Wooden, SCOTUS on the ACCA, not so free and easy

The title of this post is my not-so-clever way of connecting the Supreme Court's new-Term opening case on the Armed Career Criminal Act to a depressing CSN&Y song.  The lyrics of the song "Wooden Ships" are only a bit more opaque than the language that SCOTUS has to sort out in Wooden v. US concerning the proper application of the severe sentencing mandatory minimum of the Armed Career Criminal Act.  Daniel Harawa at SCOTUSblog has a full preview of the case in this new post titled "What’s an “occasion”? Scope of Armed Career Criminal Act depends on the answer."  Here is an excerpt (with links from the original):

If you break into a storage facility and steal from 10 separate storage units, did you commit 10 offenses “on occasions different from one another”? The Supreme Court will answer this question in Wooden v. United States, yet another case concerning the scope of the Armed Career Criminal Act....

The federal government charged Wooden with being a felon in possession of a firearm — a crime for which the maximum punishment is 10 years’ imprisonment. The government also requested that Wooden be designated an armed career criminal under the Armed Career Criminal Act, in which case Wooden would be subject to a 15-year mandatory minimum.  To qualify as an armed career criminal, a defendant must have three prior “violent felony” or “serious drug offense” convictions.  Here, the government argued that Wooden’s 10 burglary convictions qualified as 10 “violent felonies” for ACCA purposes.  To constitute separate convictions under ACCA, the crimes must be “committed on occasions different from one another.”  Wooden argued that the 10 burglaries all occurred on the same “occasion,” and therefore counted for only one qualifying violent felony under ACCA.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit agreed with the government.  It held that the crimes were committed on separate “occasions” because Wooden “committed ten distinct acts of burglary.”  To the 6th Circuit, it was dispositive that “Wooden could not be in two (let alone ten) of [the storage units] at once.”  Much like the 6th Circuit, other circuits had held that crimes are committed on different “occasions” for ACCA purposes when they are committed “successively rather than simultaneously,” as in United States v. Carter, an 11th Circuit case.  Other circuits, however, looked beyond temporality and instead considered whether the crimes were committed under sufficiently different circumstances.  The 2nd Circuit, for instance, “distinguish[ed] between the defendant who simply commits several offenses in a connected chain of events and the defendant who … commits multiple crimes separated by substantial effort and reflection.” The Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve this split.

Before the Supreme Court both Wooden and the government argue that ACCA’s structure, history, and purpose support their position.