Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/23-5572_l6hn.pdf
Page Number: 11.0

Cite as:  603 U. S. ____ (2024) 

7 

Opinion of the Court 

present  a  serious  risk  of  physical  injury,  such  an  offense
was  so  dissimilar  from  the  previously  enumerated  exam-
ples that it could not be classified as a “violent felony” under 
the statute.  Id., at 142–146.  The list of crimes that pre-
ceded the residual clause—burglary, arson, extortion, and 
the use of explosives—focused on “purposeful, violent, and
aggressive  conduct.”  Id.,  at  144–145  (internal  quotation 
marks omitted).  And if that focus did not extend to the re-
sidual  clause,  ACCA’s  15-year  mandatory  minimum  sen-
tence would apply to a host of offenses “not typically com-
mitted  by  those  whom  one  normally  labels  ‘armed  career
criminals’ ” and that were “far removed . . . from the delib-
erate kind of behavior associated with violent criminal use 
of firearms.”1  Id., at 146–147. 

The  “otherwise”  provision  of  Section  1512(c)(2)  is  simi-
larly  limited  by  the  preceding  list  of  criminal  violations. 
The offenses enumerated in subsection (c)(1) cover someone 
who “alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, docu-
ment, or other object . . . with the intent to impair the ob-
ject’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceed-
ing.”  Complex  as  subsection  (c)(1)  may  look,  it  simply 
consists of many specific examples of prohibited actions un-
dertaken with the intent to impair an object’s integrity or
availability for use in an official proceeding: altering a rec-
ord, altering a document, concealing a record, concealing a
document, and so on.  That list is followed immediately by 
a residual clause in (c)(2).  Guided by the basic logic that
Congress would not go to the trouble of spelling out the list 
in (c)(1) if a neighboring term swallowed it up, the most sen-

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1 The dissent explains that we subsequently held the ACCA residual
clause void for vagueness.  See post, at 8 (opinion of BARRETT, J.) (citing 
Johnson v. United States, 576 U. S. 591, 597 (2015)).  That our answer to 
the narrow question presented in Begay did not resolve a broader consti-
tutional defect in the statute says little about whether the reasoning of 
Begay is relevant here.