washington, DC, for Respondent.

Justice KAGAN delivered the opinion of the Court.

A federal statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1425(a), makes it a crime to "knowingly procure[ ], contrary to law, the naturalization of any person." And when someone is convicted under § 1425(a) of unlawfully procuring her own naturalization, her citizenship is automatically revoked. See 8 U.S.C. § 1451(e). In this case, we consider what the Government must prove to obtain such a conviction. We hold that the Government must establish that an illegal act by the defendant played some role in her acquisition of citizenship. When the illegal act is a false statement, that means demonstrating that the defendant lied about facts that would have mattered to an immigration official, because they would have justified denying naturalization or would predictably have led to other facts warranting that result.

I

Petitioner Divna Maslenjak is an ethnic Serb who resided in Bosnia during the 1990's, when a civil war between Serbs and Muslims divided the new country. In 1998, she and her family (her husband Ratko Maslenjak and their two children) met with an American immigration official to seek refugee status in the United States. Interviewed under oath, Maslenjak explained that the family feared persecution in Bosnia from both sides of the national rift. Muslims, she said, would mistreat them because of their ethnicity. And Serbs, she testified, would abuse them because her husband had evaded service in the Bosnian Serb Army by absconding to Serbia—where he remained hidden, apart from the family, for some five years. See App. to Pet. for Cert. 58a–60a. Persuaded of the Maslenjaks' plight, American officials granted them refugee status, and they immigrated to the United States in 2000.

Six years later, Maslenjak applied for naturalization. Question 23 on the application form asked whether she had ever given "false or misleading information" to a government official while applying for an immigration benefit; question 24 similarly asked whether she had ever "lied to a [ ] government official to gain entry or admission into the United States." Id., at 72a. Maslenjak answered "no" to both questions, while swearing under oath that her replies were true. Id., at 72a, 74a. She also swore that all her written answers were true during a subsequent interview with an immigration official. In August 2007, Maslenjak was naturalized as a U.S. citizen.

But Maslenjak's professions of honesty were false: In fact, she had made up much of the story she told to immigration officials when seeking refuge in this country. Her fiction began to unravel at around the same time she applied for citizenship. In 2006, immigration officials confronted Maslenjak's husband Ratko with records showing that he had not fled conscription during the Bosnian civil war; rather, he had served as an officer in the Bosnian Serb Army. And not only that: He had served in a brigade that participated in the Srebrenica massacre—a slaughter of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim civilians. Within a year, the Government convicted Ratko on charges of making false statements on immigration documents. The newly naturalized Maslenjak attempted to prevent Ratko's deportation. During proceedings on that matter, Maslenjak admitted she had known all along that Ratko spent the war years not secreted in Serbia but fighting in Bosnia.

As a result, the Government charged Maslenjak with knowingly "procur[ing], contrary to law, [her] naturalization," in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1425(a). According to the Government's theory, Maslenjak violated § 1425(a) because, in the course of procuring her naturalization, she broke another law: 18 U.S.C. § 1015(a), which prohibits knowingly making a false statement under oath in a naturalization proceeding. The false statements the Government invoked were Maslenjak's answers to questions 23 and 24 on the citizenship application (stating that she had not lied in seeking refugee status) and her corresponding statements in the citizenship interview. Those statements, the Government argued to the District Court, need not have affected the naturalization decision to support a conviction under § 1425(a). The court agreed: Over Maslenjak's objection, it instructed the jury that a conviction was proper so long as the Government "prove[d] that one of the defendant's statements was false"—even if the statement was not "material" and "did not influence the decision to approve [her] naturalization." App. to Pet. for Cert. 86a. The jury returned a guilty verdict; and the District Court, based on that finding, stripped Maslenjak of her citizenship. See 8 U.S.C. § 1451(e).

The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed the conviction. As relevant here, the Sixth Circuit upheld the District Court's instructions that Maslenjak's false statements need not have influenced the naturalization decision. If, the Court of Appeals held, Maslenjak made false statements violating § 1015(a) and she procured naturalization, then she also violated § 1425(a) —irrespective of whether the false statements played any role in her obtaining citizenship. See 821 F.3d 675, 685–686 (2016). That decision created a conflict in the Circuit Courts.¹ We granted certiorari to resolve it, 580 U.S. ––––, 137 S.Ct. 809, 196 L.Ed.2d 595 (2017), and we now vacate the Sixth Circuit's judgment.

II

A

Section 1425(a), the parties agree, makes it a crime to commit some other illegal act in connection with naturalization. But the parties dispute the nature of the required connection. Maslenjak argues that the relationship must be "causal" in kind: A person "procures" her naturalization "contrary to law," she contends, only if a predicate crime in some way "contribut[ed]" to her gaining citizenship. Brief for Petitioner 21. By contrast, the Government proposes a basically chronological link: Section 1425(a), it urges, "punishes the commission of other violations of law in the course of procuring naturalization"—even if the illegality could not have had any effect on the naturalization decision. Brief for United States 14 (emphasis added). We conclude that Maslenjak has the better of this argument.

We begin, as usual, with the statutory text. In ordinary usage, "to procure" something is "to get possession of" it. Webster's Third New International Dictionary 1809 (2002); accord, Black's Law Dictionary 1401 (10th ed. 2014) (defining "procure" as "[t]o obtain (something), esp. by special effort or means"). So to "procure ... naturalization" means to obtain naturalization (or, to use another word, citizenship). The adverbial phrase "contrary to law," wedged in between "procure" and "naturalization," then specifies how a person must procure naturalization so as to run afoul of the statute: in contravention of the law—or, in a word, illegally. Putting the pieces together, someone "procure[s], contrary to law, naturalization" when she obtains citizenship illegally.

What, then, does that whole phrase mean? The most natural understanding is that the illegal act must have somehow contributed to the obtaining of citizenship. Consider if someone said to you: "John obtained that painting illegally." You might imagine that he stole it off the walls of a museum. Or that he paid for it with a forged check. Or that he impersonated the true buyer when the auction house delivered it. But in all events, you would imagine illegal acts in some kind of means-end relation—or otherwise said, in some kind of causal relation—to the painting's acquisition. If someone said to you, "John obtained that painting illegally, but his unlawful acts did not play any role in his obtaining it," you would not have a clue what the statement meant. You would think it nonsense—or perhaps the opening of a riddle. That is because if no illegal act contributed at all to getting the painting, then the painting would not have been gotten illegally. And the same goes for naturalization. If whatever illegal conduct occurring within the naturalization process was a causal dead-end—if, so to speak, the ripples from that act could not have reached the decision to award citizenship—then the act cannot support a charge that the applicant obtained naturalization illegally. The conduct, though itself illegal, would not also make the obtaining of citizenship so. To get citizenship unlawfully, we understand, is to get it through an unlawful means—and that is just to say that an illegality played some role in its acquisition.²

The Government's contrary view—that § 1425(a) requires only a "violation [ ] of law in the course of procuring naturalization"—falters on the way language naturally works. Brief for United States 14. Return for a moment to our artwork example. Imagine this time that John made an illegal turn while driving to the auction house to purchase a painting. Would you say that he had "procured the painting illegally" because he happened to violate the law in the course of obtaining it? Not likely. And again, the same is true with respect to naturalization. Suppose that an applicant for citizenship fills out the necessary paperwork in a government office with a knife tucked away in her handbag (but never mentioned or used). She has violated the...