Court to Decide Military Medal Fraud Case

FEB. 26, 2012

By CHRISS STREET

Xavier Alvarez, after being elected in 2007 to the Three Valleys Municipal Water District in Pomona, California introduced himself at his first Board meeting as a wounded war veteran who had received the Congressional Medal of Honor, our nation’s highest honor.  But when it was discovered that Alvarez was never wounded in action, never awarded the Medal of Honor and actually never served in the military, under the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 he was prosecuted and convicted a federal misdemeanor for falsely claiming to have received a U.S. military medal.

Alvarez was sentenced to a $10,000 fine and a prison term for up to one year.  But thanks to the Ninth Circuit Court in Northern California, the most liberal in the country, he was freed to lie again when the court ruled the Stolen Valor Act infringed on Alvarez’s First Amendment freedom of speech.  This week the Supreme Court of the United States agreed to the prosecution’s appeal to take up the constitutionality of the Stolen Valor Act.

Lying about being a war hero is not a new concept.  George Santayana quipped,; “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”  But Alvarez is the devil’s poster child for telling whoppers about gallantry.  He brazenly admits that at various times he lied about playing hockey for the Detroit Red Wings, marrying a beautiful Mexican starlet and having an engineering degree.  He got in trouble with the law for claiming he was in the American embassy in Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s.  His fantasy exploits included being the hero who rescued the U.S. Ambassador during that crisis and being shot when going back to retrieve the embassy’s American flag.

Military Award Database

Unfortunately for Mr. Alvarez, thanks to the efforts of a real veteran named Doug Sterner and his wife, Pam, there is now a database of the nearly 100,000 military awards presented since the Civil War, including all 3,475 Medal of Honor recipients.  After the publishing of one of Pam’s college term papers expressing her husband’s frustrations over those who falsely claimed to be medal recipients was published, there was so much turmoil that Congress saw fit to make lying about valor a crime.

It became illegal not only to wear but also to buy, sell, barter, trade or manufacture “any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the armed forces of the United States, or any of the service medals or badges awarded to the members of such forces.”  The law imposes up to six months in prison for lying about any military medal, but allows a maximum penalty of $10,000 and one year in prison for offenses involving the Medal of Honor or one of the military’s three other top decorations: the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross or the Air Force Cross.

False Statements

In a prior 2010 appeal of a violation of the Stolen Valor Act by Colorado resident Rick Glen Strandlof, who falsely claimed he was an Annapolis graduate, Marine captain, survivor of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon, winner of a Purple Heart and the Silver Star during his three-tours of duty in the Iraq War, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver refused to overturn Strandlof’s conviction by stating that “false statements of fact do not enjoy constitutional protection” unless to protect more valuable speech.  The case was considered especially egregious, because Strandlof had used his false military heroism in 2008 in support of election efforts by a series of liberal candidates sympathetic to his anti-war views.

Many U.S. Supreme Court watchers questioned the timing of the Ninth Circuit accepting the prosection’s  appeal of the Stolen Valor Act on Feb. 22. That was the 280th anniversary of George Washington’s birth.  When Washington first established American military decorations in 1782, he also laid down strict punishment for any soldiers who claimed to be medal recipients, but were not.

The Ninth Circuit based its ruling that freed Alvarez on the controversial Supreme Court ruling in Texas vs. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989), which invalidated 48 state prohibitions against desecrating the American flag. Justice William Brennan wrote for a five-to-four justice majority that held defendant Gregory Lee Johnson‘s act of flag burning was protected speech under the First Amendment to the Constitution.  Most Supreme Court scholars believe the liberal ideological majority of the Supreme Court has been reversed since the 1980s.  It will be interesting to see if that change includes respect for honesty and integrity.

The Supreme Court’s acceptance of the appeal can be found at United States v. Xavier Alvarez, 11-210.

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