Sentencing Guideline – Penalties

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United States Supreme Court

Case Name: United States v. Maurice Lamont Davis, et al.

Case No.: 18-431

Focus: Sentencing Guideline – Penalties

In our constitutional order, a vague law is no law at all. Only the people’s elected representatives in Congress have the power to write new federal criminal laws. And when Congress exercises that power, it has to write statutes that give ordinary people fair warning about what the law demands of them. Vague laws transgress both of those constitutional requirements. They hand off the legislature’s responsibility for defining criminal behavior to unelected prosecutors and judges, and they leave people with no sure way to know what consequences will attach to their conduct. When Congress passes a vague law, the role of courts under our Constitution is not to fashion a new, clearer law to take its place, but to treat the law as a nullity and invite Congress to try again.

Today we apply these principles to 18 U. S. C. §924(c). That statute threatens long prison sentences for anyone who uses a firearm in connection with certain other federal crimes. But which other federal crimes? The statute’s residual clause points to those felonies “that by [their] nature, involv[e] a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.” §924(c)(3)(B). Even the government admits that this language, read in the way nearly everyone (including the government) has long understood it, provides no reliable way to determine which offenses qualify as crimes of violence and thus is unconstitutionally vague. So today the government attempts a new and alternative reading designed to save the residual clause. But this reading, it turns out, cannot be squared with the statute’s text, context, and history. Were we to adopt it, we would be effectively stepping outside our role as judges and writing a new law rather than applying the one Congress adopted.

Affirmed in part. Vacated and remanded in part.

Dissenting: KAVANAUGH, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which THOMAS and ALITO, JJ., joined, and in which ROBERTS, C. J., joined as to all but Part II–C.

Concurring:

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Derek A Hawkins is trademark corporate counsel for Harley-Davidson. Hawkins oversees the prosecution and maintenance of the Harley-Davidson’s international trademark portfolio in emerging markets.