The Supreme Court is back in action today after its February hibernation, and it kicked off a new round of activity with this long order list. Though I suspect some extended dissents from the denial of cert on non-criminal issues will garner the most attention, sentencing fans will be intrigued (or perhaps annoyed) that the Justices have taken up yet another case dealing with the intricacies of the Armed Career Criminal Act. The case is Wooden v. United States, No. 20-5279, and cert was granted on this question from the initial pro se cert petition:
Did the Sixth Circuit err by expanding the scope of 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(1) in the absence of clear statutory defintiion with regard to the vague term "committed on occasions different from one another"?
The defendant's reply brief in support of the cert petition spotlights the facts and the extreme sentencing consequences at issue in Wooden:
Petitioner William Dale Wooden broke into a ministorage facility in Georgia one night in 1997. He entered ten units during the course of the crime and later pleaded guilty to ten counts of burglary. Were these burglaries committed “on occasions different from one another”? Fifteen years in federal prison depends on the answer. If not, Wooden’s sentence for possessing a firearm as a felon would have been only 21 to 26 months; he would have been “home by Christmas 2016.” D.Ct. Dkt. 84, 1-2.
But the Sixth Circuit answered yes, affirming a harsh mandatory-minimum sentence. So Wooden will remain incarcerated until 2028. That wrongheaded decision exacerbated an acknowledged circuit split on an important and recurring question.
Most federal sentening fans know how intricate and consequential interpretations of ACCA can be for certain persons who illegally possess a firearm. But I still find the facts in a (largely unremarkable) case like Wooden remarkable.
As I read the government's filing, the defendant here at the time of sentencing had, besides the nearly 20-year-old ministorage burglaries, one other burglary conviction that was 10 years old and an assault conviction that was more than a quarter-century old. Rather that having Wooden's illegal firearm possession sentence now turn on judicial consideration of the seriousness of his current offense conduct and his true criminal history, ACCA served to make 15 mandatory(!) years of federal prison time turn entirely on legal technicalities rather than thoughtful consideration of what justice and crime control demands. Sigh.
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