Court Backs Away From Begay

Is the Begay revolution over?  In its 2008 decision in Begay v. United States, the Supreme Court adopted a narrow construction of the Armed Career Criminal Act’s “residual clause,” limiting the ACCA’s reach to convictions for “purposeful, violent, and aggressive” crimes.  (For background, see this post.)  The following year, in Chambers v. United States, the Court again pared back the residual clause, emphasizing the need to demonstrate the objective dangerousness of an offense for it to count as a trigger for the ACCA’s fifteen-year mandatory minimum sentence.

What many observers took from Begay and Chambers is that a prior conviction does not count under the ACCA unless it satisfies both a subjective test (purposeful, violent, and aggressive) and an objective test (statistically demonstrated likelihood of injury).

But, today, in Sykes v. United States (No. 09-11311), the Court threw this understanding into doubt, suggesting a considerably more expansive interpretation of the residual clause.

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SCOTUS to Rule on Right to Counsel in Collateral Proceedings

Although the Supreme Court has long recognized that defendants have a right to counsel at the first level of direct appeal, the Court has thus far declined to extend this right to collateral post-conviction proceedings, such as habeas corpus.  Earlier this week, however, the Court agreed to hear a case that will test how firm the distinction really is.  Martinez v. Ryan (No. 10-1001) involves a state-court defendant’s attempt to litigate a claim in collateral proceedings that he was prohibited from raising on direct appeal.  If he has no right to counsel in his collateral proceeding, then he has no right to counsel at all as to this issue.

Here’s what happened.

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The Constitutionality of the Open Meetings Law

During oral argument this past Monday in Ozanne v. Fitzgerald, the Wisconsin Supreme Court was asked to rule that the Open Meetings Law violates the Wisconsin Constitution to the extent that the law grants authority to the Wisconsin circuit courts to void legislative enactments passed in violation of its provisions.

This is not a novel argument.  Over the years, opponents of state “sunshine laws” have filed legal challenges to public records and open meetings laws around the country.  Sometimes, these challenges have been based on First Amendment claims.  At other times, they have attempted to argue that the judicial enforcement of sunshine laws violates the doctrine of separation of powers.

In 1992, the Supreme Court of Florida considered and rejected this exact argument. 

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