SCOTUS Takes Pro se Challenge to ACCA

The ABA Journal reports that last week the U.S. Supreme Court accepted Wooden v. United States for review.   The case involves a defendant’s pro se appeal of his enhanced sentence under the federal Armed Career Criminal Act.  William Wooden, a habitual felon, was arrested in November of 2014 for being a felon in possession of a firearm. Due to Wooden’s prior convictions; a 1989 conviction of aggravated assault, a 1997 conviction for ten burglaries, and a 2005 conviction for burglary, he was sentenced to 15 years.  In December of 2019 the Sixth Circuit upheld his conviction and sentence, rejecting Wooden’s claim that the 1997 burglaries, where he burglarized ten mini storage warehouses located at a single property, should only count as a single burglary.

The Sixth Circuit disposed of this claim with its 2006 holding in United States v. Hill finding that “using Hill as a yardstick, the same must be true for Wooden, who was convicted of burglarizing ten individual warehouses (rather than one storage business), and thus infringing upon ten distinct sets of property rights.”

That specific issue will be the subject of the Supreme Court’s inquiry.