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Page Number: 45.0

8 

JOHNSON v. UNITED STATES 

ALITO, J., dissenting 

setting out some of these laws.  See App. to Supp. Brief for 
United  States;  see  also  James,  supra,  at  210,  n. 6.    If  all 
these  laws  are  unconstitutionally  vague,  today’s  decision 
is  not  a  blast  from  a  sawed-off  shotgun;  it  is  a  nuclear 
explosion.

Attempting to avoid such devastation, the Court distin­
guishes these laws primarily on the ground that almost all 
of them “require gauging the riskiness of conduct in which 
an individual defendant engages on a particular occasion.” 
Ante, at 12 (emphasis in original).  The Court thus admits 
that, “[a]s a general matter, we do not doubt the constitu­
tionality  of  laws  that  call  for  the  application  of  a  qualita­
tive  standard  such  as  ‘substantial  risk’  to  real-world  con­
duct.” 
“requires  application  of  the  ‘serious  potential  risk’  stand­
ard to an idealized ordinary case of the crime.”  Ibid. (em­
phasis  added).  Thus,  according  to  the  Court,  ACCA’s 
residual  clause  is  unconstitutionally  vague  because  its
standard must be applied to “an idealized ordinary case of 
the  crime”  and  not,  like  the  vast  majority  of  the  laws  in
the Solicitor General’s appendix, to “real-world conduct.”

Ibid.    Its  complaint  is  that  the  residual  clause 

ACCA,  however,  makes  no  reference  to  “an  idealized 
ordinary  case  of  the  crime.”    That  requirement  was  the
handiwork  of  this  Court  in  Taylor  v.  United  States,  495 
U. S.  575  (1990).  And  as  I  will  show,  the  residual  clause 
can  reasonably  be  interpreted  to  refer  to  “real-world 
conduct.”1 
—————— 

1 The Court also says that the residual clause’s reference to the enu­
merated  offenses  is  “confusing.”    Ante,  at  12.    But  this  is  another  
argument we rejected in James v. United States, 550 U. S. 192 (2007), 
and  Sykes  v.  United  States,  564  U. S.  1  (2011),  and  it  is  no  more  per­
suasive  now.    Although  the  risk  level  varies  among  the  enumerated 
offenses, all four categories of offenses involve conduct that presents a 
serious potential risk of harm to others.  If the Court’s concern is that 
some of the enumerated offenses do not seem especially risky, all that 
means is that the statute “sets a low baseline level for risk.”  Id., at ___ 
(THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment) (slip op., at 2).