United States v. Ressam
The Court ruled that a man caught trying to smuggle explosives into the U.S. for a planned bombing could also be convicted under a law adding a mandatory 10 years for carrying explosives "during" a felony, because he lied to a customs officer at the same time he was carrying the explosives.
The decision rejects a requirement, adopted by a lower court, that the explosives-carrying and the underlying crime be meaningfully connected — holding instead that simple timing overlap is enough to trigger the extra sentence.
How it got here: Ressam was convicted at trial; the Ninth Circuit vacated his explosives-during-a-felony conviction; the government asked the Supreme Court to review that ruling.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Ahmed Ressam tried to enter the United States by ferry with explosives hidden in his rental car, intending to bomb the Los Angeles airport. When questioned by a customs officer, he lied about his identity and nationality on a customs form. Officials later found the explosives during a car search. He was convicted of lying to customs and of carrying explosives during that felony.
The question before the Court
If someone carries explosives while committing a completely unrelated federal crime, does a law adding 10 years for carrying explosives "during" a felony still apply?
The Court's answer
Yes — even without any connection between the explosives and the crime, simply carrying explosives at the same time as committing a federal felony is enough to trigger the extra 10-year sentence under this law. The Court read the word "during" in its plain, everyday sense, meaning only that the two things overlapped in time. Because Ressam was carrying explosives at the exact moment he lied to a customs officer, that timing alone satisfied the statute.
The Court also traced the law's history: an identical companion statute for firearms was amended in 1984 to add "and in relation to," creating an explicit connection requirement, but Congress later revised the explosives statute without adding that same language. That deliberate difference convinced the Court that Congress meant the explosives law to require only timing, not a relationship between the explosives and the felony.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Federal prosecutors gain a broader tool: anyone who happens to be carrying explosives — even lawfully, like a farmer with fertilizer or a hunter with gunpowder — while committing any unrelated federal felony can now face an automatic extra 10-year sentence, without prosecutors having to prove the explosives had anything to do with the crime.
What changes now
Because this is a final merits ruling, the Ninth Circuit's decision striking the explosives-during-a-felony conviction is reversed, meaning that conviction should be reinstated on remand. The ruling settles a circuit split, since the Third and Fifth Circuits had already rejected any relational requirement, aligning federal courts nationwide on a purely temporal reading of the statute.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide how broadly the term "explosive" itself should be defined, since Ressam conceded the items in his car qualified; it left open, as the dissent flagged, whether ordinary materials like gasoline or fertilizer could count as explosives in a future case.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas agreed with the outcome and with the majority's plain-language reading in Part I, but declined to join the majority's discussion of the statute's legislative history in Parts II and III, saying the statute's text alone was enough to resolve the case.
Dissent — Justice Breyer
“I cannot imagine why Congress would have wanted the presence of totally irrelevant, lawful behavior to trigger an additional 10-year mandatory prison term.”Breyer's objection that the majority's reading could punish people for unrelated lawful conduct.
Justice Breyer argued that neither the majority's pure timing test nor the Ninth Circuit's strict facilitation test was right. He reasoned that context shows 'during' implies some relationship between the explosives and the felony, so someone lawfully carrying explosives during a completely unrelated crime shouldn't face the extra 10 years. But he also thought the relationship could run either direction — the felony facilitating the explosives-carrying, or vice versa — and would have sent the case back for that determination.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court read the statutory word "during" in its plain, ordinary sense as requiring only a temporal link — that the explosives-carrying and the felony happened at the same time — not any deeper connection between the two.
- It noted the explosives-carrying statute was originally modeled word-for-word on a similar firearms statute, both requiring only that the weapon be carried 'during' the underlying felony.
- The Court observed that when Congress amended the firearms statute in 1984, it added the words 'and in relation to' after 'during,' explicitly creating a connection requirement that had not existed in the earlier text.
- By contrast, when Congress amended the explosives statute in 1988, it removed the word 'unlawfully' but did not add 'and in relation to,' even though it was revising a nearly identical companion statute at roughly the same time.
- The Court concluded that this deliberate difference in wording meant Congress chose not to add a connection requirement to the explosives statute, so only simultaneous timing is needed to satisfy the law as written.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes United States v. Stewart (779 F. 2d 538)
The Court found Stewart's reasoning about the older firearms statute did not carry over to the differently worded explosives statute.