Justices to Clarify Mandatory Jury Findings in Criminal Cases

The US Supreme Court agreed to consider whether juries—not judges—must find certain facts that trigger a 15-year mandatory minimum for gun possession.

The question was left open by the justices in 2022 and both the defendant and the Biden administration agree should now be decided by the court.

The Armed Career Criminal Act sets a mandatory minimum sentence and possible life sentence when a defendant has three previous qualifying convictions that were “committed on occasions different from one another.”

The issue for the justices deals with the interplay of two Supreme Court rulings.

In 2013, the court held in Alleyne v. United States that the Sixth Amendment right to a jury requires that any fact that increases a mandatory minimum sentence must be made by a jury, not a judge.

And in 2022, the court in Wooden v. United States took a fact-specific approach to the question of whether a conviction resulted from different occasions, as opposed to a single criminal event that resulted in more than one conviction.

Paul Erlinger was sentenced to the mandatory 15-year sentence based on four burglary convictions from 1991 that were charged in a single complaint, but took place over the course of a week.

Erlinger argues that after Wooden, the jury must consider whether the burglary convictions were committed on different occasions, or the same one. And the Biden administration agreed.

Nevertheless, lower courts have resisted that outcome. Recent “developments make clear that this Court’s intervention is necessary to ensure that the circuits correctly recognize defendants’ constitutional rights in this context,” the government said in its brief.

The case is Erlinger v. United States, U.S., No. 23-370.