Tall Tales of Valor Lead to Federal Prosecution

[WSJ Law Blog]

We blogged about the Stolen Valor Act last year, but since then we’d pretty much managed to push it off our radar screen. That is, until this morning, when we read Adam Liptak’s sidebar column. A refresher: Introduced in 2005 by Colorado Congressman John Salazar, the Act is intended to penalize distributors of phony medals and those who fraudulently claim to be decorated veterans. (Prior to the Stolen Valor Act, law only allowed prosecution of imposters who wore unearned Medal of Honor on their person.)

Apparently, Xavier Alvarez hadn’t paid close enough attention to our blog post when he stood up last summer at a meeting of a California water board to say a few words about himself. “I’m a retired marine of 25 years. I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got wounded many times by the same guy. I’m still around.”

As Liptak reports, only the last three words were true. Now Alvarez is going to trial next month in federal court in Los Angeles for violating the Stolen Valor Act.

“You don’t want to stifle speech about opinions and ideas,” saud Craig Missakian, the prosecutor in the case. “But Congress, and rightfully so, recognized the great sacrifice that people awarded the Medal of Honor made on behalf of their country. To the extent we have phony Medal of Honor winners running around like Alvarez, it dilutes the value of their sacrifice.”

Others liken the law to a ban on flag-burning, which the Supreme Court held unconstitutional in Texas v. Johnson. “If the government cannot under the First Amendment compel reverence when it comes to our nation’s highest symbol,” asked Ronald K. L. Collins, a scholar at the First Amendment Center in Washington, “why then can it compel reverence when it comes to lesser forms of symbolic expression?”