Justices Side With Defense in Gun-Sentencing Law Dispute (2) - Bloomberg Law
The Supreme Court curbed mandatory-minimum sentences in federal gun cases, siding with the defense in a dispute over what it means to commit crimes on different “occasions.”
Successive burglaries in a single criminal episode count as just one prior conviction under a three-strikes sentencing law, the high court said in Monday’s ruling authored by Justice Elena Kagan.
The decision could affect thousands of people subject to the Armed Career Criminal Act, which imposes 15-year minimums in federal gun cases if the defendant has three prior violent or serious drug convictions.
There’s been much litigation over the years about which prior offenses can trigger the act. That was the issue in this latest case, involving the act’s different-occasions clause, which captures crimes “committed on occasions different from one another.”
The question, which divided the federal appeals courts, was what that means exactly.
The justices agreed to answer the question in the case of William Wooden. He pleaded guilty to 10 counts of burglary for entering 10 units of a Georgia mini-storage facility on the same night in 1997. Years later, he faced the act’s 15-year minimum for a federal gun conviction in Tennessee. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said his entering 10 units counts as 10 burglaries, thus triggering the act.
Some circuits agreed with the Sixth’s approach, looking at whether crimes are completed at different moments in time, while others took what Kagan’s opinion called a more holistic approach, looking at the broader circumstances.
The high court sided with Wooden on Monday, reversing the Sixth Circuit and rejecting the government’s approach, which Kagan called “a legally fancified version of the Sixth Circuit’s timing test.” The government argued that an occasion happens at a particular moment in time, when an offense’s elements are established.
“Convictions arising from a single criminal episode, in the way Wooden’s did, can count only once under ACCA,” Kagan wrote.
“The ordinary meaning of the word ‘occasion'—essentially an episode or event—refutes the Government’s single-minded focus on whether a crime’s elements were established at a discrete moment in time,” she wrote. The ruling sparked several separate opinions but all of the justices agreed on the bottom line.
Devi Rao of the MacArthur Justice Center, which filed an amicus brief supporting Wooden, said it’s “always nice to see the Court unanimous in rejecting the Government’s aggressively punitive interpretation of a criminal statute.”
The Justice Department declined to comment on the ruling.
Arnold & Porter partner Allon Kedem, who argued for Wooden, said “we’re delighted that the Supreme Court has agreed that Mr. Wooden is not an Armed Career Criminal.” Kedem said his client “should be re-sentenced, we hope quickly, and returned to his family.”
According to the Bureau of Prisons, Wooden, currently serving a sentence of about 16 years, is held in a low-security facility in Arkansas, with a current release date in 2028. Without the ACCA enhancement, Wooden’s maximum was 10 years, and the probation office recommended a much lower term than that, without the enhancement: 21-27 months.
Wooden appealed to the justices with a pro se petition, which was granted after lawyers from Arnold & Porter stepped in to represent him and filed a reply brief, convincing the court to hear the case over DOJ’s objection.
Lenity Debate
Kagan’s opinion was joined in full by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Brett Kavanaugh. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett joined except for a section that looked to statutory history and the purpose behind the occasions clause.
Among the several concurring opinions were ones from Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch that delved into the subject of lenity, the rule that instructs judges to resolve ambiguities in favor of defendants.
Joined partly by Sotomayor, Gorsuch wrote that lenity could have resolved Wooden’s case and should be given a more prominent role generally.
“From the start,” Gorsuch wrote, “lenity has played an important role in realizing a distinctly American version of the rule of law—one that seeks to ensure people are never punished for violating just-so rules concocted after the fact, or rules with no more claim to democratic provenance than a judge’s surmise about legislative intentions.”
Kavanaugh said he agreed with the importance of fair notice, but he said that concern is better addressed by “mens rea,” the Latin term used to refer to a guilty mind and the requirement that the government prove it.
As shown by the back-and-forth between the justices, the lenity issue could keep surfacing at the court.
“This rather robust discussion in the concurrences signals a conversation that’s going to be continuing,” said Mary Price, general counsel of FAMM, which filed an amicus brief supporting Wooden that focused on lenity.
Price said it “shouldn’t escape notice” that Gorsuch and Sotomayor, two justices on opposite ends of the spectrum in other cases, joined forces on the issue.
Rao likewise flagged the lenity discussion, saying of Gorsuch’s opinion that she’s “interested to see if the seeds he’s planting here bear fruit in how this statute—or others—are interpreted in the lower courts.”
The case is Wooden v. United States, U.S., No. 20-5279.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jordan S. Rubin in Washington at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tom P. Taylor at [email protected]; Seth Stern at [email protected]; John Crawley at [email protected]
source: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/justices-side-with-defense-on-armed-career-criminal-law
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