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!
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