On May 23, 2024, the United States Supreme Court decided the consolidated cases captioned Brown v. United States. The principal issue before the Court concerned the application of the Armed Career Criminal Act to state drug convictions that occurred before amendments to the federal drug schedules.
Justice Alito wrote for the 6-3 majority in relevant part: ACCA imposes a 15-year mandatory minimum sentence on defendants who are convicted for the illegal possession of a firearm and who have a criminal history thought to demonstrate a propensity for violence. As relevant here, a defendant with “three previous convictions” for “a serious drug offense” qualifies for ACCA’s enhanced sentencing. 18 U. S.C. §924(e)(1). For a state crime to qualify as a “serious drug offense,” it must carry a maximum sentence of at least 10 years’ imprisonment, and it must “involve a controlled substance as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act.” §§924(e)(1), (2)(A)(ii). Under the categorical approach, a state drug offense counts as an ACCA predicate only if the State’s definition of the drug in question “matches” the definition under federal law. Shular v. United States, 589 U. S. 154, 158. The question presented is whether a state crime constitutes a “serious drug offense” if it involved a drug that was on the federal schedules when the defendant possessed or trafficked in it but was later removed.
Petitioners Justin Rashaad Brown and Eugene Jackson were separately convicted of the federal crime of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon in violation of §922(g)(1). In both cases, an ACCA enhancement was recommended based on prior state felony drug convictions. And both defendants argued that their prior convictions did not qualify as “serious drug offenses.” Brown’s presentence report identified several Pennsylvania drug convictions, including four convictions for possessing marijuana with intent to distribute. At the time of Brown’s marijuana convictions, the federal and Pennsylvania law definitions of marijuana matched. But while Brown’s federal §922(g)(1) charge was pending, Congress modified the federal definition of marijuana. Because the federal and state definitions did not fully match when Brown was sentenced, Brown argued that his marijuana convictions no longer qualified as “serious drug offenses” for purposes of the ACCA sentencing enhancement.
The language that Justice Alito uses in his opinion indicates how he will decide the case. For example, instead of writing that the federal and state definitions “did not match,” he wrote that they “did not fully match.” This implies that they were sufficient matches to justify application of the ACCA enhancement.
