Brown v. United States
The Supreme Court ruled that old state drug convictions can count as strikes under the Armed Career Criminal Act's 15-year mandatory minimum, even if the drug involved was later taken off the federal controlled-substance lists.
The decision means defendants sentenced for illegally possessing a firearm can still face sharply higher prison terms based on prior drug convictions, regardless of whether federal drug policy has since been updated to narrow or remove the substance those convictions involved.
How it got here: In both cases the federal district courts sentenced the defendants under ACCA; the Third and Eleventh Circuits each affirmed; the Supreme Court granted certiorari and consolidated the two cases.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Justin Brown had multiple Pennsylvania convictions from 2009 to 2014 for possessing marijuana with intent to distribute. Eugene Jackson had Florida convictions from 1998 and 2004 for cocaine possession and distribution. Both men were later convicted of illegally possessing a firearm as a convicted felon. At sentencing, prosecutors sought to trigger the Armed Career Criminal Act's 15-year mandatory minimum using those prior drug convictions, but by then Congress and federal regulators had each narrowed the federal definition of the relevant drugs so the federal and state definitions no longer matched.
The question before the Court
When a prior state drug conviction involved a substance that was later removed from federal controlled-substance lists, can that old conviction still be used to trigger the Armed Career Criminal Act's 15-year mandatory minimum prison sentence?
The Court's answer
Yes — the Court ruled that a prior state drug conviction counts as an Armed Career Criminal Act predicate if the drug involved was on the federal controlled-substance schedules when the defendant committed that state offense. It does not matter that the federal government later narrowed or removed the substance from those schedules.
The Court reasoned that ACCA is a backward-looking recidivist law: it gauges a defendant's dangerousness by examining the criminal history they actually built up, and that history does not disappear simply because the law was later amended. The Court also noted that reading ACCA otherwise would produce an anomaly — identical conduct prosecuted as a federal drug crime would remain a permanent predicate, while the same conduct prosecuted under an equivalent state law would lose its predicate status the moment federal drug policy changed, even for cases involving drugs like cocaine that remain fully controlled today.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
People with prior state drug convictions who are later caught illegally possessing a firearm can still receive the law's 15-year mandatory minimum even if Congress or federal regulators have since reclassified the drug from their old case. This affects defendants whose earlier convictions involved substances like certain marijuana or cocaine derivatives that federal rules have partially delisted, and it resolves a conflict among federal appeals courts on the question.
What changes now
Both Brown and Jackson will remain subject to ACCA's 15-year mandatory minimum sentences. Going forward, federal sentencing courts nationwide will apply the rule that a prior state drug conviction counts as an ACCA predicate when the drug involved appeared on federal controlled-substance schedules at the time of that state offense — regardless of any subsequent changes to those schedules. This resolves a split among the federal appeals courts and gives prosecutors and defense lawyers a clear time-of-conviction benchmark to apply.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether a state drug conviction should count when the drug was added to federal schedules only after the state crime occurred — a scenario the Court acknowledged its rule would exclude from ACCA's reach. The opinion also does not address any constitutional challenge to ACCA's mandatory minimum structure itself.
Concurrences and dissents
How the Justices voted
Majority (6). Justice Alito (author), joined by Justice Roberts, Justice Thomas, Justice Sotomayor, Justice Kavanaugh, and Justice Barrett.
Dissent (2). Justice Jackson (author), joined by Justice Kagan.
Dissent — Justice Jackson
Justice Jackson argued that the statute's text plainly answers the question: because ACCA cross-references the Controlled Substances Act's drug schedules — lists that are updated annually — a sentencing court must plug in the schedules in effect when the defendant committed the federal firearms offense, not some earlier version. She accused the majority of misreading McNeill, abandoning the categorical approach by focusing on what drugs the defendants actually handled rather than on statutory elements alone, and substituting its own policy judgment for Congress's decision to tie ACCA's mandatory minimum to current assessments of a drug's dangerousness. She would have held that neither Brown's nor Jackson's prior convictions qualified as ACCA predicates. Justice Kagan joined in full; Justice Gorsuch joined Parts I, II, and III but not Part IV (the statutory-purpose section). Read the full dissent →
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- ACCA is a recidivist sentencing law designed to gauge whether a defendant's criminal history reveals a pattern of serious drug or violent offending. The Court's 2011 decision in McNeill v. United States established that ACCA requires a 'backward-looking' inquiry into what the law said at the time of the prior offense — not at the time of the current sentencing — because the historical fact of the conviction, and what it says about the defendant's dangerousness, does not change just because the law is later amended.
- The Court applied that backward-looking framework to the drug-schedule question: a prior state drug conviction should be measured against the federal drug schedules in effect when the defendant committed the state crime. At that moment, both the state and federal law criminalized the same substance, meaning the state conviction matched the ACCA definition of a 'serious drug offense' — and that match is all the statute requires.
- The Court found additional support in ACCA's parallel definition for federal drug offenses, which asks simply whether the defendant was convicted of an offense under the Controlled Substances Act. A later change to the drug schedules does not retroactively undo a federal conviction, and the Court saw no reason to treat an equivalent state conviction differently. Reading the two back-to-back definitions in opposite ways would be anomalous.
- The Court rejected the argument that ACCA's present-tense phrasing ('involving … a controlled substance … as defined in') signals a present-day focus. The McNeill decision had already addressed and dismissed this exact argument, noting that legislative drafters are generally instructed to write in the present tense as a matter of style, not to signal a forward-looking or current-law inquiry.
- Jackson's reliance on the 'reference canon' — which can require courts to read a statutory cross-reference as incorporating current law — failed because the canon's own rules treat a reference to a specific statutory provision (here, 'section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act') as incorporating that provision as it existed when the cross-reference was enacted, not as it changes over time.
- Finally, the Court refused to apply the rule of lenity — a tie-breaker favoring criminal defendants when a statute is genuinely unclear — because context, precedent, and statutory purpose together made Congress's intent sufficiently clear. Lenity applies only when ambiguity persists after every interpretive tool has been exhausted, and the Court found that was not the case here.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms McNeill v. United States (563 U.S. 816)
The Court reaffirmed McNeill's backward-looking rule that ACCA looks to state law as it existed at the time of the prior offense.
Reaffirms Shular v. United States (589 U.S. 154)
The Court reaffirmed that the categorical approach requires matching a state drug definition to the federal definition under ACCA.