BURRAGE v. UNITED STATES
No. 12-7515
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
January 27, 2014
571 U. S. ____ (2014)
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT
Syllabus
NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued. The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader. See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U. S. 321, 337.
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
Syllabus
BURRAGE v. UNITED STATES
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT
No. 12-7515. Argued November 12, 2013—Decided January 27, 2014
Long-time drug user Banka died following an extended binge that included using heroin purchased from petitioner Burrage. Burrage pleaded not guilty to a superseding indictment alleging, inter alia, that he had unlawfully distributed heroin and that “death . . . resulted from the use of th[at] substance“—thus subjecting Burrage to a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence under the penalty enhancement provision of the Controlled Substances Act,
Held: At least where use of the drug distributed by the defendant is not an independently sufficient cause of the victim‘s death or serious bodily injury, a defendant cannot be liable for penalty enhancement under
(a) Section 841(b)(1)(C)‘s “death results” enhancement, which increased the minimum and maximum sentences to which Burrage was exposed, is an element that must be submitted to the jury and found beyond a reasonable doubt. See, e.g., Alleyne v. United States, 570 U. S. ___, ___. Pp. 4–5.
(b) Because the Controlled Substances Act does not define “results from,” the phrase should be given its ordinary meaning. See Asgrow Seed Co. v. Winterboer, 513 U. S. 179, 187. Ordinarily, that phrase imposes a requirement of actual causality, i.e., proof “‘that the harm would not have occurred’ in the absence of—that is, but for—the defendant‘s conduct.” University of Tex. Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, 570 U. S. ___. Similar statutory phrases—“because of,” see id., at ___, “based on,” Safeco Ins. Co. of America v. Burr, 551 U. S. 47, 63, and “by reason of,” Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc., 557 U. S. 167, 176—have been read to impose a but-for causation requirement. This Court declines to adopt the Government‘s permissive interpretation of “results from” to mean that use of a drug distributed by the defendant need only contribute to an aggregate force, e.g., mixed-drug intoxication, that is itself a but-for cause of death. There is no need to address a special rule developed for cases in which multiple sufficient causes independently, but concurrently, produce death, since there was no evidence that Banka‘s heroin use was an independently sufficient cause of his death. And though Congress could have written
(c) Whether adopting the but-for causation requirement or the Government‘s interpretation raises policy concerns is beside the point, for the Court‘s role is to apply the statute as written. Pp. 12–14.
687 F. 3d 1015, reversed and remanded.
SCALIA, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and KENNEDY, THOMAS, BREYER, and KAGAN, JJ., joined, and in which ALITO, J., joined as to all but Part III–B. GINSBURG, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which SOTOMAYOR, J., joined.
NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the preliminary print of the United States Reports. Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D. C. 20543, of any typographical or other formal errors, in order that corrections may be made before the preliminary print goes to press.
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
No. 12–7515
MARCUS ANDREW BURRAGE, PETITIONER v. UNITED STATES
ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT
[January 27, 2014]
JUSTICE SCALIA delivered the opinion of the Court.*
The Controlled Substances Act imposes a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence on a defendant who unlawfully distributes a Schedule I or II drug, when “death or serious bodily injury results from the use of such substance.”
