The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday overturned convictions on two counts in the case against former Chicago Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson and remanded the case back to the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
Thompson — nephew and grandson of Chicago’s two longest-serving mayors — was sentenced to four months in prison in 2022 after he was convicted of those counts for allegedly lying to bank regulators regarding loans he took out with a now-closed bank in Bridgeport. Other counts involving tax evasion remain unaffected.
Thompson already has served a prison sentence and been released.
The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld the conviction on the counts of lying to regulators, and Thompson’s attorneys and federal prosecutors in Chicago presented their arguments to the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year.
In a unanimous decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court on Friday ordered Thompson’s case remanded back to the Seventh Circuit.
The high court’s ruling largely hinged on the definitions of “false” and “misleading.”
“False and misleading are two different things,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “A misleading statement can be true, and a true statement is not false. Given that, it is significant that the statute uses only the word ‘false,’ which means ‘not true.’ Adding ‘any’ before ‘false statement’ does not transform the scope of the statute. A statute that applies to ‘any false statement’ does not cover all misleading statements, only the ‘false’ ones.”
Thompson’s lead defense attorney, Chris Gair, said in a statement to the Tribune: “We are very gratified that the Supreme Court adopted our arguments and our reading of the statute.”
Thompson, who represented the 11th Ward since 2015, was forced to resign his seat on the City Council immediately after the conviction on felony charges. Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot appointed Nicole Lee to fill the post, and she’s since been re-elected.
The charges against Thompson were an offshoot of a larger investigation into the collapse of Washington Federal Bank for Savings, which uncovered a massive embezzlement scheme leading to charges against more than a dozen former bank officers, employees and customers.
At Thompson’s trial, Gair sought to pin the blame on the bank and its former president, John Gembara, saying Thompson had nothing to do with generating the erroneous tax forms that wound up on his returns. Gembara was found hanged in the home of a customer days before the bank was shuttered, and his death was ruled a suicide.
The defense team has also portrayed Thompson as an honest but “frazzled” man, constantly torn between his duties as alderman, commercial real estate lawyer and father, and admittedly lacking when it came to focusing on the minutiae of his taxes.
Chicago Tribune’s Jason Meisner contributed.
