AMBRO, Circuit Judge.
Gregory Garrett Brown appeals the decision of the District Court enhancing his sentence on a finding that he is a career offender. For that finding, the Court followed the approach set out by our Court in United States v. Mahone, 662 F.3d 651 (3d Cir.2011). Brown contends the Supreme Court's decision in Descamps v. United States, ___ U.S. ___, 133 S.Ct. 2276, 186 L.Ed.2d 438 (2013), overrules Mahone. At
In 2010, while serving time in state custody for another offense, Brown mailed a threatening letter to Magistrate Judge Susan Baxter. Judge Baxter presided over the earlier dismissal of Brown's habeas petition. In the letter, Brown intimated that upon his release from custody he planned to kill Judge Baxter and former District Judge Sean McLaughlin. Following an investigation, Brown pled guilty to mailing a threatening communication in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 876(c).
A presentence investigation report ("PSR") recommended, among other things, that Brown be sentenced pursuant to the career offender enhancement in the United States Sentencing Guidelines. That enhancement applies to a defendant convicted under § 876(c) if he has "at least two prior felony convictions of either a crime of violence or a controlled substance offense." U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1(a). The PSR's recommendation was based on four prior offenses in Brown's criminal history: (1) a 1986 conviction for aggravated assault, in violation of 18 Pa. Cons.Stat. § 2702; (2) a 2004 conviction for making terroristic threats, in violation of 18 Pa. Cons.Stat. § 2706; (3) a 2005 conviction also for making terroristic threats, in violation of § 2706; and (4) a 2005 conviction for retaliating against a judicial officer, in violation of 18 Pa. Cons.Stat. § 4953.1. The two 2005 convictions arose from the same conduct.
A pair of concessions by the parties limited the dispute at sentencing and similarly limits the breadth of our review on appeal: Brown concedes that his 1986 conviction qualifies as a crime of violence for purposes of the enhancement, and the Government does not contend that the 2005 retaliation conviction so qualifies. Thus the parties' arguments at sentencing focused on whether either of Brown's two convictions for making terroristic threats in violation of § 2706 counted as qualifying (called predicate) offenses for purposes of the enhancement.
The definitional part of the Pennsylvania statute divides violations into three categories, only the first of which — § 2706(a)(1) — can be a predicate offense. That Brown's convictions, the Government contended, were predicate offenses was conclusively decided by an earlier case, United States v. Mahone, 662 F.3d 651 (3d Cir.2011), which held that some, but not all, violations of subsection (a)(1) were predicate offenses and that a sentencing judge may inquire further to determine if the facts of a prior conviction qualified. Among other arguments, Brown countered that Mahone is no longer controlling in light of Descamps v. United States, ___ U.S. ___, 133 S.Ct. 2276, 186 L.Ed.2d 438 (2013), in which the Supreme Court held that a sentencing court may not look to the facts underlying a prior conviction but instead must look to its elements.
Before the sentencing hearing, Judge Cohill issued tentative findings rejecting Brown's argument. Relying on Mahone, he concluded that a violation of subsection (a)(1) was a crime of violence (thus a predicate offense under the Guidelines) and that the documents underlying Brown's conviction demonstrated that he was convicted under that subsection in 2004. He also determined that the 2005 terroristic threats conviction did not qualify as a predicate offense because the documents supporting that conviction did not definitively establish under which subsection of the statute Brown was convicted. Addressing the effect of Descamps, Judge
The District Court had jurisdiction pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3231. We exercise appellate jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 and 18 U.S.C. § 3742. "Whether a prior conviction constitutes a crime of violence for purposes of the career offender Guideline is a question of law over which we exercise plenary review." United States v. Marrero, 743 F.3d 389, 393 (3d Cir.2014).
On appeal, Brown contends that the career offender enhancement did not apply to him because he has only one predicate "crime of violence" in his criminal history (the 1986 aggravated assault conviction) and the Guidelines require two predicate offenses for the enhancement to apply. The Government responds that either the 2004 or the 2005 terroristic threats conviction supplies the necessary second predicate offense. Brown asserts that his convictions under the Pennsylvania terroristic threats statute are not "crimes of violence" as defined by the Guidelines.
We conclude that, in light of the Supreme Court's explanation in Descamps, Brown's convictions under 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 2706 are not "crimes of violence" for purposes of the Guidelines' career offender enhancement. In effect, Descamps abrogated the portion of Mahone that held otherwise.
Under the Guidelines, the career offender enhancement applies to a defendant if:
U.S.S.G. § 4B1.1(a). The issue here is the third criterion — whether the 2004 (or 2005) conviction is a "crime of violence." How we go about deciding that issue, and what we can consider in doing so, takes up much of what follows.
