Lying to a peace officer; MCL 750.479c(1)(b); People v Williams; The “material fact” requirement; Materiality; United States v Gaudin; Kungys v United States

Noting that it had not previously examined the meaning of “material fact” for purposes of MCL 750.479c(1)(b), the court held that a “material fact must have ‘a natural tendency to influence, or [be] capable of influencing, the decision of the decisionmaking body to which it was addressed.’” It found there was no evidence supporting that defendant-Klages’s false statement about 1997 conversations was material to a 2018 criminal investigation. Thus, it vacated her lying to a peace officer convictions and remanded for dismissal of the charges. She was charged with making a false statement to an officer investigating MSU’s “knowledge of the sexual abuse perpetrated by Dr. Larry Nassar. Klages made the allegedly false statement in 2018, after Nassar had been convicted, sentenced, and imprisoned. The statement concerned” her memory of conversations with two gymnasts in 1997. Proof that her “statements constituted a felony under MCL 750.479c(1)(b) required” a showing that her denial of taking part in “the conversation constituted a material fact in the peace officer’s criminal investigation.” As there is only one published case construing the statute, Williams, and it did not examine the meaning of “material fact,” the court turned to federal case law on materiality and adopted the reasoning of cases such as Gaudin and Kungys. It held that the prosecution did not show “that Klages’s failure to recall or to admit to the 1997 conversations was a fact material to the investigator’s determination whether someone at MSU other than” Nassar committed CSC or misconduct in office. It emphasized MCL 750.479c(1)(b)’s material fact requirement “requires proof of something more than an investigator’s unsupported and speculative opinion that he may have asked different questions, particularly absent evidence that the ‘material fact’ had any reasonable possibility of influencing the decision that matters—a charging decision. As in Kungys, when presented with the question of whether a false statement constitutes a material fact, materiality is not determined by an investigator’s belief that more investigation would have been helpful.” In the examples in Williams, “misleading statements prevent the police from solving a crime and qualify as material because they deprive the decision makers of the information necessary to make an accurate and informed charging decision. Here, the prosecution never presented evidence of any underlying crime or even suggested that someone ‘got away.’”