Opinion ID: 2654647
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Assault and Battery with a Dangerous Weapon

Text: The next offense to which the government points is the Massachusetts crime of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (ABDW), Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 265, § 15A(b). The name of this offense marks it as a strong candidate for classification as a -15- crime of violence. Indeed, convictions for ABDW often arise from the intentional use of dangerous force against another, causing serious injury. E.g., Commonwealth v. Vick, 454 Mass. 418 (2009) (shooting with intent to murder and causing serious bodily injury). The government, with good reason, nevertheless declines to argue that ABDW qualifies under section 16(a). As we have noted, section 16(a) requires that a predicate offense have as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force. The Supreme Court recently held, in the context of ACCA's force clause, 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(2)(B)(i), that the phrase 'physical force' means violent force, see Johnson v. United States, 559 U.S. 133, 140 (2010), and we see no reason to think the same would not apply to the same phrase in section 16(a). And since ABDW may be accomplished by a mere touching, however slight, see United States v. Hart, 674 F.3d 33, 42 (1st Cir. -16- 2012), it does not have as an element the use of physical force.3 As a result, it is overbroad. The government therefore focuses its argument on section 16(b), which contains no requirement that violent force be employed. Section 16(b) does, however, require a substantial risk that physical force may be used in the course of committing an offense. In theory, it might be possible to construe the reference to the use[] of force so broadly as to encompass offenses involving strict liability, negligence, or recklessness, so long as some adequate level of violent impact were involved. Just such a construction was urged on the Supreme Court in Leocal v. Ashcroft, 543 U.S. 1, 9 (2004), a section 16(b) case involving a Florida conviction for driving under the influence and causing 3 As we explained in Hart, Massachusetts ABDW may be committed (1) intentionally or (2) wantonly or recklessly. The former theory requires the intentional and unjustified use of force upon the person of another, however slight. The latter calls for the intentional commission of a wanton or reckless act (something more than gross negligence) causing physical or bodily injury to another. In the case of reckless or wanton ABDW, the victim's injury must be more than transient or trifling and severe enough to interfere with health or comfort. 674 F.3d at 43 n.7 (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). Both theories of ABDW require that the offense involve the employment of a dangerous weapon, but the definition of dangerous weapon includes both items that are dangerous per se and otherwise innocuous items that, as used, are capable of producing serious bodily harm. Id. at 42-43 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). -17- bodily injury. The Court, however, rejected the government's argument that the 'use' of force does not incorporate any mens rea component. Id. Rather, it reasoned, 'use' requires active employment, because [w]hile one may, in theory, actively employ something in an accidental manner, it is much less natural to say that a person actively employs physical force against another person by accident. Id. at 9-10 (emphasis in original). Although the Supreme Court explicitly limited its reasoning to negligenceor-less crimes, Leocal's rationale would seem to apply equally to crimes encompassing reckless conduct wherein force is brought to bear accidentally, rather than being actively employed. It is therefore not surprising that our sister circuits have concluded, with striking uniformity, that section 16(b) does not reach -18- recklessness offenses.4 On the force of Leocal's logic, we hold the same. So the key question is whether Massachusetts ABDW allows convictions based on mere recklessness. The answer is clearly yes, as long as the recklessness causes non-trivial bodily harm. E.g., Commonwealth v. Burno, 396 Mass. 622 (1986). Indeed, [i]n Massachusetts, conduct that underlies a conviction for operating under the influence and causing serious bodily injury may also be 4 See Jobson v. Ashcroft, 326 F.3d 367, 373 (2d Cir. 2003); Tran v. Gonzales, 414 F.3d 464, 469-70 (3d Cir. 2005) ([U]se of force is an intentional act.); Bejarano-Urrutia v. Gonzales, 413 F.3d 444, 447 (4th Cir. 2005) ([T]he conclusion of the Leocal Court that 'in no ordinary or natural sense can it be said that a person risks have to use physical force against another person in the course of operating a vehicle while intoxicated and causing injury' strongly indicates that the result in Leocal would have been the same even had a violation of the statute there at issue required recklessness rather than mere negligence.); United States v. Chapa-Garza, 243 F.3d 921 (5th Cir. 2001) (felony driving while intoxicated does not qualify under section 16 because it does not necessarily involve