Supreme Court of the United States · 2005-04-26
Case and law context
Role: applied; posture: criminal; guilty plea reserving the claim that a foreign conviction is not a 922(g)(1) predicate; district court and CA3 rejected the claim; certiorari by the defendant; result: claimant-lost; claim: (g)(1)
Instances and excluded annotation blocks
| Case | Element | Holding and scope | Variant | Exact source quotations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| /us/544/0385-01 — Supreme Court of the United States · 2005 | Actual or constructive possession | not_reached Excluded from merits counts applied / merits claim: (g)(1) After release Small bought a gun from a Pennsylvania dealer and pleaded guilty; possession was not in dispute. | Unspecified variant | No source quotation recorded for this block. |
| /us/544/0385-01 — Supreme Court of the United States · 2005 | Conviction punishable by more than one year | not Counted merits instance applied / merits basis: law; claim: (g)(1); opinion: majority; subject: opinion=majority The only predicate was a Japanese conviction; "any court" is read with an assumption of domestic reach (akin to, but not, the presumption against extraterritoriality), supported by anomalies a foreign reading would create in 921(a)(20), 921(a)(33) and 924(e). The length of the foreign sentence is irrelevant once the court is foreign. | convicted-in-any-court/foreign-court-conviction | In 1994 petitioner, Gary Small, was convicted in a Japanese court of having tried to smuggle several pistols, a rifle, and ammunition into Japan.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_544.jsonl#/us/544/0385-01; Unicode character offsets [571:716] (end exclusive); SHA-256 1060dfdb181f03e6cd7c6634b2c1b274d424bfaa84320732c16c9078e0948c62.Small was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_544.jsonl#/us/544/0385-01; Unicode character offsets [717:765] (end exclusive); SHA-256 1060dfdb181f03e6cd7c6634b2c1b274d424bfaa84320732c16c9078e0948c62.We consequently assume a congressional intent that the phrase “convicted in any court” applies domestically, not extraterri-torially.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_544.jsonl#/us/544/0385-01; Unicode character offsets [7904:8037] (end exclusive); SHA-256 1060dfdb181f03e6cd7c6634b2c1b274d424bfaa84320732c16c9078e0948c62.Thus, the key statutory phrase “convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year” somewhat less reliably identifies dangerous individuals for the purposes of U. S. law where foreign convictions, rather than domestic convictions, are at issue.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_544.jsonl#/us/544/0385-01; Unicode character offsets [6334:6619] (end exclusive); SHA-256 1060dfdb181f03e6cd7c6634b2c1b274d424bfaa84320732c16c9078e0948c62.we conclude that the phrase “convicted in any court” refers only to domestic courts, not to foreign courts.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_544.jsonl#/us/544/0385-01; Unicode character offsets [15090:15197] (end exclusive); SHA-256 1060dfdb181f03e6cd7c6634b2c1b274d424bfaa84320732c16c9078e0948c62.For these reasons, the judgment of the Third Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_544.jsonl#/us/544/0385-01; Unicode character offsets [15287:15431] (end exclusive); SHA-256 1060dfdb181f03e6cd7c6634b2c1b274d424bfaa84320732c16c9078e0948c62. |
| /us/544/0385-01 — Supreme Court of the United States · 2005 | Conviction punishable by more than one year | satisfied Excluded from merits counts applied / dissent basis: law; claim: (g)(1); opinion: Thomas, J., dissenting (joined by Scalia and Kennedy, JJ.); subject: opinion=Thomas, J., dissenting (joined by Scalia and Kennedy, JJ.) Dissent reads "any court" literally to include foreign courts. | convicted-in-any-court/foreign-court-conviction | Gary Small, having recently emerged from three years in Japanese prison for illegally importing weapons into that country, bought a gun in the United States.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_544.jsonl#/us/544/0385-01; Unicode character offsets [15591:15748] (end exclusive); SHA-256 1060dfdb181f03e6cd7c6634b2c1b274d424bfaa84320732c16c9078e0948c62.In concluding that “any” means not what it says, but rather “a subset of any,” the Court distorts the plain meaning of the statute and departs from established principles of statutory construction.Source: docroot/ir/caselaw/us_544.jsonl#/us/544/0385-01; Unicode character offsets [16153:16350] (end exclusive); SHA-256 1060dfdb181f03e6cd7c6634b2c1b274d424bfaa84320732c16c9078e0948c62. |
Court interpretations recorded from this case
interpretation
We hold that the phrase encompasses only domestic, not foreign, convictions.
/us/544/0385-01 — Supreme Court of the United States · 2005
We hold that the phrase encompasses only domestic, not foreign, convictions.Source:
docroot/ir/caselaw/us_544.jsonl#/us/544/0385-01; Unicode character offsets [492:568] (end exclusive); SHA-256 1060dfdb181f03e6cd7c6634b2c1b274d424bfaa84320732c16c9078e0948c62.McAdory applies the Ninth Circuit rule to Washington mandatory sentencing ranges; the actual sentence served alone is not the test, nor is the state felony label conclusive. Small, 544 U.S. 385, 387 (2005), judicially construes convicted in any court in section 922(g)(1) to exclude foreign convictions; this is not a textual exclusion enacted in section 921(a)(20).