Recently, the Supreme Court has been taking a lot of interest in the Armed Career Criminal Act, which requires that a minimum fifteen-year prison term be imposed on certain defendants with three or more prior convictions for serious drug offenses or crimes of violence.  As I discussed here, the ACCA has proven to be an interpretive nightmare, with courts struggling for more than two decades now to decide exactly which prior convictions count as triggers for the mandatory minimum.  With several recent opinions and cert grants, the Supreme Court now seems intent on addressing some of the many circuit splits in the ACCA case law.

Of particular note last year was the Court’s decision in Begay v. United States, in which the Court held that DUI is not a “crime of violence.”  Now, following in Begay’s footsteps, the Court held today in Chambers v. United States (No. 06-11206) that failure to report to prison is not a crime of violence. 

Chambers does not purport to revise the analytical framework used in Begay, but I am struck by how much closer the Chambers opinion seems to be to Justice Scalia’s concurrence in Begay than to the majority opinion in the earlier case.  Has Scalia convinced a few of his colleagues to switch sides?