U.S. Supreme Court Cites Model Penal Code
In a unanimous opinion delivered by Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the U.S. Supreme Court cited Model Penal Code §§ 221.0 and 221.1. The opinion, United States v. Stitt, Nos. 17-765 and 17-766 (December 10, 2018), involved two consolidated cases in which each defendant, who had prior state burglary convictions in Tennessee and Arkansas, respectively, was convicted in federal court of unlawfully possessing a firearm. In both cases, the relevant district court found that the state statutory crimes fell within the scope of the Armed Career Criminal Act’s term “burglary,” and thus imposed the Act’s mandatory sentence enhancement. The Courts of Appeals for the Sixth and Eighth Circuits vacated the sentences and remanded for resentencing, holding that the crimes did not fall within the scope of the term “burglary.”
The Supreme Court reversed the judgment of the Sixth Circuit, and vacated the judgment of the Eighth Circuit and remanded for further proceedings, holding that the term “burglary” in the Armed Career Criminal Act includes burglary of a structure or vehicle that has been adapted or is customarily used for overnight accommodation. The Court determined that “[t]he relevant language of the Tennessee and Arkansas statutes falls within the scope of generic burglary’s definition as set forth in Taylor [v. United States, 495 U.S. 575 (1990)],” which required courts to evaluate a prior state-court conviction by reference to the elements of the state offense rather than to the defendant’s behavior on a particular occasion. The Court concluded that the Eighth Circuit case had to be remanded to the lower courts for further proceedings, because the lower courts did not consider the defendant’s argument, which rested in part on state law, that the Arkansas residential-burglary statute was too broad to count as generic burglary, because it also covered burglary of a vehicle in which any person lives.
The Court explained that, in Taylor, it had made clear that “Congress intended the definition of ‘burglary’ to reflect ‘the generic sense in which the term [was] used in the criminal codes of most States’ at the time the Act was passed,” and noted that Model Penal Code §§ 221.0(1) (erron. cite as § 220.0(1)) and 221.1(1) defined “occupied structure” for purposes of burglary as “any structure, vehicle or place adapted for overnight accommodation of persons, or for carrying on business therein, whether or not a person is actually present.” The Court noted that, according to § 221.1, Comment 3(b), the essential notion of occupancy was the apparent potential for regular occupancy, and reasoned that, “[a]lthough, as respondents point out, the risk for violence is diminished if, for example, a vehicle is only used for lodging part of the time, we have no reason to believe that Congress intended to make a part-time/full-time distinction.”
Read the opinion here.
