Parsing Prior Convictions: Mathis v. United States and the Means-Element Distinction

Abstract

Legislatures regularly specify increased penalties for criminal defendants with certain types of prior convictions. In Mathis v. United States, the Supreme Court clarified how sentencing judges must analyze prior convictions under statutes that could be violated in multiple ways, not all of which would trigger a subsequent sentence enhancement. Sentencing judges may only impose the enhancement if the facts necessary for the enhancement were “elements” of the prior offense, not “means” — only the former are necessarily found by a convicting jury or admitted in a guilty plea. The Court divided over whether this rule would prove workable for lower-court judges to apply. This Note analyzes the lower-court decisions applying Mathis and reaches four conclusions. First, it finds that Mathis has proven workable in early applications of its approach, though it does often necessitate challenging interpretation of state criminal law. Second, it argues that the judicial burden of applying the Mathis rule can be lessened by rejecting dicta in the majority opinion that would treat this inquiry into state law as a “threshold” issue that must be resolved before examining the record documents of the defendant’s prior conviction. Third, it argues that courts should be permitted to impose prior-conviction enhancements even in the presence of some legal uncertainty about the nature of the prior conviction, so long as there is no factual uncertainty. And fourth, this Note argues that facts alleged in indictments alone are never sufficient to establish factual certainty about the nature of a prior offense.