Fleeing from the police in a car is a violent felony that can subject criminals to mandatory 15-year prison terms, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a 6-to-3 decision.
The decision was the court’s fourth encounter since 2007 with a phrase in a federal law, the Armed Career Criminal Act. Under the law, convicted felons found with guns face a maximum sentence of 10 years. But those with three convictions for violent felonies are subject to a 15-year mandatory minimum sentence.
The law defines violent felonies as including burglary, arson and other “conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.” The defendant in the case Thursday, Marcus Sykes, pleaded guilty to having a gun in violation of the federal law, and it was undisputed that he had twice committed violent felonies, by robbing a man of his wristwatch and a woman of her purse.
The question in the case was whether a third conviction under Indiana law for fleeing from the police in a car was also a violent felony. Mr. Sykes’s flight was dangerous, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority. “Sykes wove through traffic, drove on the wrong side of the road and through yards containing bystanders, passed through a fence and struck the rear of a house,” Justice Kennedy wrote.
But, Justice Kennedy went on, the issue was not whether Mr. Sykes’s actual conduct had been violent. Rather, it was whether the crime he had been convicted of was as a general matter a crime of violence.
As a matter of both common experience and statistics, Justice Kennedy wrote, the answer was yes. Fleeing from the police in a car, he wrote, “is a provocative and dangerous act that dares, and in a typical case requires, the officer to give chase.”
As a statistical matter, he wrote, four police officers or bystanders are injured for every 100 pursuits. By contrast, he said, there are 3.2 injuries for every 100 burglaries.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Sonia Sotomayor joined the majority opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas voted with the majority in the case, Sykes v. United States, No. 09-11311, but on slightly different grounds.
“In the real world,” Justice Thomas wrote, “everyone — police, citizens and suspects who elect to flee — knows that vehicular flight is dangerous.”
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing only for himself, issued a vigorous dissent. He said the provision of the federal law under review (“involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another”) was a hopelessly vague Congressional “drafting failure” and that “today’s tutti-frutti opinion” produces “a fourth ad hoc judgment that will sow further confusion.”
“Insanity, it has been said, is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results,” Justice Scalia wrote. “Four times is enough.”
Justice Scalia also criticized the majority’s reliance on statistics that had not been tested in the adversary process, calling it “judicial fact-finding masquerading as statutory interpretation.”
A key line from Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent which is certainly true regardless of the outcome of this particular case of statutory interpretation and possible vagueness of the law:
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We face a Congress that puts forth an ever-increasing volume of laws in general, and of criminal laws in particular. It should be no surprise that as the volume increases, so do the number of imprecise laws. And no surprise that our indulgence of imprecisions that violate the Constitution encourages imprecisions that violate the Constitution. Fuzzy, leave-the-details-to-be-sorted-out-by-the-courts legislation is attractive to the Congressman who wants credit for addressing a national problem but does not have the time (or perhaps the votes) to grapple with the nitty-gritty... [I]t is time to call a halt.
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