Thursday, February 28, 2019

SC Assault Conviction Not ACCA Violent Felony


US v. Jones: Jones was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm and sentenced under the Armed Career Criminal Act. Among his prior convictions was one for assaulting, beating, or wounding a law enforcement officer while resisting arrest in South Carolina (“ABWO”), although it wasn’t identified as one of the ACCA predicates at the time. Jones received a sentence of 456 months in prison. He later filed a Johnson motion to vacate his sentence. While it cut away many of the priors that had been ACCA predicates, he still had enough if the ABWO conviction counted as a violent felony. The district court concluded it did and denied Jones’ motion.

On appeal, the Fourth Circuit reversed. The court first determined that the ABWO statute was not divisible and that it listed three means of committing the same offense. The least potentially violent of those, assault, then became the focus of the analysis – did assault in South Carolina require the violent force necessary to be an ACCA predicate? The court said no, even though it admitted that there was some “tension” in South Carolina case law on the matter. It pointed to a 1912 state supreme court case holding that spitting in another’s face constituted assault. As a result, there was a “realistic probability” that someone could be convicted of ABWO without using violent force.

Congrats to the Defender office in South Carolina on the win!

No comments: