Supreme Court grants cert on application of Sixth Amendment rights for key issue for applying ACCA

In this post two weeks ago, I flagged the Supreme Court filing by the United States in response to a cert petition in an Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) case in Erlinger v. US, No. 23-370.  In that post, I noted the feds wanted cert granted in this case:

Petitioner [contends] that the Sixth Amendment requires a jury to find (or a defendant to admit) that predicate offenses were committed on different occasions under the ACCA. In light of this Court’s recent articulation of the standard for determining whether offenses occurred on different occasions in Wooden v. United States, 595 U.S. 360 (2022), the government agrees with that contention. Although the government has opposed previous petitions raising this issue, recent developments make clear that this Court’s intervention is necessary to ensure that the circuits correctly recognize defendants’ constitutional rights in this context.  This case presents a suitable vehicle for deciding the issue this Term and thereby providing the timely guidance that the issue requires. 

This morning, via this order list, the Supreme Court granted cert in Erlinger. Here is the formal Question Presented from the federal government’s cert petition:

Whether the Constitution requires that a jury find (or the defendant admit) that a defendant’s predicate offenses were “committed on occasions different from one another” before the defendant may be sentenced under the Armed Career Criminal Act of 1984, 18 U.S.C. 924(e)(1).

And though this case deals with a relatively little issue in the application of ACCA, I cannot help but wonder if this case could prove to be a big Sixth Amendment case.  Notably, we have not had a significant Sixth Amendment case on sentencing issues before SCOTUS since Haymond, and that was before Justices Barrett and Jackson were member of the Court. Moreover, as I noted in my prior post, Justice Thomas has suggested that he disagrees with the entire prior-conviction exception to Sixth Amendment rights (on originalist grounds), so maybe this ACCA issue could even provide the Court an opportunity to reconsider that (historically suspect) exception altogether.

I assume Erlinger v. United States, will get argued in the spring and may end up one of the last (small?) cases to get decided by the Justices this Term.  I also expect that SCOTUS will end up appointing someone to defend the Seventh Circuit’s decision below since both the feds and the defendant here have the same (pro-defendant) view of this issue.