The Guidelines define a "crime of violence" in relevant part as any crime punishable by more than a year of imprisonment that "has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person of another." U.S.S.G. § 4B1.2(a)(1).
However, there is a "narrow range of cases" whereby a court can look beyond the fact of conviction and examine certain record evidence from the conviction to determine whether the prior offense is a crime of violence. Taylor, 495 U.S. at 602, 110 S.Ct. 2143. In Descamps, the Supreme Court explained that when a statute is "divisible" — i.e., "comprises multiple, alternative versions of the crime" — a sentencing court may look to a limited class of extra-statutory documents to determine which version of the offense was the basis of conviction. 133 S.Ct. at 2284. This is known as the "modified categorical approach." Id. at 2283. Under this approach, if a statute is divisible, a court may consult "the charging paper and jury instructions" when the conviction resulted from a jury trial, Taylor, 495 U.S. at 602, 110 S.Ct. 2143, or, when the conviction resulted from a guilty plea, "the charging
It bears repeating that the modified categorical approach is "applicable only to divisible statutes." Id.; accord id. at 2285 ("[T]he modified approach merely helps implement the categorical approach when a defendant was convicted of violating a divisible statute."). In Descamps, for example, the Supreme Court held that the modified approach could not be applied to the California burglary statute at issue because it had a "single, indivisible set of elements." Id. at 2282. To explain the difference between a divisible and indivisible statute, and why the modified categorical approach may be used only with the former, the Court imagined a hypothetical assault statute that simply required the "use of a `weapon,'" as opposed to a specific list of weapons. Id. at 2289 (internal quotation marks omitted). Including a "weapon" as an element of the crime makes the statute indivisible because it creates only an "implied list" of the ways the offense may be committed rather than an explicit list of ways to commit the crime. Id. (emphasis in original). A sentencing court should not examine extra-statutory documents (such as a charging document or guilty plea) and find that a defendant committed a predicate gun crime based on a conviction under such an indivisible statute because,
Id. at 2290.
By contrast, a statute is "divisible" when it "list[s] potential offense elements in the alternative." Id. at 2283. For example, continuing with the Supreme Court's hypothetical, it considered for analysis an assault statute that prohibits assault with a "gun, axe, sword, baton, slingshot, knife, machete, bat," "grenade[], pipe bomb[], spear[], tire iron[], BB gun[], nunchucks, [or] crossbow[]." Id. at 2289-90 (internal quotation marks omitted). Under such a statute, if assault with a gun is categorically (that is, always) a predicate offense, then a sentencing court may examine the documents underlying a defendant's conviction to see whether he was charged with and convicted of using a gun. Id. at 2290.
The modified categorical approach is perhaps best explained by a generic example. Imagine a defendant previously convicted for violating Statute X. In considering whether that prior conviction is a predicate offense, a sentencing should first determine whether a violation of X is, no matter the circumstances of the particular crime, always a crime of violence. If so, it is a predicate offense under the regular categorical approach and there is no need to analyze the statute any further. If, on the other hand, the court determines that X is overbroad (i.e., it covers some conduct that is a crime of violence and some that is not), the court should then inquire whether X is divisible. If the court determines that X is generally divisible into, say, three versions of the offense — subsections a, b and c — it should next determine whether any of these subsections (for example, X(a)) is, by its particular elements, always a federally defined crime of violence. If so, then the court may apply the modified categorical approach to determine whether the defendant was convicted under X(a). That is the typical way in which the modified categorical approach operates.
This case probes how far the modified categorical approach logically extends if a statute is divisible into subparts but no version of the offense (a, b or c) is in all circumstances a crime of violence. May a sentencing court nonetheless look to extra-statutory documents to see whether the particular offense a defendant committed was a crime of violence? Or must the Court halt its analysis and find that the conviction is not a predicate offense? Descamps, which took a hard line on how the modified categorical approach operates, requires the latter. If a statute is generally divisible into multiple versions, but each version is overbroad (covers at least some conduct that is not a crime of violence) and indivisible (cannot be further divided into sub-versions based on the elements), the extra-statutory documents are irrelevant and a sentencing court's analysis has reached a dead-end: the prior conviction is not a predicate offense. See Descamps, 133 S.Ct. at 2283.
We now turn to the particular statute — the Pennsylvania terroristic threats statute, 18 Pa. Cons.Stat. § 2706 — underlying Brown's 2004 and 2005 convictions.
