Welch v. United States

Police entered Gregory Welch’s apartment because they had reason to believe that a robbery suspect was on the premises. After obtaining Welch’s consent to search the apartment, the police located a gun and ammunition that Welch later identified as his own. Welch was subsequently arrested and charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm, and he pleaded guilty. Because Welch had three prior felony convictions, the district court determined that the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) required that he be sentenced to a minimum of 15 years in prison. Welch appealed his sentence and argued that one of his felonies, a conviction for “strong arm” robbery in Florida state court in 1996, did not qualify as a predicate offense for the purpose of the ACCA because, at the time he was convicted, Florida state law allowed for a conviction of robbery with a much lower level of force than the federal law required. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the district court’s determination that Welch’s conviction for robbery under Florida state law was a predicate offense for the purpose of the ACCA because it involved force that was “capable of causing physical pain or injury to another person.”

In 2013, Welch filed a collateral challenge to his conviction and argued that his prior conviction for strong arm robbery vague and that his trial counsel had been ineffective in allowing him to be sentenced under the ACCA. He sought a certificate of appealability to the appellate court, which the district court denied. Welch then sought a certificate of appealability from the appellate court and noted that there was a challenge to the ACCA based on its vagueness pending in the Supreme Court, Johnson v. United States. The appellate denied the certificate of appealability.

Three weeks later, the Supreme Court decided Johnson v. United States and held that the residual clause of the ACCA, which included action that “otherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another” in the definition of a violent felony, was unconstitutionally vague. The Court held that the residual clause violated the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendments because it was so vague that it failed to give people adequate notice of the conduct it punished. In order to apply the residual clause to a case, courts had to assess the “hypothetical risk posed by an abstract generic version” of the crime in question, which made the application of the clause unconstitutionally arbitrary and unpredictable.