Chambers v. US (Decision)

Thankfully, I was wrong when I predicted that the Supreme Court would affirm the Seventh Circuit on this one--after the Seventh had said that failure to report back to prison after work release constituted an "escape" under IL law, which could constitute a serious or violent felony, which then would make the defendant susceptible to a sentence enhancement under the Armed Career Criminal Act ("ACCA"). The Court concluded in a unanimous decision, with two Justices concurring only in the judgment, that Illinois' crime of faliure to report for penal confinement falls outside the scope of the ACCA's "violent felony" definition. This essay quotes from the Syllabus of the Court's opinion to show the Court's thinking (opinion by Breyer).

First, a few of the facts.

"The Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) imposes a 15-year mandatory prison term on a felon unlawfully in possession of a firearm who has three prior convictions for committing certain drug crimes or “a violent felony,” 18 U. S. C. §924(e)(1), defined as a crime punishable by more than one year’s imprisonment that, inter alia, “involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another,” §924(e)(2)(B)(ii). At petitioner Chambers’ sentencing for being a felon in possession of a firearm, the Government sought ACCA’s 15-year mandatory prison term. Chambers disputed one of his prior convictions—failing to report for weekend confinement—as falling outside the ACCA definition of “violent felony.” The District Court treated the failure to report as a form of what the relevant state statute calls “escape from [a] penal institution,” and held that it qualified as a “violent felony” under ACCA. The Seventh Circuit agreed."

The Supreme Court, however, reversed the Seventh. The crucial point was in how to construe these words in the ACCA:

"involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another."

The key to the Court's decision was to look at classes or categories of crimes. It decided that failure to report was of a different class of crimes than escape (and escape could be a violent crime under the ACCA); because of this difference, one couldn't lump together failure to report with violence. Thus, the sentence enhancement wasn't proper. To the language of the syllabus:

"This categorical approach requires courts to choose the right category, and sometimes the choice is not obvious. The nature of the behavior that likely underlies a statutory phrase matters in this respect. The state statute at issue places together in a single section several different kinds of behavior, which, as relevant here, may be categorized either as failure to report for detention or as escape from custody. Failure to report is a separate crime from escape. Its underlying behavior differs from the more aggressive behavior underlying escape, and it is listed separately in the statute’s title and body and is of a different felony class than escape."

So, the idea of aggressiveness, which characterizes escape and is absent from the notion of failure to report, is the key determinant. The state statute therefore contains at least two separate crimes, escape and failure to report.

Failure to report doesn't satisfy the ACCA's violent felony definition. Even though failure to report is punishable by imprisonment exceeding one year, it satisfies none of the other parts of the definition. More critically, as the Court said,

"it does not “involv[e] conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.” Conceptually speaking, the crime amounts to a form of inaction, and there is no reason to believe that an offender who fails to report is otherwise doing something that poses a serious potential risk of physical injury. The Government’s argument that a failure to report reveals the offender’s special, strong aversion to penal custody—pointing to 3 state and federal cases over 30 years in which individuals shot at officers attempting to recapture them—is unconvincing. Even assuming the relevance of violence that may occur long after an offender fails to report, the offender’s aversion to penal custody is beside the point. The question is whether such an offender is significantly more likely than others to attack or resist an apprehender, thereby producing a serious risk of physical injury. Here a United States Sentencing Commission report, showing no violence in 160 federal failure-to-report cases over 2 recent years, helps provide a negative answer."

Thus, in the final analysis, the Court found helpful a study that showed that people who fail to report aren't violent toward those who want to apprehend them. One would probably have good grounds for concluding that these people just want to be away from the prison environment. Of course, they will need to go back, and with several more years tacked onto the sentence. But not via the ACCA. Good decision.

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