intentional use of force or recklessness as to the possibility of intentional use of force); United States v. Portela, 469 F.3d 496 (6th Cir. 2006) ([A] crime requiring only recklessness does not qualify as a 'crime of violence' under 18 U.S.C. § 16.); Jimenez-Gonzalez v. Mukasey, 548 F.3d 557, 560 (7th Cir. 2008) (Today we join our sister circuits and hold that reckless crimes are not crimes of violence under Section 16(b)); United States v. Torres-Villalobos, 487 F.3d 607, 615 (8th Cir. 2007) (reckless manslaughter not a crime of violence after Leocal); Fernandez-Ruiz v. Gonzales, 466 F.3d 1121, 1129-30 (9th Cir. 2006) (cited in Covarrubias Teposte v. Holder, 632 F.3d 1049 (9th Cir. 2010) (intentionally discharging firearm with reckless disregard as to whether it will hit an inhabited dwelling is not a crime of violence)); United States v. Zuniga-Soto, 527 F.3d 1110, 1124 (10th Cir. 2008) ([R]ecklessness falls into the category of accidental conduct that the Leocal Court described as failing to satisfy the use of physical force requirement under either of § 16's definitions of 'crime of violence.'); United States v. Palomino Garcia, 606 F.3d 1317, 1335-36 (11th Cir. 2010). -19- charged as ABDW. Hart, 674 F.3d at 43 n.8 (1st Cir. 2012). The government does not challenge the accuracy of this description of Massachusetts ABDW. Instead, the government argues that, in fact, Massachusetts ABDW is typically applied to conduct involving the active employment of force against another, so we should simply ignore, as not the ordinary case, convictions involving mere recklessness. In support of this position, the government relies on United States v. Hart, 674 F.3d 33, 41-44 (1st Cir. 2012), in which we determined that Massachusetts ABDW qualifies as a violent felony under ACCA's residual clause. In analyzing ACCA's applicability to the ABDW offense, we first found that ABDW posed a serious risk of injury, comparable to the degree of risk posed by [ACCA's] enumerated offenses. Id. Clearly ABDW does, in all of its applications (and thus in the ordinary case, see James v. United States, 550 U.S. 192, 208 (2007)), pose such a risk--even in its reckless form, which expressly requires injury that is more than transient. Burno, 396 Mass. at 627; see also United States v. Glover, 558 F.3d 71, 81 (1st Cir. 2009) (concluding that because ABDW requires as an element that a defendant have effected a touching with a dangerous weapon, the offense ineluctably poses a serious potential risk of physical injury). Equally clearly, and contrary to the dissent's suggestion that section 16(b) does not differ from the ACCA's residual clause in any relevant respects, -20- see Dissenting Op. at 43, this is not the risk that must be assessed in a section 16(b) analysis. See Leocal, 543 U.S. at 10 n.7 (holding that section 16(b) plainly does not encompass all offenses which create a 'substantial risk' that injury will result from a person's conduct, because [t]he 'substantial risk' in § 16(b) relates to the use of force, not to the possible effect of a person's conduct); Aguiar, 438 F.3d at 88. Having determined that ABDW posed a sufficient risk of injury to qualify under ACCA's residual clause, we proceeded, pursuant to the Supreme Court's analysis in Begay v. United States, 553 U.S. 137, 142 (2008), to inquire into whether ABDW was roughly similar in kind to the [offenses enumerated in ACCA's residual clause]. Hart, 674 F.3d at 43-44; see also Begay, 553 U.S. at 143 ([T]o give effect to every clause and word [of 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(2)(B)(ii)], we should read the [example crimes in section 924(e)(2)(B)(ii)] as limiting the crimes that clause (ii) covers to crimes that are roughly similar, in kind as well as in degree of risk posed, to the examples themselves. (internal citation and quotation marks omitted)). In order to satisfy Begay's test for rough[] similarity to burglary, arson, extortion, and crimes involving the use of explosives--crimes that are listed in ACCA, but not in section 16(b)--an offense must typically involve purposeful, violent and aggressive conduct. Hart, 674 F.3d at 4344 (quoting Begay, 553 U.S. at 144-45) (internal quotation marks -21- omitted). Over protest from the defendant to the effect that ABDW is occasionally applied to reckless conduct--and, in particular, to reckless driving causing injury--we found that such a fact pattern did not represent the vast majority of ABDW convictions, 674 F.3d at 44, and could therefore not defeat the conclusion that ABDW was typically purposeful, violent, and aggressive. Id. We need not question Hart's holding as to ABDW's similarity to ACCA's listed offenses. But that holding, based as it is on an inquiry into whether ABDW is typically purposeful, violent, and aggressive, cannot establish that ABDW satisfies section 16(b). To the extent that the typically purposeful, violent, and aggressive test requires that an offense involve purposefulness at all,5 the test looks only to the usual circumstances of the crime. See 674 F.3d at 44 ('Adjectives like purposeful and aggressive denote qualities that are ineluctably manifested in degree and appear in different