Descamps instructs that we focus on the elements of the offense rather than Brown's particular conduct in committing the offense. Section 2706 prohibits
18 Pa. Cons.Stat. § 2706(a).
Because § 2706(a) is phrased in the disjunctive — "describing three variations of the same offense" — the statute is divisible into subsections (a)(1), (a)(2), and (a)(3), Mahone, 662 F.3d at 654,
But a determination that a defendant was previously convicted under § 2706(a)(1) does not end the inquiry. The subsection prohibits threatening to "commit any crime of violence with intent to terrorize another," yet it does not define what is a "crime of violence." Though we might think Pennsylvania's definition matches the definition in the Guidelines, thereby making any violation of § 2706(a)(1) a predicate offense, we cannot conclude that without further application of the categorical approach. See Mahone, 662 F.3d at 655 ("We cannot conclude at this step in our analysis that the statutory variation in § 2706(a)(1) categorically qualifies as a [crime of violence] ... because this variation of the statute contains the undefined term `crime of violence.'").
As we observed in Mahone, another Pennsylvania statute defines a "crime of violence" for purposes of sentencing. 42 Pa. Cons.Stat. § 9714(g); Mahone, 662 F.3d at 655 (citing United States v. Ortiz-Gomez, 562 F.3d 683, 685-86 (5th Cir. 2009)). Included within that definition is a version of arson that does not necessarily "ha[ve] as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person of another." U.S.S.G. § 4B1.2(a)(1); see Ortiz-Gomez, 562 F.3d at 686 (citing 18 Pa. Cons.Stat. §§ 3301(a)(1) and 9714(g)) (observing that in Pennsylvania arson can be committed by "start[ing] a fire for the purpose of damaging a structure ... regardless of whether a person is present"). Because in Pennsylvania arson can exist "regardless of whether a person is present," that crime would not be included in the Guidelines' definition of a "crime of violence." Mahone, 662 F.3d at 655-56 (quoting Ortiz-Gomez, 562 F.3d at 686). Hence a threat to commit arson with intent to terrorize another — a violation of § 2706(a)(1) — would not be a predicate offense under § 4B1.2(a) of the Guidelines. Id. at 655-56.
Mahone, which was decided before Descamps, applied precisely the sort of "modified factual" approach the Supreme Court has since disavowed. In Mahone, the criminal record of the defendant included a conviction under a nearly identical predecessor to the current Pennsylvania terroristic threats statute. 662 F.3d at 653. He was charged with "threaten[ing] to commit the violent crime of criminal homicide with intent to terrorize [the victim]." Id. at 656. The plea colloquy's factual recitation included the allegation that Mahone threatened to kill the victim, which he admitted by pleading guilty. Id.
Mahone appealed the sentencing judge's application of the enhancement, and we affirmed. Id. at 652. We concluded that, although subsection (a)(1) covered some conduct that would not be a "crime of violence" under the Guidelines, because Mahone was in fact charged with, and thus convicted of, threatening a federally defined "crime of violence," criminal homicide, his § 2706 conviction qualified as a predicate offense under the career offender enhancement. Id. at 657.
Descamps overrode that conclusion. Like the burglary statute there that criminalized simple shoplifting and "define[d] burglary more broadly than the generic offense" under the ACCA, 133 S.Ct. at 2285 (internal quotation marks omitted), we now hold that § 2706(a)(1) is overbroad in that it criminalizes conduct that is not always considered a federally defined "crime of violence." Hence a violation of the statute is categorically not a predicate offense for purposes of the career offender enhancement. See Descamps, 133 S.Ct. at 2283 ("[I]f the statute sweeps more broadly than the generic crime, a conviction under that law cannot count as an ACCA predicate, even if the defendant actually committed the offense in its generic form."). Descamps thus supersedes the portion of Mahone that held otherwise.
Returning to our case, the District Court, relying on Mahone, analyzed the
But Descamps rejects that approach; the factual circumstances of the conviction are not what matter, the key is the elements of the crime. As we explained above and in Mahone, subsection (a)(1) of the Pennsylvania terroristic threats statute (the subsection under which Brown concedes he was convicted) is overbroad because, in using the undefined term "crime of violence," it covers at least one factual circumstance — threatening to commit arson-that does not meet the Guidelines' definition of a "crime of violence." "The modified [categorical] approach ... has no role to play[,]" Descamps, 133 S.Ct. at 2285, because no single subsection of § 2706, by its elements, can be categorized exclusively as a crime of violence and thus may not qualify as a predicate offense for the enhancement.
