Supreme Court to Decide Reach of 3-Strikes Law

Published on November 21, 2023

The Supreme Court will consider whether a judge or a jury gets to decide if criminal defendants’ prior convictions justify enhanced sentencing under a federal three-strikes law. The case, Erlinger v. United States (court file 23-370), is the second Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) case the court has agreed to hear in its current term, which began in October. The court is expected to decide if the Constitution requires juries to go through fact-based inquiries to figure out if a defendant has committed multiple prior offenses on separate occasions and therefore qualifies for an enhanced sentence under the ACCA. The ACCA states that a mandatory minimum sentence and, in some cases, a life sentence, should be imposed when a defendant has three prior qualifying convictions that were “committed on occasions different from one another.”...

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