Opinion of the Court
is implausible would be an understatement.[1] Because everyday overbilling cases would account for the majority of violations 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 prosecutors will act responsibly. To this, the Court gives a just-as-familiar response: We “cannot construe a criminal statute on the assumption that the Government will ‘use it responsibly.’ ” 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-ranging 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 offenses, 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
- ↑ 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 inclusion 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 cannot be squared with the Government’s own “facilitates” standard.
