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

WOODEN v. UNITED STATES CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

No. 20–5279. Argued October 4, 2021—Decided March 7, 2022 A jury convicted William Dale Wooden of being a felon in possession of a firearm in violation of 18 U. S. C. §922(g). The Government asked the District Court to sentence Wooden under the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA). ACCA mandates a 15-year minimum penalty for §922(g) offenders with at least three prior convictions for specified felonies “committed on occasions different from one another.” §924(e)(1). Wooden’s relevant criminal record included ten burglary convictions arising out of a single criminal episode in 1997, during which Wooden had unlawfully entered a one-building storage facility and stolen items from ten different storage units. Prosecutors indicted Wooden on ten counts of burglary—one for each storage unit—and Wooden pleaded guilty to all counts. Years later, at Wooden’s sentencing hearing on his §922(g) conviction, the District Court applied ACCA’s penalty en- hancement in accordance with the Government’s view that Wooden had commenced a new “occasion” of criminal activity each time he left one storage unit and entered another. The resulting sentence was al- most sixteen years, much higher than the statutory maximum for Wooden’s crime absent such an enhancement. The Sixth Circuit af- firmed, reasoning that ACCA’s occasions clause is satisfied whenever crimes take place at different moments in time—that is, sequentially rather than simultaneously. Held: Wooden’s ten burglary offenses arising from a single criminal epi- sode did not occur on different “occasions” and thus count as only one prior conviction for purposes of ACCA. Pp. 4–15. (a) Wooden’s successive burglaries occurred on one “occasion” under a natural construction of that term. An ordinary person using lan- guage in its normal way would describe Wooden’s entries into the stor- 2 WOODEN v. UNITED STATES

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age units as happening on a single occasion, rather than on ten “occa- sions different from one another.” §924(e)(1). The Government’s con- tention that an “occasion” ends at the discrete moment when an of- fense’s elements are established contravenes the ordinary usage of the word. An occasion may itself encompass multiple, temporally distinct activities. For example, the occasion of a wedding may include a cere- mony, cocktail hour, dinner, and dancing. Those activities need not— and often do not—occur simultaneously; yet they nevertheless compose one occasion. The same is true for sequential criminal offenses. In- deed, the Court has often used the word “occasion” to encompass mul- tiple, temporally discrete offenses. See, e.g., United States v. Bryant, 579 U. S. 140, 151. The Government’s contrary view—that each se- quential offense forms its own “occasion”—can make someone a career offender in the space of a minute. But that view goes far toward col- lapsing ACCA’s two separate statutory conditions for imposing an en- hanced penalty on a §922(g) offender. ACCA’s enhancement kicks in only if (1) the offender has three previous convictions for specified fel- onies; and (2) those predicate felonies were committed on “occasions different from one