{"id":12271,"date":"2010-11-27T17:57:07","date_gmt":"2010-11-27T22:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=12271"},"modified":"2010-11-27T17:59:01","modified_gmt":"2010-11-27T22:59:01","slug":"cleaning-up-the-acca-mess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2010\/11\/cleaning-up-the-acca-mess\/","title":{"rendered":"Cleaning Up the ACCA Mess"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>David Holman has a\u00a0helpful new article<\/a> exploring the mess that has become the Armed Career Criminal Act jurisprudence in the wake of\u00a0Begay v. United States.<\/em> (I\u2019ve blogged about this unfolding jurisprudence several times, e.g.,\u00a0here<\/a> and\u00a0here<\/a>.) \u00a0The ACCA, of course, imposes a fifteen-year mandatory minimum for felons in possession of a firearm who have three or more prior convictions for a \u201cviolent felony\u201d or a serious drug offense. <\/em>It is the definition of \u201cviolent felony\u201d that has occasioned so much litigation and so many unsatisfying judicial decisions over the past couple of years. \u00a0I\u2019m glad to see David\u2019s article because I think legal scholars have not been paying nearly enough attention to recent developments in this important area of federal criminal law.<\/p>\n

I think David is correct to trace the jurisprudential difficulties to the tension between two lines of Supreme Court decisions. \u00a0<\/p>\n

The first line, exemplified by\u00a0Taylor v. United States<\/em>, 495 U.S. 575 (1990), requires the \u201ccategorical\u201d approach to determining whether a prior conviction qualifies: based on its elements, an offense is or is not an ACCA predicate without regard to the specifics of how a defendant perpetrated the offense. \u00a0The second line, exemplified by\u00a0Chambers v. United States<\/em>, 129 S. Ct. 687 (2009), indicates that courts should determine whether a prior felony was violent based on whether that type of felony ordinarily involves violence. \u00a0This inquiry contemplates that judges will go beyond the bare elements of the offense and draw on statistics, personal experience, or common-sense intuitions. \u00a0Adding to the difficulty is\u00a0Begay<\/em>, which adopted a vague\u00a0mens rea <\/em>requirement that was not very well anchored in the statutory language.<\/p>\n

Here are David\u2019s thoughtful recommendations for lower courts struggling with these difficulties, particularly as they relate to the ACCA\u2019s \u201cresidual clause,\u201d which extends the definition of \u201cviolent felony\u201d to any crime that \u201cotherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another\u201d:<\/p>\n

First, courts should narrowly construe\u00a0Begay<\/em>\u2019s mens rea holding and read it as excluding only strict liability crimes from the residual clause while including crimes of negligence and recklessness. Second, courts should readBegay<\/em>\u2019s \u201caggressive\u201d requirement as a rhetorical flourish without any meaningful distinction from \u201cviolent.\u201d Third, despite\u00a0Begay<\/em>\u2019s apparent invitation to do otherwise, courts should strictly follow the categorical approach and apply the residual clause to only those crimes with elements that require the underlying conduct be violent while excluding those crimes with elements that do not require violence or any mens rea.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

David\u2019s proposal is framed as advice to lower courts that are stuck with the Supreme Court precedent. \u00a0But I wonder how the Supreme Court itself might best clean up the mess it is has created.<\/p>\n

I think a good first step would be for the Court to abandon the categorical approach, which seems inevitably to lead to many arbitrary distinctions based on the fine-grained parsing of criminal statutes that were not written with the ACCA in mind and that do not readily lend themselves to categorization under the\u00a0Begay <\/em>test. \u00a0Courts ought to be able to look through the formal crime of conviction to determine what defendants\u2019 actually did \u2014 this is the only sensible way to accomplish what Congress intended through the ACCA, that is, the incapacitation of armed felons who have demonstrated their dangerousness through a prior course of violent crime.<\/p>\n

The Court has resisted an actual-conduct test because of Sixth Amendment concerns \u2014 a sentencing judge should not be making findings of fact about a defendant\u2019s prior conduct when those findings increase a defendant\u2019s sentencing exposure. \u00a0There would indeed be a conflict between an actual-conduct test and the Sixth-Amendment purism of cases like\u00a0Apprendi v. New Jersey<\/em>. \u00a0On the other hand, the Court\u2019s most recent pronouncement in this area,\u00a0Oregon v. Ice<\/em>, indicates that the Court may be shifting to a more flexible, pragmatic approach. \u00a0In any event, there is a simple solution to the Sixth Amendment dilemma: give defendants the right to a jury trial on their alleged ACCA predicates under the residual clause. \u00a0There would be some additional transaction costs associated with this, but probably not much \u2014 the ACCA issues would surely be resolved by plea agreement in the vast majority of cases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Holman has a\u00a0helpful new article exploring the mess that has become the Armed Career Criminal Act jurisprudence in the wake of\u00a0Begay v. United States. (I\u2019ve blogged about this unfolding jurisprudence several times, e.g.,\u00a0here and\u00a0here.) \u00a0The ACCA, of course, imposes a fifteen-year mandatory minimum for felons in possession of a firearm who have three or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,28,74,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criminal-justice","category-criminal-law-process","category-federal-sentencing","category-us-supreme-court","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}