combinations.' (quoting United States v. Williams, 529 F.3d 1, 7 n.7 (1st Cir. 2008)). Section 16(b), by contrast, requires that an offense, in 5 Though the phrase purposeful, violent, and aggressive would seem, on its face, to require purposefulness, violence, and aggression, it is by now well-established that the test may be satisfied by any offense that contemplates purposefulness, but not necessarily conduct that is deliberately violent or aggressive as a matter of course. Hart, 674 F.3d at 44 n.9; see also United States v. Williams, 529 F.3d 1, 7 n.7 (1st Cir. 2008) (noting that even ACCA's example crimes satisfy [the 'purposeful, violent, and aggressive'] requirements only in some measure and that drug trafficking crimes, which involve purposeful conduct but are only sometimes violent or aggressive, may satisfy Begay). -22- every realistically probable application, involve a substantial risk that physical force will be brought to bear in a manner such that it can be said to have been used. See Leocal, 543 U.S. at 8-12; Gonzales v. Duenas-Alvarez, 549 U.S. 183, 193 (2007) ([To find that a state statute is overbroad] requires a realistic probability, not a theoretical possibility, that the State would apply its statute to conduct that falls outside the generic definition of a crime. To show that realistic probability, an offender, of course, may show that the statute was so applied . . . ); see also James v. United States, 550 U.S. 192, 208 (2007) (citing Duenas-Alvarez with approval and noting that [o]ne can always hypothesize unusual cases in which even a prototypically violent crime might not present a genuine risk of injury--for example, an attempted murder where the gun, unbeknownst to the shooter, had no bullets.). Finding no comfort in Hart's holding, the government points out that our opinion in Hart employed language that can be read to go beyond what Begay required. Specifically, Hart's analysis of the purposeful, violent, and aggressive test contains the following references to the ordinary case: It is true that an ABDW conviction may rest on a recklessness theory, and it is not insignificant that reckless ABDW may be committed with a seemingly innocent object used in a dangerous fashion, as in the case of reckless, vehicular ABDW. But this fact pattern does not represent the vast majority of ABDW convictions, and our analysis under the residual clause is explicitly, and -23- necessarily, limited to the ordinary case. James v. United States, 550 U.S. 192, 208 (2007). . . . . . . In considering the 'ordinary case []' of ABDW, James, 550 U.S. at 208, we must conclude that a composite of purposeful, violent, and aggressive conduct is the norm. See Begay, 553 U.S. at 144-45. 674 F.3d at 43-44 (some citations omitted). The government argues that this language, in combination with Hart's citations to James, should be read as license to use the ordinary case approach to ignore reckless ABDW in determining whether Massachusetts ABDW satisfies the section 16(b) test. For the following reasons, we disagree. As an initial matter, the license the government would draw from this language rests on dictum. As we have explained, Begay's test for similarity to ACCA's enumerated offenses was never intended to operate as a rigorous comparison between the conduct necessarily underlying a prior conviction and the conduct described in a recidivist statute. See Sykes v. United States, 131 S. Ct. 2267, 2275 (2011) (The phrase 'purposeful, violent, and aggressive' has no precise textual link to the residual clause.). Rather, after first employing the categorical approach to define the elements of an offense without reference to the actual facts of a defendant's conduct, Begay trains its focus on whether that offense is, in addition to meeting ACCA's textual requirement, roughly similar to the offenses listed in ACCA, so as to avoid the absurd application of ACCA to crimes that though dangerous, -24- are not typically committed by those whom one normally labels 'armed career criminals.' Begay, 553 U.S. at 146. Because our observation in Hart that reckless, vehicular ABDW does not represent the vast majority of ABDW convictions was enough to satisfy this permissive standard, it was unnecessary to further inquire into whether the ordinary case of ABDW involves a risk of the use of physical force as required by Leocal. Any conclusion we drew as to that question would, as dictum, therefore not bind us here. See Koseiris v. Rhode Island, 331 F.3d 207, 213 (1st Cir. 2003) (Dicta, of course, is not binding on future panels.); see also Diaz-Rodriguez v. Pep Boys Corp., 410 F.3d 56 (1st Cir. 2005) ([A]lthough a newly constituted panel ordinarily may not disregard the decision of a previous panel, principles of stare decisis do not preclude us from disclaiming dicta in a prior decision.); Pierre N. Leval, Judging Under the Constitution: Dicta About Dicta, 81 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1249, 1263 (2006) (Among the most common manifestations of disguised dictum occurs where the court ventures beyond the issue in controversy to declare the solution to a further problem--one that will arise in another case, or