Statutory Interpretation

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Michael Hill v. United States of America

Case No.: 16-3239

Officials: BAUER, EASTERBROOK, and SYKES, Circuit Judges.

Focus:  Statutory Interpretation

Following his convictions for drug and firearms crimes, Michael Hill was sentenced to 276 months’ imprisonment as an armed career criminal. See 18 U.S.C. §924(e), the Armed Career Criminal Act or ACCA. He contends in this successive collateral attack (which we authorized under 28 U.S.C. §§ 2244(b), 2255(h)) that one of his earlier convictions does not qualify as a “violent felony” and that the recidivist enhancement therefore is improper. The United States could have invoked a number of procedural defenses, see Stanley v. United States, 827 F.3d 562 (7th Cir. 2016), but has not developed any of them. As the defenses are not jurisdictional we proceed to the merits. Wood v. Milyard, 566 U.S. 463 (2012); Douglas v. United States, 858 F.3d 1069 (7th Cir. 2017).

Given the statutory specification that an element of attempted force operates the same as an element of completed force, and the rule that conviction of attempt requires proof of intent to commit all elements of the completed crime, we now adopt Judge Hamilton’s analysis as the law of the circuit. When a substantive offense would be a violent felony under §924(e) and similar statutes, an attempt to commit that offense also is a violent felony. Hill insists, however, that even the completed crime of murder in Illinois, under 720 ILCS 5/9-1(a)(1), is not a violent felony under the federal elements clause.

As for the felony-murder doctrine, which Hill says takes the crime of murder outside §924(e): The proper treatment of felony murder is the same as that of attempted murder. As long as the completed crime of murder has as an element the actual or attempted use of violence against the person of another, a state rule making a person accountable for the substantive crime must be treated as equivalent to the substantive crime itself. Both murder and attempted murder in Illinois are categorically violent felonies under §924(e).

Affirmed

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