I
Joshua Banka, a long-time drug user, died on April 15, 2010, following an extended drug binge. The episode began on the morning of April 14, when Banka smoked marijuana at a former roommate‘s home. Banka stole oxycodone pills from the roommate before departing and later crushed, cooked, and injected the oxycodone. Banka and his wife, Tammy Noragon Banka (Noragon), then met with petitioner Marcus Burrage and purchased one gram
Burrage pleaded not guilty to a superseding indictment alleging two counts of distributing heroin in violation of
Two medical experts testified at trial regarding the cause of Banka‘s death. Dr. Eugene Schwilke, a forensic toxicologist, determined that multiple drugs were present in Banka‘s system at the time of his death, including heroin metabolites, codeine, alprazolam, clonazepam metabolites, and oxycodone. (A metabolite is a “product of metabolism,” Webster‘s New International Dictionary 1544 (2d ed. 1950), or, as the Court of Appeals put it, “what a drug breaks down into in the body,” 687 F. 3d 1015, 1018, n. 2 (CA8 2012).) Although morphine, a heroin metabolite, was the only drug present at a level above the therapeutic range—i.e., the concentration normally present when a person takes a drug as prescribed—Dr. Schwilke could not say whether Banka would have lived had he not taken the heroin. Dr. Schwilke nonetheless concluded that heroin “was a contributing factor” in Banka‘s death, since it interacted with the other drugs to
The District Court denied Burrage‘s motion for a judgment of acquittal, which argued that Banka‘s death did not “result from” heroin use because there was no evidence that heroin was a but-for cause of death. Id., at 30. The court also declined to give Burrage‘s proposed jury instructions regarding causation. One of those instructions would have required the Government to prove that heroin use “was the proximate cause of [Banka‘s] death.” Id., at 236. Another would have defined proximate cause as “a cause of death that played a substantial part in bringing about the death,” meaning that “[t]he death must have been either a direct result of or a reasonably probable consequence of the cause and except for the cause the death would not have occurred.” Id., at 238. The court instead gave an instruction requiring the Government to prove “that the heroin distributed by the Defendant was a contributing cause of Joshua Banka‘s death.” Id., at 241–242. The jury convicted Burrage on both counts, and the court sentenced him to 20 years’ imprisonment, consistent with
The Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed Burrage‘s convictions. 687 F. 3d 1015. As to the causation-in-fact element of count 2, the court held that the District Court‘s contributing-cause instruction was consistent with its earlier decision in United States v. Mon-nier, 412 F. 3d 859, 862 (CA8 2005). See 687 F. 3d, at 1021. As to proximate cause, the court held that Burrage‘s proposed instructions “d[id] not correctly state the law” because “a showing of ‘proximate cause’ is not required.” Id., at 1020 (quoting United States v. McIntosh, 236 F. 3d 968, 972–973 (CA8 2001)).
We granted certiorari on two questions: Whether the defendant may be convicted under the “death results” provision (1) when the use of the controlled substance was a “contributing cause” of the death, and (2) without separately instructing the jury that it must decide whether the victim‘s death by drug overdose was a foreseeable result of the defendant‘s drug-trafficking offense. 569 U. S. ___ (2013).
II
As originally enacted, the Controlled Substances Act, 84 Stat. 1242,
Because the “death results” enhancement increased the minimum and maximum sentences to which Burrage was exposed, it is an element that must be submitted to the jury and found beyond a reasonable doubt. See Alleyne v. United States, 570 U. S. ___, ___ (2013) (slip op., at 14–15); Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U. S. 466, 490 (2000). Thus, the crime charged in count 2 of Burrage‘s superseding indictment has two principal elements: (i) knowing or intentional distribution of heroin,
A
The law has long considered causation a hybrid concept, consisting of two constituent parts: actual cause and legal cause. H. Hart & A. Honoré, Causation in the Law 104 (1959). When a crime requires “not merely conduct but also a specified result of conduct,” a defendant generally may not be convicted unless his conduct is “both (1) the actual cause, and (2) the ‘legal’ cause (often called the ‘proximate cause‘) of the result.” 1 W. LaFave, Substantive Criminal Law §6.4(a), pp. 464–466 (2d ed. 2003) (hereinafter LaFave); see also ALI, Model Penal Code §2.03, p. 25 (1985). Those two categories roughly coincide with the two questions on which we granted certiorari. We find it necessary to decide only the first: whether the use of heroin was the actual cause of Banka‘s death in the sense that
The Controlled Substances Act does not define the phrase “results from,” so we give it its ordinary meaning. See Asgrow Seed Co. v. Winterboer, 513 U. S. 179, 187 (1995). A thing “results” when it “[a]rise[s] as an effect, issue, or outcome from some action, process or design.” 2 The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 2570 (1993). “Results from” imposes, in other words, a requirement of actual causality. “In the usual course,” this requires proof “‘that the harm would not have occurred’ in the absence of—that is, but for—the defendant‘s conduct.” University of Tex. Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, 570 U. S. ___ (2013) (slip op., at 5–6) (quoting Restatement of Torts §431, Comment a (1934)). The Model Penal Code reflects this traditional understanding; it states that “[c]onduct is the cause of a result” if “it is an antecedent but for which the result in question would not have occurred.” §2.03(1)(a). That formulation represents “the minimum requirement for a finding of causation when a crime is defined in terms of conduct causing a particular
Thus, “where A shoots B, who is hit and dies, we can say that A [actually] caused B‘s death, since but for A‘s conduct B would not have died.” LaFave 467–468 (italics omitted). The same conclusion follows if the predicate act combines with other factors to produce the result, so long as the other factors alone would not have done so—if, so to speak, it was the straw that broke the camel‘s back. Thus, if poison is administered to a man debilitated by multiple diseases, it is a but-for cause of his death even if those diseases played a part in his demise, so long as, without the incremental effect of the poison, he would have lived. See, e.g., State v. Frazier, 339 Mo. 966, 974–975, 98 S. W. 2d 707, 712–713 (1936).
