Ethics

Obscurely Important Supreme Court Decision

By Ed Brayton

This case will probably never be a staple of the law texts, but it's substantively important and, I believe, correctly decided.

The case is Chambers v. United States. From the syllabus of the opinion.

The Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) imposes a 15-year mandatory prison term on a felon unlawfully in possession of a firearm who has three prior convictions for committing certain drug crimes or "a violent felony," 18 U. S. C. §924(e)(1), defined as a crime punishable by more than one year's imprisonment that, inter alia, "involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another," §924(e)(2)(B)(ii). At petitioner Chambers' sentencing for being a felon in possession of a firearm, the Government sought ACCA's 15-year mandatory prison term. Chambers disputed one of his prior convictions--failing to report for weekend confinement--as falling outside the ACCA definition of "violent felony." The District Court treated the failure to report as a form of what the relevant state statute calls "escape from [a] penal institution," and held that it qualified as a "violent felony" under ACCA. The Seventh Circuit agreed.

Held: Illinois' crime of failure to report for penal confinement falls outside the scope of ACCA's "violent felony" definition. ...

Failure to report is a separate crime from escape. Its underlying behavior differs from the more aggressive behavior underlying escape, and it is listed separately in the statute's title and body and is of a different felony class than escape.

Hear, hear! This case is, at its foundation, about over-reaching executive power that is wholly disinterested in due process and civil liberties. Even the conservatives on this Court were not convinced by the conflation of what is essentially a crime of "inaction" (as Breyer puts it in the opinion) and a crime of action, and plausibly violent action. The decision was 9-0 (with 7 joining the opinion and Alito and Scalia concurring); a pretty clear sign that the federal authorities should have known better from the start.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on January 13, 2009 (boomark / email).