The Need for Sneed: A Loophole in the Armed Career Criminal Act

On March 24, 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in United States v. Sneed, held that courts may not use police reports to determine if prior offenses occurred on different occasions for the purposes of the Armed Career Criminal Act. In so doing, the court narrowed the class of offenders that qualify as career offenders and created a loophole that allows some offenders to avoid the ACCA’s mandatory minimum sentence if their previous offenses were not well documented in judicially approved sources. This Comment argues that in order to correct the problem of the Sneed loophole, Congress should amend the ACCA by defining different “occasions” so that the statute can be consistently applied in all jurisdictions and will not force juries to examine the facts underlying a defendant’s previous convictions.