08-1301 Carr v. U.S.

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SORNA
Ex post facto clause

Section 2250 of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act does not apply to sex offenders whose interstate travel occurred before SORNA's effective date.

The Court rejects the Government's view that §2250(a) requires a sex-offense conviction, subsequent interstate travel, and then a failure to register, and that only the last of these events must occur after SORNA took effect. The Court instead accepts Carr's interpretation that the statute does not impose liability unless a person, after becoming subject to SORNA's registration requirements, travels across state lines and then fails to register. That interpretation better accords with §2250(a)'s text, the first element of which can only be satisfied when a person "is required to register under SORNA." §2250(a)(1). That §2250 sets forth the travel requirement in the present tense ("travels") rather than in the past or present perfect ("traveled" or "has traveled") reinforces this conclusion. See, e.g., United States v. Wilson, 503 U. S. 329, 333. And because the Dictionary Act's provision that statutory "words used in the present tense include the future as well as the present," 1 U. S. C. §1, implies that the present tense generally does not include the past, regulating a person who "travels" is not readily understood to encompass a person whose only travel occurred before the statute took effect. Indeed, there appears to be no instance in which this Court has construed a present-tense verb in a criminal law to reach preenactment conduct. The statutory context also supports a forward-looking construction of "travels." First, the word "travels" is followed in §2250(a)(2)(B) by a series of other present tense verbs-"enters or leaves, or resides." A statute's "undeviating use of the present tense" is a "striking indic[ator]" of its "prospective orientation." Gwaltney of Smithfield, Ltd. v. Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Inc., 484 U. S. 49, 59. Second, the other elements of a §2250 violation are similarly set forth in the present tense: Sections 2250(a)(1) and (a)(3) refer, respectively, to any person who "is required to register under [SORNA]" and who "knowingly fails to register or update a registration." (Emphasis added.) Had Congress intended preenactment conduct to satisfy§2250's first two requirements but not the third, it presumably would have varied the verb tenses, as it has in numerous other federal statutes.

551 F. 3d 578, reversed and remanded.

Local effect: The opinion reversed was issued by the Seventh Circuit.

08-1301 Carr v. U.S.

Sotomayor, J.; Scalia, J., concurring; Alito, J., dissenting.

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