UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. MERCEDES WILSON, Defendant-Appellee.
No. 19-3394
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT
Decided and Filed: October 23, 2020
RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION Pursuant to Sixth Circuit I.O.P. 32.1(b) File Name: 20a0337p.06. Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio at Cleveland. No. 1:17-cr-00365-1—Solomon Oliver, Jr., District Judge. Argued: February 6, 2020. Before: ROGERS, KETHLEDGE, and LARSEN, Circuit Judges.
COUNSEL
ARGUED: Megan R. Miller, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, Cleveland, Ohio, for Appellant. Lori B. Riga, FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER’S OFFICE, Cleveland, Ohio, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Megan R. Miller, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, Cleveland, Ohio, for Appellant. Lori B. Riga, FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER’S OFFICE, Cleveland, Ohio, for Appellee.
OPINION
LARSEN, Circuit Judge. Mercedes Wilson pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm in violation of
I.
Mercedes Wilson was arrested after he ran from a routine traffic stop. When police searched the area where Wilson was apprehended, they discovered “two clear plastic bags of cocaine and a loaded handgun.” Wilson, who previously had been convicted of multiple felonies, was indicted for possessing a firearm in violation of
The typical violation of
In the meantime, this court issued a fractured en banc opinion in United States v. Burris, 912 F.3d 386 (6th Cir. 2019), cert. denied, 140 S. Ct. 90 (2019). There, we considered whether Ohio’s felonious- and aggravated-assault crimes,
With respect to the (A)(2) crimes, we noted that Ohio defines “serious physical harm” to include not only bodily injury but also “[a]ny mental illness or condition of such gravity as would normally require hospitalization or prolonged psychiatric treatment.”
Once Wilson’s sentencing recommenced, he argued that Burris precluded his (A)(3) Aggravated Robbery conviction from qualifying as a violent felony under the ACCA because it also includes, as an element, the causing of “serious physical harm to another.” The district court agreed and sentenced Wilson to seventy-nine months’ imprisonment. The government timely appealed.
II.
We review de novo whether a prior conviction constitutes a violent felony under the ACCA. United States v. Gatson, 776 F.3d 405, 410 (6th Cir. 2015). As relevant here, the ACCA defines a “violent felony” as any felony that “has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person of another.”
Wilson was previously convicted of three counts of Ohio aggravated robbery, two under
Wilson believes that Burris dictates this conclusion. He argues that Burris “already held [that] Ohio’s ‘serious physical harm’ element is categorically overbroad“; accordingly, any statute in the Ohio Code—including (A)(3) Aggravated Robbery—that criminalizes conduct resulting in “serious physical harm” does not qualify as a violent felony.
Burris does not sweep as broadly as Wilson would like. Burris held that the definition of “serious physical harm,” when applied to two particular statutes—Ohio’s felonious-assault and aggravated-assault statutes—rendered those statutes “too broad to categorically qualify as violent-felony predicates under the ACCA.” Burris, 912 F.3d at 399. This matters because we do not look at elements in isolation but at how the statutes as a whole will, in reality, be applied. See Moncrieffe, 569 U.S. at 191. As in Burris, then, we must look at how the “serious physical harm” element is applied in the specific offense at issue here, (A)(3) Aggravated Robbery.
Undertaking this task reveals important distinctions between (A)(3) Aggravated Robbery and the assault statutes at issue in Burris. First, to obtain a conviction for Ohio felonious assault, a prosecutor need show only that the perpetrator knowingly caused severe mental harm. See
Yet that conclusion tells us only that Burris did not answer whether (A)(3) Aggravated Robbery is a violent felony. We still must decide whether it is. The government asks us to resolve this question by adopting the reasoning of Fullum v. United States, 756 F. App’x 568 (6th Cir. 2018). There, a panel of this court concluded that (A)(3) Aggravated Robbery did constitute a violent felony. Id. at 570. The panel noted that the statute required a defendant to “inflict grave mental harm in the course of or immediately after stealing property.” Id. at 571. “In that short window of time, it seem[ed] unlikely that a thief could cause the victim mental harm requiring prolonged psychiatric treatment without using or threatening violent force.” Id. But, for reasons not presented to the panel in Fullum, we decline to follow that course.
Wilson directs us to the many predicate “theft offenses” underlying (A)(3) Aggravated Robbery, some of which do not require physical proximity to a victim or his property. See
To appreciate this argument, we need to examine the statutory language defining (A)(3) Aggravated Robbery.
No person, in attempting or committing a theft offense, as defined in section 2913.01 of the Revised Code, or in fleeing immediately after the attempt or offense, shall do any of the following:
(1) Have a deadly weapon on or about the offender’s person or under the offender’s control and either display the weapon, brandish it, indicate that the offender possesses it, or use it;
(2) Have a dangerous ordnance on or about the offender’s person or under the offender’s control;
(3) Inflict, or attempt to inflict, serious physical harm on another.
