Maslenjak v. United States

137 S. Ct. 1918 (2017)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

A federal statute, 18 U.S.C. §1425(a), makes it a crime to “knowingly procure, contrary to law, the naturalization of any person.” When someone is convicted under §1425(a) of unlawfully procuring her own naturalization, her citizenship is automatically revoked. Maslenjak (D) is an ethnic Serb who resided in Bosnia during the 1990s 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. D 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. D was granted refugee status and immigrated to the United States in 2000. Six years later, D applied for naturalization. Question 23 asked whether she had ever given “false or misleading information” to a government official while applying for an immigration benefit; question 24 asked whether she had ever “lied to a government official to gain entry or admission into the United States.” P’s answer to both questions was no. D also swore under oath that her replies were true. In August 2007, D was naturalized as a U.S. citizen. Most of what D claimed to be true was false. In 2006, immigration officials confronted D’s husband Ratko with records showing that he had not fled conscription during the Bosnian civil war. Ratko had served as an officer in the Bosnian Serb Army. He had served in a brigade that participated in the Srebrenica massacre-a slaughter of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim civilians. P convicted Ratko on charges of making false statements on immigration documents. D admitted she had known all along that Ratko spent the war years not secreted in Serbia but fighting in Bosnia. P charged D with knowingly “procuring, contrary to law, her naturalization,” in violation of 18 U.S.C. §1425(a). P 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 court instructed the jury that a conviction was proper so long as D “proved that one of D’s statements was false”-even if the statement was not “material” and “did not influence the decision to approve [her] naturalization.” D was found guilty and was stripped of her citizenship. The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed the conviction. It held that D’s false statements need not have influenced the naturalization decision. D appealed.