Sawed-off Shotguns, Violence, and the Law

The Supreme Court will hear a case on shotgun-related crime sentencing from Miami.
Image: Unsplash

Should owning a sawed-off shotgun be considered a violent crime under sentencing guidelines for career offenders? That’s the question that will face the Supreme Court as they deal with a case brought by Miami Federal Public Defender Michael Caruso. The case has the potential to shorten the prison terms of thousands of people.

This one is all about the standards set in previous cases. In Johnson v. United States, for example, the residual clause of the sentencing law in these cases was found to be too vague to be helpful. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the 8-1 majority that it “fails to give ordinary people fair notice of the conduct it punishes.”

“Justice Scalia was an important advocate for the rights of the accused in several significant areas of criminal law,” noted Kendall Coffey of Coffey Burlington in Miami. “Best known was Scalia’s success in jettisoning the sentencing guidelines as binding upon federal judges, but his decision in Johnson also represented a defense victory.”

The official decision in Johnson v. United States concurred with Scalia’s warning, noting that the residual clause was “so standardless that it invit[ed] arbitrary enforcement.” In fact, the court found that that residual clause, which increased the sentencing of some offenders, actually violated the Fifth Amendment.

The findings of Johnson v. United States led to a rush of convicts seeking to lessen their sentences. They were given a one-year filing window, ending on June 26, 2016, to put their cases into motion.

As public defender in Miami, Caruso led the charge to get hearings. In addition, he arranged for a seminar on the finer points of the confused law so that private attorneys would know how to deal with it and help their clients get their appeals in on time.

Unfortunately, policy has gotten in the way: Filing more than one attack on a sentence meant the appellate court had to sign off on it before a trial could start. With so many trials requested on such a challenging topic, many were turned away.

“Now it is coming to light that some prisoners who made timely applications to seek relief in district court were mistakenly turned away by ours,” Judge Beverly Martin commented. “If even a single one of these orders was mistaken, then a prisoner has been doomed to serve an unlawful prison sentence.”

Caruso and his team are hoping the Supreme Court will be able to sift through the mess and put together a more hopeful future for the prisoners struggling with sentencing from the original law.