Someone Else's Numbers

The Defendant, a Mexican citizen working in the United States, gave his employer counterfeit Social Security and alien-registration cards bearing invented numbers. Years later he replaced them with new fakes — but these happened to carry numbers that actually belonged to real people, a fact he did not know. He was charged with aggravated identity theft, a crime that adds a mandatory two years for anyone who knowingly uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person. The Defendant argued the government had to prove he knew the numbers belonged to a real person; the government argued the word knowingly did not reach that far.