United States v. Davis
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 24, 2019 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Decided
- June 24, 2019
- Term
- October Term 2018
- Vote
- 5–4
- Majority author
- Justice Gorsuch
- Issue area
- Due Process
- Disposition
- Affirmed and reversed (or vacated) in part and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
- Constitutional ruling
- Federal law held unconstitutional
Opinion excerpt
Justice GORSUCH delivered the opinion of the Court. In our constitutional order, a vague law is no law at all. Only the people's elected representatives in Congress have the power to write new federal criminal laws. And when Congress exercises that power, it has to write statutes that give ordinary people fair warning about what the law demands of them. Vague laws transgress both of those constitutional requirements. They hand off the legislature's responsibility for defining criminal behavior to unelected prosecutors and judges, and they leave people with no sure way to know what consequences will attach to their conduct. When Congress passes a vague law, the role of courts under our Constitution is not to fashion a new, clearer law to take its place, but to treat the law as a nullity and invite Congress to try again. Today we apply these principles to 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). That statute threatens long prison sentences for anyone who uses a firearm in connection with certain other federal crimes. But which other federal crimes? The statute's residual clause points to those felonies "that by [their] nature, involv[e] a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense." § 924(c)(3)(B). Even the government admits that this language, read in the way nearly everyone (including the government) has long…
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