This but-for requirement is part of the common understanding of cause. Consider a baseball game in which the visiting team‘s leadoff batter hits a home run in the top of the first inning. If the visiting team goes on to win by a score of 1 to 0, every person competent in the English language and familiar with the American pastime would agree that the victory resulted from the home run. This is so because it is natural to say that one event is the outcome or consequence of another when the former would not have occurred but for the latter. It is beside the point that the victory also resulted from a host of other necessary causes, such as skillful pitching, the coach‘s decision to put the leadoff batter in the lineup, and the league‘s decision to schedule the game. By contrast, it makes little sense to say that an event resulted from or was the outcome of some earlier action if the action merely played a nonessential contributing role in producing the event. If the visiting team wound up winning 5 to 2 rather than
Where there is no textual or contextual indication to the contrary, courts regularly read phrases like “results from” to require but-for causality. Our interpretation of statutes that prohibit adverse employment action “because of” an employee‘s age or complaints about unlawful workplace discrimination is instructive. Last Term, we addressed Title VII‘s antiretaliation provision, which states in part:
“It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer . . . to discriminate against any individual . . . because he has opposed any practice made an unlawful employment practice by this subchapter, or because he has made a charge, testified, assisted, or participated in any manner in an investigation, proceeding, or hearing under this subchapter.”
42 U. S. C. §2000e–3(a) (2006 ed.) (emphasis added).
Given the ordinary meaning of the word “because,” we held that
Our insistence on but-for causality has not been restricted to statutes using the term “because of.” We have, for instance, observed that “[i]n common talk, the phrase ‘based on’ indicates a but-for causal relationship,” Safeco Ins. Co. of America v. Burr, 551 U. S. 47, 63 (2007), and that “the phrase, ‘by reason of,’ requires at least a showing of ‘but for’ causation,” Gross, supra, at 176 (citing Bridge v. Phoenix Bond & Indemnity Co., 553 U. S. 639, 653–654 (2008)). See also Holmes v. Securities Investor Protection Corporation, 503 U. S. 258, 265–268 (1992) (explaining that a statute permitting recovery for injuries suffered “‘by reason of‘” the defendant‘s unlawful conduct “require[s] a showing that the defendant‘s violation was,” among other things, “a ‘but for’ cause of his injury“). State courts, which hear and decide the bulk of the Nation‘s criminal matters, usually interpret similarly worded criminal statutes in the same manner. See, e.g., People v. Wood, 276 Mich. App. 669, 671, 741 N. W. 2d 574, 575–578 (2007) (construing the phrase “[i]f the violation results in the death of another individual” to require proof of but-for causation (emphasis deleted)); State v. Hennings, 791 N. W. 2d 828, 833–835 (Iowa 2010) (statute prohibiting “‘offenses . . . committed against a person or a person‘s property because of the person‘s race‘” or other protected trait requires discriminatory animus to be a but-for cause of the offense); State v. Richardson, 295 N. C. 309, 322–
In sum, it is one of the traditional background principles “against which Congress legislate[s],” Nassar, 570 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 6–7), that a phrase such as “results from” imposes a requirement of but-for causation. The Government argues, however, that distinctive problems associated with drug overdoses counsel in favor of dispensing with the usual but-for causation requirement. Addicts often take drugs in combination, as Banka did in this case, and according to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, at least 46 percent of overdose deaths in 2010 involved more than one drug. See Brief for United States 28–29. This consideration leads the Government to urge an interpretation of “results from” under which use of a drug distributed by the defendant need not be a but-for cause of death, nor even independently sufficient to cause death, so long as it contributes to an aggregate force (such as mixed-drug intoxication) that is itself a but-for cause of death.
