Delligatti v. United States
The Supreme Court ruled that intentionally causing death or serious injury through deliberate inaction — such as a parent who refuses to feed a child — counts as a 'crime of violence' under the federal law that adds mandatory prison time for using a gun, just as much as causing harm through a direct violent act.
The decision closes off a legal escape route that some defendants had used to argue that their underlying crime did not qualify as 'violent' because the relevant state law technically allowed conviction for doing nothing rather than for actively striking a victim.
“The knowing or intentional causation of injury or death, whether by act or omission, necessarily involves the use of physical force against another person.”
The majority's core holding: deliberate inaction that causes death or injury counts as 'use of physical force' under the federal firearms sentencing law.
How it got here: A federal trial court denied Delligatti's motion to dismiss the gun charge before trial; a jury convicted him; the Second Circuit affirmed; Delligatti asked the Supreme Court to hear the case and the Court agreed.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Salvatore Delligatti, an associate of the Genovese crime family, was hired to kill a man suspected of being a police informant. He recruited street gang members to carry out the killing and handed them a loaded revolver. Police discovered the plot before anyone was hurt and arrested the gang members. The government charged Delligatti with carrying a firearm during a "crime of violence" — using his attempted murder charge under a federal racketeering law as the predicate offense. Delligatti argued that New York's second-degree murder law doesn't qualify as a "crime of violence" because under New York law a person can commit murder by doing nothing, not just by acting violently.
The question before the Court
Can a murder committed by deliberate inaction — failing to fulfill a legal duty — count as a "crime of violence" that triggers the mandatory five-year sentence for carrying a gun under federal law?
The Court's answer
Yes — the Court held that intentionally causing death or injury, whether through an affirmative act or by deliberately doing nothing, necessarily involves the "use of physical force" under the federal firearms sentencing law's definition of "crime of violence." The Court extended its earlier ruling in United States v. Castleman, which established that knowingly causing bodily harm always involves the use of physical force. Even though the firearms sentencing law demands a higher level of force than the battery standard discussed in Castleman, any force that actually causes death or injury qualifies — and that principle applies whether the harm is caused by action or inaction.
The Court also rejected the argument that doing nothing cannot constitute a "use" of force "against" another person. Just as a person can use darkness as cover by lying still, a person who deliberately allows a child to be poisoned uses the harmful substance against the child. Because New York's second-degree murder law requires intentionally causing death — which under this framework always involves physical force — it qualifies as a "crime of violence," and Delligatti's mandatory five-year sentence for the gun charge stands.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Defendants in federal gun cases will no longer be able to avoid the mandatory five-year sentencing add-on by pointing to the theoretical possibility that the underlying state crime could be committed by omission rather than action. Prosecutors in cases involving murder, assault, or other cause-and-result crimes paired with firearm charges retain the enhancement even when the state statute reaches omission-based conduct.
What changes now
Delligatti's conviction and 25-year sentence are upheld. Going forward, defendants in federal firearms cases cannot escape the mandatory five-year sentencing enhancement by arguing that the underlying state murder or violent-crime law technically reaches omission-based conduct. Courts applying the categorical approach to similar state statutes will follow this ruling. One open question — whether a federal racketeering murder charge can be a "crime of violence" even if the underlying state offense is not — was expressly left unresolved.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether a federal racketeering murder offense can qualify as a "crime of violence" even when its underlying state predicate offense does not. It also left open whether the phrase "against the person or property of another" in the elements clause imposes a separate mens rea requirement beyond identifying the target of force.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Gorsuch
“Section 924(c)(3)(A) may reach many crimes, but it does not reach crimes of omission.”The dissent's central objection: the statute's text requires active use of violent physical force and cannot cover offenses committed by doing nothing.
Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Jackson, argued that the statute's text forecloses the majority's result. The word 'use' has an 'active meaning' requiring affirmative employment of force, not mere inaction. 'Physical force' demands a violent, extreme physical act — not pre-existing natural forces allowed to run their course. The dissent faulted the majority for leaning on Castleman and Stokeling while ignoring contrary precedents, and for substituting guesses about congressional purpose for the express statutory definition Congress wrote. Justice Gorsuch also invoked the rule of lenity as a tiebreaker in the defendant's favor.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the 'categorical approach' to decide whether New York second-degree murder qualifies as a 'crime of violence' under §924(c)(3)(A)'s elements clause. Under this approach, courts do not look at what the specific defendant actually did; instead, they ask whether the offense as defined always requires the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force. If the offense can theoretically be committed without any such force, it falls outside the definition — which is exactly what Delligatti argued.
- The Court started from its 2014 decision in United States v. Castleman, which held that 'the knowing or intentional causation of bodily injury necessarily involves the use of physical force' under a related federal gun statute prohibiting domestic-violence misdemeanants from owning firearms. In Castleman, the Court reasoned that it is impossible to cause bodily injury without applying force, and that deliberately applying force is a 'use' of force — even when the harm is caused indirectly, like slipping poison into a drink.
- The Court then asked whether Castleman's principle carries over to §924(c), which requires 'violent force' — a higher bar than the light touching sufficient for common-law battery that Castleman addressed. Drawing on its 2019 decision in Stokeling v. United States (which held that violent force encompasses the force required for common-law robbery), the Court concluded that any application of force that actually causes injury or death satisfies the violent-force standard. Because indirect methods of causing harm — robbery by sedative, battery by poison — meet the bar, the distinction between battery-level force and violent force is irrelevant to the omission question.
- The Court then confronted Delligatti's core argument: that a person who commits murder by omission — say, a parent who refuses to feed a child — is not the 'actual cause' of death but only a legal-fiction cause. The Court rejected this, applying the standard but-for test for causation: if the victim's death would not have occurred but for the defendant's deliberate choice not to act, the defendant is the actual cause, just as surely as if he had administered poison directly.
- The Court next addressed whether doing nothing can constitute a 'use' of force 'against' another person. Looking to ordinary meaning, the Court found that people routinely 'use' things through deliberate inaction — a car owner uses the rain to wash his car by leaving it outside; a fugitive uses darkness by lying still. A mother who lets a child drink bleach to accomplish the child's death similarly 'uses' the bleach's harmful properties. The phrase 'against another' merely requires that another person be the conscious target of the force, which is always true when someone deliberately causes another's death.
- Finally, the Court read the elements clause in light of the ordinary meaning of 'crime of violence,' the term it defines. Intentional murder is the archetypal crime of violence, and it has long covered both act-based and omission-based killing. At the time Congress enacted the elements clause in 1986, at least 33 states defined criminal liability to include deliberate omissions, and leading criminal-law treatises treated act and omission as equivalent. An interpretation that excludes traditional murder from the definition of 'crime of violence' would produce an unreasonable result the Court declined to reach.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms United States v. Castleman (572 U. S. 157)
The Court extends Castleman's principle — that causing bodily harm always involves physical force — to §924(c)'s higher violent-force standard.
Reaffirms Stokeling v. United States (586 U. S. 73)
Relied upon to confirm that any force actually causing injury or death, even applied indirectly, qualifies as violent force under §924(c).