Background
Following a two-day trial in January two thousand twenty-three, a jury convicted Tarrell Leshaun Williams of possession of a firearm by a felon in violation of Section eighteen of the United States Code, Section nine hundred twenty-two, subsection G. At sentencing, the district court found that Williams qualified as an armed career criminal pursuant to the Armed Career Criminal Act, Section eighteen of the United States Code, Section nine hundred twenty-four, subsection E. The district court imposed a one hundred eighty-month sentence. On appeal, Williams argued that his ACCA designation should have been determined by the jury, not the district court, and that he did not commit three predicate crimes on different occasions.
The court’s reasoning
The court acknowledged that following the Supreme Court’s decision in Erlinger versus the United States, the district court erred in deciding that Williams’s ACCA predicate convictions involved crimes committed on occasions different from one another rather than submitting the question to the jury. The court noted that a jury must make the different occasions finding unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt. However, the court found this error harmless because the government demonstrated that proof of the missing fact was overwhelming and uncontroverted. Williams’s presentence report established that the qualifying predicate crimes occurred on at least three separate dates between May one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine and March two thousand fourteen with no legally significant connection. The court concluded that no reasonable jury could have found that the predicate crimes were committed on the same occasion.
What it means going forward
This decision reinforces that while the different-occasions element of the Armed Career Criminal Act must be found by a jury, errors in failing to submit this question to a jury may be deemed harmless if the record contains overwhelming evidence that the crimes occurred on separate occasions.