Shepard v. United States
Shepard pled guilty to a charge of violating the federal statute that prohibits a felon from possessing a firearm. Shepard already had a dozen of prior state convictions on his record, including eleven for breaking and entering. The government sought to have Shepard sentenced under the Armed Carrier Career Criminal Act (ACCA), which requires a 15-year mandatory minimum sentence for anyone convicted as a felon in possession of a firearm who has three or more prior convictions for a "violent felony." The government argued that at least five of Shepherd’s breaking and entering convictions were actually burglaries and therefore violent felonies under the ACCA. The district court rejected the government’s request for a sentencing enhancement due to lack of proof that Shepard had actually pled guilty to a burglary. The First Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the sentence and remanded, and the district court again denied the government’s motion for enhancement. On appeal, the court held that Shephard’s prior convictions for burglary, premised on his guilty pleas, were “violent felonies,” for purposes of ACCA sentence enhancement.
Question Presented:
The Armed Career Criminal Act imposes a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years imprisonment for a person convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm where that person has previously been
convicted of three violent felonies or serious drug offenses or both. United States v. Taylor, 495 U.S 575 (1990) held that Congress intended a sentencing court to employ a categorical approach to
determine whether a defedant’s prior convictions qualify as predicates for this sentence enhancement, looking only to the fact of conviction and the elements of the statute of conviction, or
to the charging document and the jury instructions to determine whether all of the elements of generic burglary (an enumerated violent felony) were necessarily adjudicated in the state court.
The questions presented are:
1. Whether, where the defendant has pleaded guilty to a nongeneric charge of burglary brought under a nongeneric statute, there is no contemporaneous record of the guilty plea proceedings and the
judgment of conviction reflects a general finding of guilty, the sentencing court is still bound by Taylor's categorical method of application or may instead be required to conduct an
inquiry–including an evidentiary hearing–into the facts underlying the conviction, to determine whether, in the guilty plea proceeding, both the defendant and the government believed
that generic burglary was at issue.
2. If so, whether the sentencing court may be required to consider a version of these underlying facts found in any document in the court file such as an investigative police report or a complaint
application and, if the facts alleged in the document are not challenged by the defendant, regard them as sufficiently reliable evidence that the defendant was convicted of a crime including all of
the elements of generic burglary to support an Armed Career Criminal Act enhancement.