in a later phase of the same case.). The government concedes that Hart is, to be sure, . . . not dispositive of this case, and we take that concession at face value. The dissent, however, overshoots the government, proposing that we transform the Begay test--an inquiry -25- designed to narrow ACCA's application even when a crime, in all its actual applications, poses the risk that ACCA's text requires--into one that broadens section 16(b)'s application. For this simple reason, we cannot accede to the dissent's suggestion that Begay's focus on the usual circumstances of an offense now binds us to conclude that everything outside those usual circumstances is, in James's terms, hypothesize[d]. See James, 550 U.S. at 208.6 Neither James nor Begay suggests such an approach, and to adopt it would be to abandon section 16(b)'s requirements in favor of an ill-fitting and less demanding test designed to accommodate the text, purpose, and legislative history of a materially different statute. Such a result simply cannot be what Begay, which 6 The dissent suggests that the examples of 'unusual' cases that James gave are not so far-fetched. See Dissenting Op. at 46. But James gave no examples of merely unusual cases. Rather, James made clear that the examples it provided were of hypothesize[d] unusual cases, see 550 U.S. at 208 (emphasis added), provided in order to demonstrate only that ACCA does not require metaphysical certainty that a defendant's underlying conduct would have met a federal recidivist statute's requirements. Id. (citing Duenas-Alvarez, 550 U.S. at 193). Notwithstanding our dissenting colleague's objection to the examples provided in James, that case's warning against relying on imagined, hypothetical scenarios has no application here, because the defendant points to cases in which the ABDW statute has in fact been applied to conduct falling outside section 16(b)'s bounds. -26- mentioned the risk inquiry only to demonstrate that it was not the inquiry at issue, had in mind.7 Our analysis under section 16(b) is therefore governed by James, Duenas-Alvarez, and Leocal, not by Begay. And in defining the ordinary case as it applies to the risk inquiry, James explains that sentencing courts may disregard only hypothetize[d] factual scenarios. 550 U.S. at 208. Duenas-Alvarez, which James cites in the course of its explanation of the ordinary case, likewise permits exclusion only of applications that exist solely in legal imagination. 549 U.S. at 193. Unlike Begay's roughly similar test, the analysis described in James and Duenas-Alvarez grants us no license to ignore actual cases on the ground that they are not typical or do not represent the majority of convictions. Thus, though we do not read our opinion in Hart as having gone out of its way, in cryptic dictum, to violate James and Duenas-Alvarez, we conclude that we would be bound to follow those two Supreme Court cases over any dictum the government might find to the contrary in Hart's application of the less-demanding typically purposeful, violent, and aggressive test. See 7 Moreover, we are unable to reconcile the dissent's suggestion that section 16(b) does not differ from the ACCA's residual clause in any relevant respects, Dissenting Op. at 43, with the Supreme Court's suggestion in Leocal that the two statutes are meaningfully distinct. See 543 U.S. at 10 n.7; see generally John v. United States, 524 U.S 236, 252-53 (1998) (Supreme Court decisions remain binding precedent until that Court see[s] fit to reconsider them). -27- generally United States v. Dancy, 640 F.3d 455, 470 (1st Cir. 2011).8 In so concluding, we acknowledge that at least one court has, in an analogous situation, relied on James to find license under the ordinary case approach to look only to what it imagined might be the typical case of conviction, in the process ignoring a state statute's overbreadth even in the face of actual applications of the statute to conduct that failed to meet the textual requirements of the federal statute at issue. See, e.g., United 8 In agreeing with the government that Hart is not dispositive of the case before us, we do not, as the dissent suggests, apply[] the ordinary case rule differently to Section 16(b) than the ACCA. Dissenting Op. at 45. To the contrary, we acknowledge that the ordinary case rule allows courts to disregard imagined, hypothetical scenarios when matching an offense to the two statutes' risk requirements. But what does not apply to section 16(b) (particularly to broaden it) is the assessment, under Begay, of what an offense typically involves. That assessment, which permits a court to look only to the usual circumstances under which an offense is committed, applies only to ACCA. -28- States v. Mayer, 560 F.3d 948, 960-63 (9th Cir. 2009).9 Such a freewheeling interpretation of James would seem to conflict not only with James and Duenas-Alvarez, but also with the Supreme Court's recent decision in Descamps v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 2276, 2285-86 (2013), which again reaffirmed that the only way a facially overbroad statute can qualify as an ACCA predicate is by application of the modified categorical