Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/22-10_ifjn.pdf
Page Number: 31.0

6 

DUBIN v. UNITED STATES 

 GORSUCH, J., concurring
GORSUCH, J., concurring in judgment 

about a 2-year mandatory federal prison sentence.  Crimi-
nal statutes are not games to be played in the car on a cross-
country road trip.  To satisfy the constitutional minimum of 
due  process,  they  must  at  least  provide  “ordinary  people” 
with “fair notice of the conduct [they] punis[h].”  Johnson v. 
United States, 576 U. S. 591, 595 (2015).  And, respectfully,
I do not see how §1028A(a)(1) can clear that threshold.  Un-
der the Court’s “crux” test, no boundary separates conduct
that gives rise to liability from conduct that does not.  And 
it  appears  I  share  this  concern  with  the  very  lower  court
judges who will have to apply this standard prospectively. 
As even many of the Fifth Circuit dissenters below warned, 
the  sort  of  “facilitation  standard”  the  Court  today  adopts, 
“with  its  incidental/integral  dividing  line,”  is  unworkable 
because it “lacks clear lines and a limiting principle.”  27 F. 
4th 1021, 1042 (2022) (en banc) (Costa, J., dissenting).  In 
the end, it is hard not to worry that the Court’s “crux” test 
will simply become a fig leaf for judges’ and jurors’ own sub-
jective moral judgments about whether (as the Court itself 
puts it) the defendant’s crime is “one that warrants a 2-year
mandatory minimum.”  Ante, at 17. 

I do not question that the Court today has done the best
it might to make sense of this statute.  It’s just that it faces 
an impossible task.  In the past when this Court has grap-
pled with similar statutory language, it has done so in con-
texts where the relevant terms could carry only a few pos-
sible  (and  comparatively  fixed)  meanings.    For  example, 
when it comes to the “us[e]” of a firearm “in relation” to a 
crime of violence, 18 U. S. C. §924(c)(1)(A), the presence of
a gun could be a but-for cause of (or a necessary ingredient
of ) the offense—used, for example, as compensation in an
exchange for illicit drugs.  Smith v. United States, 508 U. S. 
223,  237–238  (1993).  Or  the  gun  could  be  “ ‘used  as  a 
weapon’ ”  by  being  discharged  or  brandished.    Id.,  at  243 
(Scalia, J., dissenting).  Because both those interpretations 
are  relatively  bounded  and  understandable,  this  Court