Supreme Court decides the definition of occasion, and a defendant benefits
One night in 1997, William Dale Wooden and three accomplices went on a burglary spree at a storage facility in Dalton, Ga., entering one unit and then busting through the drywall to the next until they had stolen items from 10 units in all.
Were his crimes 10 offenses committed on one “occasion,” or was each burglary in the string committed on a different occasion?
The answer, according to a Supreme Court opinion issued Monday, is that all 10 came on one occasion. And that matters greatly to Wooden, who wasn’t done with legal trouble.
He was charged in 2012 with being a violent felon in possession of a gun and faced a mandatory 15-year prison sentence under the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA). The law requires enhanced sentences for those convicted of three violent felonies committed on “occasions different from one another.”
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That caused Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority, to delve deeply into the meaning of “occasion.” She consulted common language usage and conjured up a wedding ceremony and a (separate) barroom brawl to make her point.
“Consider first how an ordinary person (a reporter; a police officer; yes, even a lawyer) might describe Wooden’s ten burglaries — and how she would not,” Kagan wrote. “The observer might say: ‘On one occasion, Wooden burglarized ten units in a storage facility.’ By contrast, she would never say: ‘On ten occasions, Wooden burglarized a unit in the facility.’”
Or think of it another way, Kagan wrote.
“The occasion of a wedding,” she wrote, “often includes a ceremony, cocktail hour, dinner, and dancing. Those doings are proximate in time and place, and have a shared theme (celebrating the happy couple); their connections are, indeed, what makes them part of a single event. But they do not occur at the same moment: The newlyweds would surely take offense if a guest organized a conga line in the middle of their vows.”
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Or another. “A barroom brawl breaks out, and a patron hits first one, then another, and then a third of his fellow drinkers,” Kagan said, Under the government’s reading of the law, that would be three “occasions.” But Kagan, joined by seven other justices, said, “The occasion in the hypothetical is the barroom brawl, not each individual fisticuff.”
A judge had found differently, and as a result of the increased penalties imposed by the ACCA, Wooden was sentenced to 16 years in prison on the gun offense instead of what probably would have been two years. Wooden will be able now to challenge that sentence.
Lower courts had disagreed with how to read the statute. In the future, Kagan wrote, they should consider several factors: whether the offenses were committed “close in time” and in an “uninterrupted course of conduct”; whether they occurred in one place; and whether they shared a common scheme or purpose.
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It might sound complicated, she wrote, but “for the most part, applying this approach will be straightforward and intuitive.”
The only justice who didn’t go along with Kagan’s approach was Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. He said disputes over the wording of the ACCA “have occupied so much of this Court’s attention over so many years,” and he feared that Kagan’s introduction of a multifaceted test to define “occasion” would not help.
“Imagine a defendant who sells drugs to the same undercover police officer twice at the same street corner one hour apart,” Gorsuch wrote. “Do the sales take place on the same occasion or different ones?”
What if Kagan’s imagined barroom brawl spilled out onto the street, Gorsuch wrote. What would be the ruling if the assailant “assaults one victim inside the bar and another 20 minutes later in the street outside, in part because the second victim called the police? Are those two assaults part of a ‘continuous stream’ of conduct? Do they even occur ‘at one location’?”
For his part, Gorsuch thought Wooden should win, too. But he said he would rule for Wooden by applying the “rule of lenity.” That means, he explained, that when the language of a statute is difficult to decipher, it should be interpreted to the benefit of the defendant, or as Gorsuch put it, “in favor of liberty.”
The case is Wooden v. U.S.
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