approach. Though it is theoretically possible to read Descamps as having no application to the theory the dissent proposes, we think it unlikely that the 9 Though our dissenting colleague also claims support in Delgado-Hernandez v. Holder, 697 F.3d 1125, 1129 (9th Cir. 2012), and United States v. Johnson, 616 F.3d 85 (2d Cir. 2010), see Dissenting Op. at 47-48 & nn.15-16, neither opinion even feints toward an analysis different from the one we employ. In DelgadoHernandez, the Ninth Circuit held that California's kidnapping statute was a crime of violence only after scouring reported cases to ensure that only by adopt[ing] a Pollyannaish outlook at the margins of the statute could it imagine a scenario in which the offense did not involve at least a substantial risk of force. Delgado-Hernandez, 697 F.3d at 1129. And in Johnson, the Second Circuit applied James precisely as we understand it, concluding that Connecticut's prison rioting statute applied (both in theory and in fact) only to conduct involving the requisite risk. See 616 F.3d at 94 (Every violation of prison rules creates a risk that fellow inmates will join in the disturbance, oppose it with force, or simply use its occurrence to engage in other acts of violence.). If the language our colleague quotes from Johnson seems inconsistent with that understanding of James, see Dissenting Op. at 48 n.16, that is perhaps because the language is plucked not from the section of Johnson entitled Similar in Degree of Risk Posed, but instead from a separate section of the opinion--one entitled Similar 'In Kind.' See 616 F.3d at 89-93. The latter section, which makes not a single reference to the ordinary case, demonstrates little more than that like us, the Second Circuit understands the Begay inquiry to permit a court to look only to the usual circumstances of an offense. See supra note 8. Neither case contains any indication whatsoever that the same applies to either ACCA's or section 16(b)'s risk requirement. -29- Supreme Court took and decided the Descamps case, in which it yet again clarified the ornate rules that govern the categorical and modified categorical approaches, all in the service of a procedure that ends with the excision of real applications of broad offenses based on non-empirical determinations that they do not present the ordinary case. We are guided here not merely by the thrust of Descamps, but by its language, as well. Descamps contains myriad warnings to the effect that [w]hether the statute of conviction has an overbroad or missing element, the problem is the same: Because of the mismatch in elements, a person convicted under that statute is never convicted of the generic crime. Id. at 2292. In this case, the dissent can avoid the application of that principle only by suggesting that we not consider whether the statute is overbroad until we have already whitewashed its overbroad, actual applications. To adopt that approach would ensnare us into deciding how big a minority of actual convictions for unqualifying offenses under an overly broad definition we may permissibly ignore. One option, in theory, would be to find empirical tools for confidently gauging whether actual convictions met whatever definition of minority we might invent. See Mayer, 560 F.3d at 952 (Kozinski, C.J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc) (Don't even think about how a court is supposed to figure out whether a statute -30- is applied in a certain way 'most of the time.' (A statistical analysis of the state reporter? A survey? Expert evidence? Google? Gut instinct?)). The only alternative would be to wipe out the categorical approach and directly reject Descamps. The first option is impossible, the second foreclosed. In view of the unavoidable complexity of the foregoing, we also consider a simple hypothetical. Imagine that Massachusetts defined the current elements of ABDW solely by statute, rather than in its case law. Keeping the elements the same, the statute would, in substance, read as follows: Assault and Battery with a Dangerous Weapon is: (1) The intentional and unjustified touching of another by use of a dangerous weapon, or, (2) The intentional commission of a wanton or reckless act causing more than transient or trifling injury to another. See Hart, 674 F.3d at 42, 43 n.7. We do not understand the dissent or the government to go so far as to argue, counter to the law of ten circuits, that a conviction under part (2) of our hypothetical statute would serve as a predicate offense under section 16(b). See, e.g., Leocal, 543 U.S. at 9-10. And if a defendant's conviction were simply for ABDW (as in the present case), with no indication as to whether the charge was under a particular subdivision, one would have to assume that the conviction might have taken place under part (2). Aguiar -31- 438 F.3d at 89 ([O]nly the minimum criminal conduct necessary to sustain a conviction under a given statute is relevant. (internal citation omitted)). So the question arises: given such a statute, and an actual conviction not specified as to whether it arose under part (1) or part (2), would the possibility of a conviction under part (2) be ignored as outside of the