Taylor v. United States (1990)

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Taylor v. United States
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued February 28, 1990 Decided May 29, 1990
Full case name	Arthur Lajuane Taylor v. United States of America
Citations	495 U.S. 575 (more) 110 S. Ct. 2143; 109 L. Ed. 2d 607; 1990 U.S. LEXIS 2788
Case history
Prior	Sentence imposed by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri and affirmed by the Eighth Circuit, 864 F.2d 625 (8th Cir. 1989), cert. granted, 493 U.S. 889 (1989).
Holding
In determining whether a prior burglary conviction counts against a defendant for purposes of the Armed Career Criminal Act, district courts must employ a formal categorical approach, looking only to the fact of the prior conviction and the statutory definition of the predicate offense and also, in a narrow class of cases, the charging documents and jury instructions, so that the sentencing court may determine whether the defendant had been convicted of "burglary" in the generic sense.
Court membership
Chief Justice William Rehnquist Associate Justices William J. Brennan Jr. · Byron White Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy
Case opinions
Majority	Blackmun, joined by Rehnquist, Brennan, White, Marshall, Stevens, O'Connor, Kennedy; Scalia (all but Part II)
Concurrence	Scalia
Laws applied
18 U.S.C. § 924(e)

Taylor v. United States, 495 U.S. 575 (1990), was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that filled in an important gap in the federal criminal law of sentencing. The federal criminal code does not contain a definition of many crimes, including burglary, the crime at issue in this case. Yet sentencing enhancements applicable to federal crimes allow for the enhancement of a defendant's sentence if he has been convicted of prior felonies. The Court addressed in this case how "burglary" should be defined for purposes of such sentencing enhancements when the federal criminal code contained no definition of "burglary."^[1] The approach the Court adopted in this case has guided the lower federal courts in interpreting other provisions of the criminal code that also refer to generic crimes not otherwise defined in federal law.