In U.S. v. Holmes, No. 09-14035 (Feb. 4, 2010), the Court rejected a sufficiency of the evidence challenge to a conviction of aggravated identity theft in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1028A(a)(1). The defendant argued that there was insufficient evidence that she knew that Julie Ann Overton, the person whose identity Holmes fraudulently used, was an “actual person.”
The Court noted that the government presented evidence of the rigorous identification processes to which the personal information Holmes submitted about Overton was subjected. Holmes’ willingness to subject the personal information to such scrutiny established that Holmes knew, all along, that the information belonged to a real person. Further, Holmes would have known Overton’s actual existence from the repeated successful use of her personal information to obtain a passport, a driver’s licence, and identification cards.