In support of its argument, the Government can point to the undoubted reality that courts have not always required strict but-for causality, even where criminal liability is at issue. The most common (though still rare) instance of this occurs when multiple sufficient causes independently, but concurrently, produce a result. See Nassar, supra, at ___ (slip op., at 6); see also LaFave 467 (describing these cases as “unusual” and “numerically in the minority“). To illustrate, if “A stabs B, inflicting a fatal wound; while at the same moment X, acting independently, shoots B in the head . . . also inflicting [a fatal] wound; and B dies from the combined effects of the two wounds,” A will generally be liable for homicide even
Thus, the Government must appeal to a second, less demanding (but also less well established) line of authority, under which an act or omission is considered a cause-in-fact if it was a “substantial” or “contributing” factor in producing a given result. Several state courts have adopted such a rule, see State v. Christman, 160 Wash. App. 741, 745, 249 P. 3d 680, 687 (2011); People v. Jennings, 50 Cal. 4th 616, 643, 237 P. 3d 474, 496 (2010); People v. Bailey, 451 Mich. 657, 676–678, 549 N. W. 2d 325, 334–336 (1996); Commonwealth v. Osachuk, 43 Mass. App. 71, 72–73, 681 N. E. 2d 292, 294 (1997), but the American Law Institute declined to do so in its Model Penal Code, see ALI, 39th Annual Meeting Proceedings 135–141 (1962); see also Model Penal Code §2.03(1)(a). One prominent authority on tort law asserts that “a broader rule . . . has found general acceptance: The defendant‘s conduct is a cause of the event if it was a material element and a substantial factor in bringing it about.” W. Keeton, D. Dobbs, R. Keeton, & D. Owen, Prosser and Keeton on Law of Torts §41, p. 267 (5th ed. 1984) (footnote omitted). But the authors of that treatise acknowledge that, even in the tort context, “[e]xcept in the classes of cases indicated” (an apparent reference to the situation where each of two causes is independently effective) “no case has been found where the defendant‘s act could be called a substantial factor when the event would have occurred without it.” Id., at 268. The authors go on to offer an alternative rule—functionally identical to the one the Government
We decline to adopt the Government‘s permissive interpretation of
B
The Government objects that the ordinary meaning of “results from” will “unduly limi[t] criminal responsibility” and “cannot be reconciled with sound policy.” Brief for United States 24. We doubt that the requirement of but-for causation for this incremental punishment will prove a policy disaster. A cursory search of the Federal Reporter
Indeed, it is more likely the Government‘s proposal that “cannot be reconciled with sound policy,” given the need for clarity and certainty in the criminal law. The judicial authorities invoking a “substantial” or “contributing” factor test in criminal cases differ widely in their application of it. Compare Wilson v. State, 24 S. W. 409, 410 (Tex. Crim. App. 1893) (an act is an actual cause if it “contributed materially” to a result, even if other concurrent acts would have produced that result on their own), with Cox v. State, 305 Ark. 244, 248, 808 S. W. 2d 306, 309 (1991) (causation cannot be found where other concurrent causes were clearly sufficient to produce the result and the defendant‘s act was clearly insufficient to produce it (applying
But in the last analysis, these always-fascinating policy discussions are beside the point. The role of this Court is to apply the statute as it is written—even if we think some other approach might “‘accor[d] with good policy.‘” Commissioner v. Lundy, 516 U. S. 235, 252 (1996) (quoting Badaracco v. Commissioner, 464 U. S. 386, 398 (1984)). As we have discussed, it is written to require but-for cause.
*
*
*
We hold that, at least where use of the drug distributed by the defendant is not an independently sufficient cause of the victim‘s death or serious bodily injury, a defendant
It is so ordered.
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
No. 12–7515
MARCUS ANDREW BURRAGE, PETITIONER v. UNITED STATES
ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT
[January 27, 2014]
JUSTICE GINSBURG, with whom JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR joins, concurring in the judgment.
For reasons explained in my dissenting opinion in University of Tex. Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, 570 U. S. ___ (2013), I do not read “because of” in the context of antidiscrimination laws to mean “solely because of.” See id., at ___ (slip op., at 20–21, 23–24). And I do not agree that words “appear[ing] in two or more legal rules, and so in connection with more than one purpose, ha[ve] and should have precisely the same scope in all of them.” Cook, “Substance” and “Procedure” in the Conflict of Laws, 42 Yale L. J. 333, 337 (1933). But I do agree that “in the interpretation of a criminal statute subject to the rule of lenity,” where there is room for debate, one should not choose the construction “that disfavors the defendant.” Ante, at 12. Accordingly, I join the Court‘s judgment.