(emphasis added). Wilson asks us to look at each of the theft offenses defined in
Thirty-one different theft offenses qualify as predicate “theft offenses” under (A)(3) Aggravated Robbery. See
But that is not our task. When reviewing a statute for ACCA purposes, we must consider whether it is divisible. See Mathis v. United States, 136 S. Ct. 2243, 2256 (2016). A divisible statute “list[s] elements in the alternative, and thereby define[s] multiple crimes,” id. at 2249, rather than setting out “alternative factual means of committing a single element.” Burris, 912 F.3d at 393. “Elements are the constituent parts of a crime’s legal definition—the things the prosecution must prove to sustain a conviction. At a trial, they are what the jury must find beyond a reasonable doubt to convict the defendant.” Mathis, 136 S. Ct. at 2248 (citations and quotation marks omitted). And “at a plea hearing, they are what the defendant necessarily admits when he pleads guilty.” Id. As the district court rightly concluded, Ohio’s aggravated robbery statute,
also Fullum, 756 F. App’x at 570. But Wilson’s suggestion that we must consider each of the statute’s predicate theft offenses raises the question whether these also constitute separate crimes. That is: is the statute twice divisible?
Much turns on the answer to that question. If the statute is twice divisible—once by recognizing (A)(1), (A)(2), and (A)(3) as separate crimes, and again by recognizing each of the predicate theft offenses as separate crimes—then our analysis is limited. Our task would be to determine whether there is a “realistic probability” that a person could, while “attempting or committing” Wilson’s particular theft offense of conviction (or fleeing immediately thereafter), cause “serious physical harm” without the use, attempted use or threatened use of violent force. See Mathis, 136 S. Ct. at 2249, 2256 (explaining that once a court determines a crime is divisible, it must then apply the modified categorical approach “to discover which of the enumerated alternatives played a part in the defendant’s prior conviction” and determine if that offense is an ACCA predicate).
When asked to brief the question, both parties took the position that the statute is not twice divisible. Wilson, for his part, tried to support his position with legal authority. The government, however, merely asserted that the statute is not twice divisible. We are not bound to accept “what in effect was a stipulation on a question of law.” U.S. Nat’l Bank of Or. v. Ind. Ins. Agents of Am., Inc., 508 U.S. 439, 448 (1993). “The
We have previously confronted another Ohio statute with a structure similar to the aggravated robbery statute. In United States v. Denson, we examined Ohio’s inciting to violence statute, see
Here, Ohio’s pattern jury instructions indicate that
UNDERLYING THEFT OFFENSE. Before you can find that the defendant was (committing) (attempting to commit) (insert name of applicable theft offense under R.C. 2913.01[K]) you must find beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant (describe each element of applicable theft offense).
2 CR Ohio Jury Instructions 511.01(A). So to convict for (A)(3) Aggravated Robbery, the government must prove—and a jury must find—the elements of a particular predicate theft offense as defined in
In response, Wilson offers State v. Gardner, 889 N.E.2d 995, 1004 (Ohio 2008), which considered a similar question with respect to aggravated burglary: “whether the jurors must agree unanimously as to which criminal offense a defendant intended to commit during a burglary.” A plurality of the Ohio Supreme Court answered “no.” Considering the language of the Ohio aggravated burglary statute, the plurality determined that so long as the government proves that the defendant had the “purpose to commit . . . any criminal offense,”
(A)(3) Aggravated Robbery differs from aggravated burglary in this respect. Ohio aggravated burglary casts its focus on the defendant’s formation of criminal intent, not on the particular crime intended. Id. (A)(3) Aggravated Robbery, by contrast, requires the defendant to complete or attempt to complete a “theft offense,” as that term is defined in
This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that (A)(3) Aggravated Robbery does not have its own mens rea. Instead, the Ohio Supreme Court has said that the statute “incorporates the mens rea of the underlying theft offense,” State v. Wesson, 999 N.E.2d 557, 567 (Ohio 2013), and that the government must prove the underlying mens rea in order to secure an aggravated robbery conviction, Horner, 935 N.E.2d at 35; see also State v. Tolliver, 19 N.E.3d 870, 874 (Ohio 2014) (noting in the context of the similarly-structured robbery statute that “[b]ecause
We acknowledge that one panel of the Ohio Court of Appeals has reached a different conclusion in an unpublished opinion. See State v. Lewis, No. 2012-L-074, 2013 WL 5225561, at *8 (Ohio Ct. App. Sept. 16, 2013). Citing Gardner, the panel in Lewis held that “the underlying [theft] offenses are not viewed as actual elements of” aggravated robbery. Id. Lewis, however, contains almost no analysis and is out of step with other Ohio caselaw detailed above. As a result, we do not believe Lewis reflects the state of the law in Ohio. Cf. Kingsley Assocs., Inc. v. Moll PlastiCrafters, Inc., 65 F.3d 498, 507 (6th Cir. 1995) (recognizing that when determining state law, a state appellate court decision may be disregarded if “we are presented with persuasive data that the [state] Supreme Court would decide otherwise“).
In our view, Ohio law confirms that the enumerated predicate theft offenses in
Because
* * *
We VACATE Wilson’s sentence and REMAND to the district court for proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Notes
(2) A violation of an existing or former municipal ordinance or law of this or any other state, or of the United States, substantially equivalent to any section listed in division (K)(1) of this section or a violation of section 2913.41, 2913.81, or 2915.06 of the Revised Code as it existed prior to July 1, 1996;
(3) An offense under an existing or former municipal ordinance or law of this or any other state, or of the United States, involving robbery, burglary, breaking and entering, theft, embezzlement, wrongful conversion, forgery, counterfeiting, deceit, or fraud;
(4) A conspiracy or attempt to commit, or complicity in committing, any offense under division (K)(1), (2), or (3) of this section.
