Opinion ID: 4537855
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Predicate Crimes post-Johnson II7

Text: Both the ACCA, 18 U.S.C. § 924(e), and the career offender provision of the Sentencing Guidelines, U.S.S.G. § 4B1, provide for enhanced punishment for certain repeat offenders. Under the ACCA, a defendant convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm faces more severe punishment if he has three or more previous convictions for a 'violent felony.' Johnson II, 135 S. Ct. at 2555. Before the Supreme Court's decision in Johnson II, the statute had defined a violent felony 7 Johnson I addressed the force clause of the ACCA, which is not implicated in this case. See Johnson v. United States, 559 U.S. 133 (2010). - 14 - to include any felony, in addition to certain specified violent crimes, that otherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another. 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(2)(B) (2012). The Court struck down this portion of the definition -- the so-called residual clause -- as unconstitutionally vague, 135 S. Ct. at 2557, and it subsequently held that Johnson II's holding applied retroactively to collateral challenges, see Welch v. United States, 136 S. Ct. 1257, 1268 (2016). The Supreme Court later considered whether the identically worded residual clause in the career-offender provision of the Guidelines -- defining a crime of violence8 -- suffers from the same constitutional defect. See Beckles v. United States, 137 S. Ct. 886, 890 (2017). The Court held that it does not -- at least since the Court ruled that the Guidelines must be treated as advisory rather than mandatory. Id. at 894-95; see Booker, 543 U.S. at 245 (deeming the Guidelines advisory). In a concurrence, Justice Sotomayor noted that the Court had left open whether defendants who were sentenced under the pre-Booker 8 We have observed that the equivalence in language between the ACCA definition of a violent felony and the Guidelines definition of a crime of violence makes decisions 'interpreting one phrase frequently . . . persuasive in interpreting the other.' United States v. Ramírez, 708 F.3d 295, 301 n.4 (1st Cir. 2013) (quoting United States v. Winter, 22 F.3d 15, 18 n.3 (1st Cir. 1994)). - 15 - mandatory Guidelines regime, like Bartolomeo, may mount vagueness attacks on their sentences. Beckles, 137 S. Ct. at 903 n.4 (Sotomayor, J., concurring in the judgment). The argument that Bartolomeo presents in his habeas petition -- that he was improperly classified as a career offender -- is thus anchored in Johnson II, Welch and Beckles,9 but the Supreme Court has not yet answered the specific question on which his petition turns: whether the reasoning of Johnson II applies to career-offender determinations made prior to Booker, when the Guidelines were mandatory. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ginsburg, dissented from the denial of certiorari in a 2018 case that could have resolved the circuit split on that question. See Brown v. United States, 139 S. Ct. 14, 15-16 (2018) (Sotomayor, J.) (dissenting from denial of certiorari and describing the differing circuit decisions)10; id. at 16 (stating that this case 9 The parties in this case agree that, if the residual clause in the career-offender provision was unconstitutionally vague at the time Bartolomeo was sentenced, he could no longer be classified as a career offender because the two predicate convictions presumed to underlie that classification do not otherwise qualify as crime[s] of violence. 10Our court also has not decided whether a habeas petitioner may rely on the reasoning of Johnson II to challenge the identical language in the mandatory Guidelines. In listing the cases that comprise the circuit split, Justice Sotomayor recognized that the First Circuit had not yet taken a position on the issue, but she noted her view that we had strongly hint[ed] yes in Moore v. United States, 871 F.3d 72, 80-83 (1st Cir. 2017). See Brown, 139 S. Ct. at 15-16. We briefly discuss Moore in Section II.B. - 16 - presents an important question of federal law that has divided the courts of appeals and in theory could determine the liberty of over 1,000 people).11