Other Circuit Courts that have examined a statute that contains multiple versions of an offense, none of which is categorically a crime of violence by its elements, have similarly concluded that the modified categorical approach does not apply to those statutes. In Cabrera-Umanzor, the Fourth Circuit was faced with a Maryland child abuse statute that was "generally divisible" into two categories: physical abuse and sexual abuse. 728 F.3d at 352 (emphasis in original). The plea agreement demonstrated that the defendant was convicted of committing sexual abuse, but that category "d[id] not, by its elements, constitute any of the potentially applicable crimes of violence enumerated in the Guidelines Commentary." Id. at 350, 352-53. The Court concluded that the Maryland statute is "therefore not divisible in the manner necessary to warrant application of the modified categorical approach." Id. at 353. Similarly, the Sixth Circuit, while examining a Tennessee robbery statute, applied Descamps' categorical approach as follows:
United States v. Mitchell, 743 F.3d 1054, 1064 (6th Cir.2014) (alteration and emphasis in original) (quoting Descamps, 133 S.Ct. at 2286). Finally, in United States v. Tucker, 740 F.3d 1177 (8th Cir.2014) (en banc), the Eighth Circuit refused to apply the modified categorical approach to a Nebraska escape statute that criminalized certain types of escapes, only some of which qualified as predicate offenses,
While the above speaks of other Circuits, the Government, as it should, cites to our recent decision in United States v. Blair, 734 F.3d 218 (3d Cir.2013), and argues that, where a statute is divisible at some level (here, into subsections (a)(1), (a)(2), and (a)(3)), a sentencing court may look to the extra-statutory documents to identify not only the subsection of conviction but also to determine whether the particular circumstances of the offense within that subsection comprise a "crime of violence." See Gov't Br. at 39-40 (citing Blair, 734 F.3d at 224-25). We agree that, at first blush, Blair appears to condone the analysis applied by the District Court here. But a careful reading of that opinion, which dealt with a different statute (18 Pa. Cons.Stat. § 3701), leads us to conclude that the portion of Blair on which the Government relies does not apply to our case.
Blair's prior robbery convictions resulted in his sentence as a career offender under the ACCA. On appeal we decided whether a robbery conviction in Pennsylvania that did not reference the applicable subsection of the statute was a violent felony under the ACCA. As here, three alternative versions of the offense were at issue. We considered whether the modified categorical approach could be used to determine that Blair was convicted under the "least culpable" of those, § 3701(a)(1)(iii). Blair, 734 F.3d at 225-26. That part of the statute makes it a crime in the course of a theft to "commit[] or threaten[] immediately to commit any felony of the first or second degree." § 3701(a)(1)(iii). Like Mahone and the District Court here, our Court concluded that Blair's conviction was a violent felony under the ACCA because the extra-statutory documents demonstrated that he committed or threatened to commit during the course of the theft an aggravated assault — a felony "in the first or second degree ... [that] clearly involves violence." Id. at 222-23.
Blair argued, among other things, that though § 3701(a)(1) as a whole is divisible into subsections (i), (ii), and (iii), the last, and applicable, subsection is not further divisible by the type of felony committed or threatened. He contended (similar to Brown's argument here) that § 3701(a)(1)(iii) is overbroad and indivisible because "some felonies of the first and second degree involve no violence." Id. at 225. We assumed Blair was correct that the subsection was "indivisible and categorically overbroad," yet rejected his argument. Id. We did so despite conceding that "Descamps makes it clear that if the relevant statute is indivisible ... and ... overbroad ..., then the sentencing court cannot apply the modified categorical approach," id. at 224. The Government seizes on the language rejecting Blair's argument:
Applying this logic to our case, the Government argues that, because § 2706(a) is broadly divisible into subsections (a)(1), (a)(2), and (a)(3), once the sentencing court looked to the charging document and jury instructions to determine under which of those three subsections Brown was convicted, it was also free to use those documents to determine whether the particular circumstances of Brown's conviction under § 2706(a)(1) fit the federal definition of a "crime of violence." Only in that way, the argument goes, are the blinders off.
Though one may question the correctness of the above excerpt in Blair as a general matter,
The Supreme Court's concluding remarks in Descamps all but decide this case: "[The defendant] may ... have broken and entered, and so committed generic burglary [under the ACCA]. But [the California burglary statute] — the crime of which he was convicted — does not require the factfinder (whether jury or judge) to make that determination." 133 S.Ct. at 2293. So too here, Brown may have threatened to murder persons in 2004 and 2005 and so committed a "crime of violence." But § 2706(a) — the crime of which he was convicted — does not require the jury to make that determination. Thus the modified categorical approach has no permitted use. Because this holding applies
We make no comment on the correct sentence for Brown. Under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), the District Court has the discretion to fashion an appropriate sentence under the factors noted therein and in doing so is free to take into account his pattern of behavior over the years, including his conduct in 2004 and 2005. We hold only that, in light of the Supreme Court's ruling in Descamps, the career offender enhancement is not available in this case. We thus vacate Brown's judgment of sentence and remand for resentencing.