ordinary case? Clearly, the answer must be no. If that is the case, then why would one reach a different result here? True, our hypothetical is easy because the elements are plainly defined by statute. But because the provenance of a crime's elements tells one nothing about how the crime is committed, we see no reason why that fact should be decisive. This hypothetical also serves to illustrate our reading of Hart. Absent any Shepard-approved documents telling us which provision of the hypothetical statute had given rise to a conviction, our analysis of the statute under ACCA would replicate Hart's holding that ABDW is a violent felony under ACCA's residual clause. Thus, we would first ask whether, in all but imagined, hypothetical circumstances, the statute involved a serious potential risk of physical injury. We would have to conclude that it did: section (2) makes injury an explicit textual requirement, and although section (1) does not explicitly require injury, it plainly requires conduct that creates a serious potential risk thereof. Under ACCA (unlike section 16(b)), we would then apply -32- Begay's similarity test to see whether ABDW should nevertheless be disqualified. Because that inquiry, unlike the ordinary case analysis, is satisfied so long as the typical violation of the statute involves purposefulness, we would, just as in Hart, find Begay satisfied. Cf. United States v. Johnson, 616 F.3d 85, 91 n.4 (2d Cir. 2010) (finding Begay's roughly similar test satisfied even on the assumption that an overwhelming majority of convictions under a statute, but not all of them, involve[d] violent and aggressive behavior). To summarize our analysis of ABDW: the elements of Massachusetts ABDW are satisfied when the intentional commission of a reckless act causes more than trifling injury; convictions for ABDW for such reckless conduct are not merely hypothetical possibilities, but instead actually occur; we agree with ten Circuits that reckless conduct bereft of an intent to employ force against another falls short of the mens rea required under section 16(b) as interpreted in Leocal; no Shepard-approved documents tell us that Fish's ABDW conviction was not such an offense; therefore, his ABDW conviction is not a crime of violence under section 16(b). And in response to our learned colleague's considered dissent, we agree with both Fish and the government that Hart does not dictate a contrary result. To the extent that Hart can be read as using the ordinary case notion of James to erase from our consideration of ABDW its actual applications to reckless conduct, we find such -33- a construction of James to be unnecessary to Hart's actual holding that Massachusetts ABDW survives examination under Begay's similarity test. The similarity test requires only that an offense typically involve a purposeful use of force.10 Finally, the very complexity of the government's attempt to prove that every person convicted of ABDW in Massachusetts is, per se, a violent offender, without any adjudication or admission necessitating the conclusion, should itself give us pause. If someone with Fish's record had asked whether he could lawfully buy body armor, no one (other than five Supreme Court Justices) could have confidently answered the question. In such a case, we cannot simply combine intricate statutory interpretations with judicial hunches about the conduct underlying prior convictions in order to imprison as a violent felon one whose conduct no jury has necessarily found to satisfy the elements that make an offense a 10 Our dissenting colleague, proposing that we should treat Begay and James interchangeably, points to two cases that he suggests have so held. See Dissenting Op. at 44 (citing United States v. Dismuke, 593 F.3d 582 (7th Cir. 2010); United States v. Stinson, 592 F.3d 460, 466 (3d Cir. 2010)). But neither of those cases supports our colleague's conclusion that the James rule permits us to disregard actual applications of a statute to conduct that fails to meet ACCA's risk requirement. Rather, in Dismuke, the defendant conceded that the risk requirement was satisfied, thus taking it off the table completely. See 593 F.3d at 591 n.3. And in Stinson, the Third Circuit concluded that although the language of Pennsylvania's resisting arrest statute suggested the possibility of overbroad application, the statute had never been so applied. See 592 F.3d at 466 ([W]e have found no decision under Pennsylvania law that affirmed a conviction for resisting arrest based on a defendant's inaction or simply 'lying down' or 'going limp.'). -34- crime of violence as defined by Congress. See Leocal, 543 U.S. at 11 n.8 (noting that because § 16 is a criminal statute, the rule of lenity applies); cf. Alleyne v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 2151, 2156 (2013) (The Sixth Amendment . . . , in conjunction with the Due Process Clause, requires that each element of a crime be proved to the jury beyond a reasonable doubt.). We therefore hold that because ABDW, as defined by Massachusetts law, does not in form or application require a risk of the use of force, it is not a crime of violence as defined in section 16(b).