New Challenges to Federal Firearms Laws After Supreme Court Decision In Wooden v. United States

Under the Armed Career Criminal Act, 18 USC Sec. 924(e), someone convicted of the federal crime of possessing a firearm after attaining the status of a prohibited person (typically having been previously convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year or a federal felony) under 18 USC 922(g), faces a 15 year mandatory minimum prison sentence (and up to life in prison) if they have 3 prior violent felony or serious drug offense convictions. These 3 prior convictions have to have been “committed on occasions different from one another…” In Wooden v. United States, the Supreme Court clarified that determining a single criminal episode from two or more episodes or occasions is “multi-factored in nature” involving a broad factual inquiry.

In the past, judges made the different occasions determination at sentencing along with the other aspects of whether someone falls under ACCA’s 15 year mandatory minimum sentence. But fact-finding that necessarily increases punishment under the 6th Amendment’s Right to a Jury Trial Clause has long been held to require that those kinds of factual allegations be charged in the indictment, admitted to as part of any plea, or otherwise proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.

Also, Justice Gorsuch in Wooden noted that, while not an issue raised in that case, the 6th Amendment jury trial right is implicated by ACCA’s language, which is enabling a new challenge to ACCA’s severe sentencing scheme post-Wooden. In fact, at least several pending appeals in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (and likely in other federal courts) are seeking to get ACCA sentences thrown out because the Department of Justice previously never alleged the different occasions language in the federal indictments for federal charges of being a felon or prohibited person in possession of a firearm and were not proving up different occasions to juries or asking people charged to admit those facts as part of a plea.

Our firm is working on this challenge right now in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to bring a similar challenge to those already pending and brought by some of the most talented federal appeal lawyers in North Carolina.