Supreme Court Rules for Chicago Politician in Bank Fraud Case

The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a Chicago politician’s conviction for making statements to bank regulators that were misleading but not false.

The case concerned Patrick Daley Thompson, a former Chicago alderman who is the grandson of one former mayor, Richard J. Daley, and the nephew of another, Richard M. Daley. He conceded that he had misled the regulators but said that did not make his statements criminal.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for a unanimous court, said the case turned on elementary logic. The law in question prohibited making “any false statement or report.”

“False and misleading are two different things,” the chief justice wrote. “A misleading statement can be true. And a true statement is obviously not false. So basic logic dictates that at least some misleading statements are not false.”

The case, Thompson v. United States, No. 23-1095, started when Mr. Thompson took out three loans from Washington Federal Bank for Savings from 2011 to 2014. He used the first, for $110,000, to finance a law firm. He used the next loan, for $20,000, to pay a tax bill. He used the third, for $89,000, to repay a debt to another bank.

He made a single payment on the loans, for $390 in 2012. The bank, which did not press him for further payments, failed in 2017.

When the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and a loan servicer it had hired sought repayment of the loans plus interest, amounting to about $270,000, Mr. Thompson told them he had borrowed $110,000, the amount of only the first loan. That statement was true in a narrow sense but incomplete.

After negotiations, Mr. Thompson in 2018 paid back the principal but not the interest. More than two years later, federal prosecutors charged him with violating a law making it a crime to give “any false statement or report” to influence the F.D.I.C.

Mr. Thompson, who was elected to the Chicago City Council in 2015, representing a district on the South Side, resigned after he was convicted in 2022 and ordered to repay the interest, amounting to about $50,000. He served four months in prison.

Chief Justice Roberts noted that many federal laws prohibit “false or misleading statements,” suggesting that the omission of misleading statements from the law at issue in Mr. Thompson’s case was meaningful.

The chief justice gave examples of true but misleading statements.

“If a tennis player says she ‘won the championship’ when her opponent forfeited, her statement — even if true — might be misleading because it could lead people to think she had won a contested match,” he wrote.

Similarly, if a doctor says he has “done a hundred of these surgeries” when 99 of the patients had died, the chief justice wrote, “the statement — even if true — would be misleading because it might lead people to think those surgeries were successful.”

The Supreme Court returned the case to the appeals court, ordering it to examine a separate question: whether Mr. Thompson’s statements, in context, were indeed false as opposed to merely misleading.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. agreed that context mattered, giving an example that he said illustrated the point.

“After noticing that a plate of 12 fresh-baked cookies has only crumbs remaining,” he wrote, “a mother asks her daughter, ‘Did you eat all the cookies?’”

“If the child says ‘I ate three’ when she actually had all 12, her words would be literally true in isolation but false in context,” he wrote. “The child did eat three cookies (then nine more). In context, however, the child is implicitly saying that she ate only three cookies, and that is false.”

In a second concurring opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the jury had already found that Mr. Thompson’s statements were false and that the appeals court should affirm his conviction on that ground.