SCOTUS Rules That Current Penalties Do Not Govern Whether Prior Conviction Is ACCA Predicate
I continue to be mystified by the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on the Armed Career Criminal Act. The Court has been remarkably active in taking ACCA cases in recent years, but I’m hard-pressed to see much coherence in the outcomes. On the one hand, there is the Begay line of cases, which have substantially narrowed the definition of “violent felonies” that can be used as a predicate for the ACCA fifteen-year mandatory minimum. (For background, see my post here.) Yet, there are plenty of other ACCA cases – many involving short, unanimous decisions, as if the underlying legal issues were entirely unproblematic – that adopt unnecessarily expansive interpretations of the ACCA triggering language.
Count the Court’s decision today in McNeill v. United States (No. 10-5258) in the latter category.
Here’s the background on McNeill from an earlier post: