In United States v. Gardner, No. 20-13645 (May 27, 2022) (Newsom, Tjoflat, Hull), the Court affirmed the defendant’s ACCA sentence.
The district court applied the ACCA based prior Alabama drug convictions. The defendant argued that his convictions did not qualify as “serious drug offenses” because they did not have a “maximum term of imprisonment” of ten years or more. The Court held that the “maximum term of imprisonment” was determined by the statutory maximum under state law. The Court rejected the defendant’s argument that it was instead determined by the high-end of the state’s presumptive guideline range.
