Supreme Court of the United States · 2009-02-24
Case and law context
Role: applied; posture: criminal; motion to dismiss the indictment denied, conditional guilty plea; CA4 reversed (predicate offense must have a domestic-relationship element); certiorari by the United States on the meaning of "misdemeanor crime of domestic violence" in 921(a)(33)(A); result: claimant-won; claim: (g)(9)
Instances and excluded annotation blocks
| Case | Element | Holding and scope | Variant | Exact source quotations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| /us/555/0415-01 — Supreme Court of the United States · 2009 | Actual or constructive possession | not_reached Excluded from merits counts applied / merits claim: (g)(9) Officers found a rifle in Hayes's home on a consent search and learned of other recent firearms; three possession counts; not contested in this opinion. | Unspecified variant | No source quotation recorded for this block. |
| /us/555/0415-01 — Supreme Court of the United States · 2009 | Misdemeanor crime of domestic violence | satisfied Counted merits instance applied / merits basis: pleaded; claim: (g)(9) The indictment was sufficient as charged: a generic battery conviction qualifies when the victim was in fact a spouse or other listed relation. Only the use-of-force requirement must be an element of the predicate statute; the domestic relationship is a fact the Government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt in the 922(g)(9) prosecution itself. Whether the relationship was actually proved was not before the Court (conditional plea on the indictment's allegations). | predicate-offense-definition/generic-battery-conviction-with-domestic-victim-in-fact | The indictment identified Hayes’s predicate misdemeanor crime of domestic violence as a 1994 conviction for battery in violation of West Virginia law.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_555.jsonl#/us/555/0415-01; Unicode character offsets [1542:1692] (end exclusive); SHA-256 3a7a3039ef9688b8d4c2536bed0b3955aac1c4369fca644134b99ecce9c9e3a5.The victim of that battery, the indictment alleged, was Hayes’s then-wife — a person who “shared a child in common” with Hayes and “who was cohabitating with ... him as a spouse.”Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_555.jsonl#/us/555/0415-01; Unicode character offsets [1693:1872] (end exclusive); SHA-256 3a7a3039ef9688b8d4c2536bed0b3955aac1c4369fca644134b99ecce9c9e3a5.The West Virginia statute under which he was convicted in 1994, Hayes observed, was a generic battery proscription, not a law designating a domestic relationship between offender and victim as an element of the offense.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_555.jsonl#/us/555/0415-01; Unicode character offsets [2208:2427] (end exclusive); SHA-256 3a7a3039ef9688b8d4c2536bed0b3955aac1c4369fca644134b99ecce9c9e3a5.Instead, in a § 922(g)(9) prosecution, it suffices for the Government to charge and prove a prior conviction that was, in fact, for “an offense . . . committed by” the defendant against a spouse or other domestic victim.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_555.jsonl#/us/555/0415-01; Unicode character offsets [4995:5215] (end exclusive); SHA-256 3a7a3039ef9688b8d4c2536bed0b3955aac1c4369fca644134b99ecce9c9e3a5.To obtain a conviction in a § 922(g)(9) prosecution, the Government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the victim of the predicate offense was the defendant’s current or former spouse or was related to the defendant in another specified way. But that relationship, while it must be established, need not be denominated an element of the predicate offense.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_555.jsonl#/us/555/0415-01; Unicode character offsets [12793:13155] (end exclusive); SHA-256 3a7a3039ef9688b8d4c2536bed0b3955aac1c4369fca644134b99ecce9c9e3a5.In line with the large majority of the Courts of Appeals, we conclude that § 921(a)(33)(A) does not require a predicate-offense statute of that specificity.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_555.jsonl#/us/555/0415-01; Unicode character offsets [4838:4994] (end exclusive); SHA-256 3a7a3039ef9688b8d4c2536bed0b3955aac1c4369fca644134b99ecce9c9e3a5.For the reasons stated, the judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_555.jsonl#/us/555/0415-01; Unicode character offsets [19171:19360] (end exclusive); SHA-256 3a7a3039ef9688b8d4c2536bed0b3955aac1c4369fca644134b99ecce9c9e3a5. |
Court interpretations recorded from this case
interpretation
We hold that the domestic relationship, although it must be established beyond a reasonable doubt in a § 922(g)(9) firearms possession prosecution, need not be a defining element of the predicate offense.
/us/555/0415-01 — Supreme Court of the United States · 2009
We hold that the domestic relationship, although it must be established beyond a reasonable doubt in a § 922(g)(9) firearms possession prosecution, need not be a defining element of the predicate offense.Source:
docroot/ir/caselaw/us_555.jsonl#/us/555/0415-01; Unicode character offsets [758:962] (end exclusive); SHA-256 3a7a3039ef9688b8d4c2536bed0b3955aac1c4369fca644134b99ecce9c9e3a5.