Someone shot Eric Davis. He wasn’t hurt badly, but he was mad.
The next day, someone told him that the man who shot him was near a high school. Mr. Davis went to the high school. He saw Octavious Wilkins, and took Mr. Wilkins as the man who shot him.
Mr. Davis, and friends, approached Mr. Wilkins. They had guns drawn.
As frequent readers of this blog know, the Armed Career Criminal Act gets a lot of appellate attention.
Simply put, if you’ve been previously convicted of a felony, and you’re found with a gun, that’s a federal crime. Normally, the most you can get for that crime is 10 years.
But, under the Armed Career Criminal Act, if you have three prior convictions for either a crime of violence or a drug distribution offense, then you face a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years, and a maximum sentence of life.
Two guys are sitting on a porch in Memphis on a July night. They share some conversation and a little bit of marijuana.
Three and a half years later, the Sixth Circuit wrote about that night in United States v. Shields.
Kevin Shields stopped by to visit Eugene Moore on his mother’s porch. Earlier that night, Mr. Shields had been seen with a handgun in his waistband by a Memphis police officer.
The Armed Career Criminal Act creates more absurd law than any part of the American legal system outside of the tax code.
The Sixth Circuit’s recent, and short, opinion in United States v. Oaks illustrates the point. It asks the question we’ve never needed answering before – is running out of a courtroom a violent act?
It turns out that it isn’t.
Paresh Patel is probably the smartest lawyer I know when it comes to criminal history calculations in the Fourth Circuit. So I was particularly tickled to see his win in United States v. Donnell.
How a person’s criminal history is calculated when a federal judge decides what sentence the person should get is, of course, incredibly important to what the sentence will be. (See this post, or this one, or this one.)
If a person’s prior convictions are for crimes of violence, that’s particularly true. In many cases with crimes of violence, the guidelines look twice to a person’s criminal history – once when the criminal history score is calculated and once when the offense level is determined.
The Federal Criminal Appeals Blog