  We report the discovery of a redshift 1.71 supernova in the GOODS North
field. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) ACS spectrum has almost negligible
contamination from the host or neighboring galaxies. Although the rest frame
sampled range is too blue to include any Si ii line, a principal component
analysis allows us to confirm it as a Type Ia supernova with 92% confidence. A
recent serendipitous archival HST WFC3 grism spectrum contributed a key element
of the confirmation by giving a host-galaxy redshift of 1.713 +/- 0.007. In
addition to being the most distant SN Ia with spectroscopic confirmation, this
is the most distant Ia with a precision color measurement. We present the ACS
WFC and NICMOS 2 photometry and ACS and WFC3 spectroscopy. Our derived
supernova distance is in agreement with the prediction of LambdaCDM.
