McNeill v. United States

Oral argument

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Source: CourtListener oral-argument corpus (CC0).

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that state’s subsequent lowering of punishment for crime of prior conviction did not render conviction inapplicable to Federal Armed Career Criminal Act
• holding that a sentencing court applying the Armed Career Criminal Act must conduct a “backward-looking” inquiry into prior convictions, meaning the court must “consult the law that applied at the time of th[ose] conviction[s]”
• noting that in “assessing” a previous offense, the Court “con- sulted” the “statutes and penalties that applied at the time of” the defendant’s conviction
• noting that the Court has “repeatedly looked to the historical statute of conviction in the context of vio- lent felonies”
• finding that the \plain text\ of a sentencing enhancement required courts to look to the state of the law at the time of the conviction irrespective of any subsequent amendments
• noting that questions regarding the scope of past crimes in the context of the ACCA “can only be answered by reference to the law under which the defendant was convicted”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).