Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/14pdf/13-7120_p86b.pdf
Page Number: 9

Cite as:  576 U. S. ____ (2015) 

7 

Opinion of the Court 

Co.,  255  U. S.  81,  91  (1921).    Here,  this  Court’s  repeated
attempts  and  repeated  failures  to  craft  a  principled  and 
objective  standard  out  of  the  residual  clause  confirm  its
hopeless  indeterminacy.    Three  of  the  Court’s  previous
four decisions about the clause concentrated on the level of 
risk  posed  by  the  crime  in  question,  though  in  each  case
we found it necessary to resort to a different ad hoc test to 
guide our inquiry.  In James, we asked whether “the risk 
posed  by  attempted  burglary  is  comparable  to  that  posed 
by  its  closest  analog  among  the  enumerated  offenses,” 
namely completed burglary; we concluded that it was.  550 
U. S., at 203.  That rule takes care of attempted burglary,
but offers no help at all with respect to the vast majority of
offenses,  which  have  no  apparent  analog  among  the  enu­
merated crimes.  “Is, for example, driving under the influ­
ence  of  alcohol  more  analogous  to  burglary,  arson,  extor­
tion,  or  a  crime  involving  use  of  explosives?”  Id.,  at  215 
(SCALIA, J., dissenting). 

Chambers,  our  next  case  to  focus  on  risk,  relied  princi­
pally  on  a  statistical  report  prepared  by  the  Sentencing
Commission  to  conclude  that  an  offender  who  fails  to 
report  to  prison  is  not  “significantly  more  likely  than
others  to  attack,  or  physically  to  resist,  an  apprehender,
thereby  producing  a  ‘serious  potential  risk  of  physical
injury.’ ”    555  U. S.,  at  128–129.    So  much  for  failure  to 
report  to  prison,  but  what  about  the  tens  of  thousands  of 
federal  and  state  crimes  for  which  no  comparable  reports
exist?  And  even  those  studies  that  are  available  might 
suffer from methodological flaws, be skewed toward rarer 
forms  of  the  crime,  or  paint  widely  divergent  pictures  of
the  riskiness  of  the  conduct  that  the  crime  involves.    See 
Sykes,  564  U. S.,  at  ___–___  (SCALIA,  J.,  dissenting)  (slip
op.,  at  4–6);  id.,  at  ___,  n. 4  (KAGAN,  J.,  dissenting)  (slip 
op., at 6, n. 4).

Our  most  recent  case,  Sykes,  also  relied  on  statistics, 
though only to “confirm the commonsense conclusion that