By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON — The Kansas Attorney General's office found out some good news from the U.S. Supreme Court this week.
"The United States Supreme Court agreed with our argument that the Kansas Supreme Court got it wrong in a case called Kansas versus Garcia," said Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt. "It's an identity theft case. The issue is whether, when a person uses a stolen Social Security number, somebody else's number and uses that to apply for a job, does federal immigration law prevent the state from prosecuting that identity theft?"
The Kansas Supreme Court thought that federal law superseded state law, the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed.
"The state may prosecute those identity thefts," Schmidt said. "People don't get a special immunity from state criminal law just because of their employment status or their immigration status. We're very pleased with that outcome."
To be clear, these weren't just paperwork mistakes.
"It's a consolidated group of three different prosecutions from Kansas, all presenting the same legal issue," Schmidt said. "The cases all had real flesh and blood victims. These are not abstract crimes against the government or anything like that, not to downplay those, but there were real people who are innocent, who did nothing wrong, who had their Social Security numbers and identities stolen, used by somebody else. We are now able to say with certainty, when the state of Kansas discovers that, we can hold that somebody else, that identity thief, accountable."
This was the third U.S. Supreme Court case Schmidt has personally argued as Kansas attorney general.