First Supreme Court Appearance Nets Win on Career Criminal Issue
A lawyer who made her first U.S. Supreme Court appearance on behalf of a man sentenced as an armed career criminal ended up with a win and a new view of oral arguments.
Assistant Federal Defender Lisa Call told the Jacksonville News that interacting with Supreme Court justices was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. “It was a lot more fun than I anticipated,” she told the newspaper.
The 7-2 opinion (PDF), issued earlier this month, held that a 2002 Florida battery conviction could not be used as an underlying crime to charge Curtis Darnell Johnson under a federal law, the Armed Career Criminal Act. The federal statute imposes a mandatory 15-year sentence for anyone convicted of a gun crime who also has three prior violent felonies.
Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said Johnson’s earlier conviction under Florida’s simple battery statute couldn’t be considered a violent felony because physical force wasn’t necessarily an element of the crime. Intentionally touching another person against his or her will was enough to support a conviction.
Ohio State University law professor Douglas Berman told the newspaper that the opinion is the latest in a series of rulings in which the Supreme Court scaled back the types of crimes that can be used under the career criminal law.
“What’s really a mess is the way Congress wrote this statute,” Berman told the newspaper. “The Supreme Court has come to the conclusion that this is meant for people who have a more serious criminal history.”
Prior coverage:
Financial News & Daily Record: “Headed to the land’s highest court”
