Whether a defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial is violated when a sentencing enhancement under the Armed Career Criminal Act is determined by a judge rather than a jury beyond a reasonable doubt

No question identified. : 1. Mr. Bradley pled guilty to the simple offense of being a felon in possession of a firearm, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). At the time of his offense, that crime carried a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment. 18 U.S.C. § 924(a)(2) (2021). But the Armed Career Criminal Act, 18 U.S.C. § 924(e) (“ACCA”), established a 15-year mandatory minimum sentence for individuals with “three previous convictions” for “a violent felony or a serious drug offense,” each committed “on occasions different from one another.” 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(1). In Wooden v. United States, 595 U.S. 360 (2022), this Court established a multi-factored, fact-laden test for determining whether prior offenses count as a single occasion or instead different ones. 2. At his sentencing hearing, held on April 27, 2023, Mr. Bradley argued that under the combined reasoning of Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466 (2000), and Wooden, the occasions-different fact must be charged in the indictment and found by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt (or admitted by a defendant as part of his guilty plea), rendering the ACCA a distinct, aggravated offense. Because none of that occurred in his case, he argued that the district court could not sentence him for the greater ACCA offense, but only for the simple § 922(g) offense to which he pled guilty. 3. The district court disagreed, considering itself bound by precedent to decide the occasions-different fact for itself, by a preponderance of evidence. Concluding that Mr. Bradley committed his prior offenses on different occasions, the district court sentenced him to 210 months’ imprisonment, within the advisory guideline range corresponding to the enhanced statutory range for the greater ACCA offense. 4. While Mr. Bradley’s case was on appeal, this Court decided Erlinger v. United States, 144 S. Ct. 1840 (2024), in which it held that the ACCA’s occasionsdifferent fact must be charged in the indictment and proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt (or admitted by a defendant as part of his guilty plea). Erlinger thereby established the true relationship between the simple § 922(g) offense and the greater ACCA offense, and also that the district court erred in Mr. Bradley’s case. 5. In an unpublished order, the Sixth Circuit nonetheless affirmed. It rejected Mr. Bradley’s argument that the Erlinger error was structural, relying on its holding in United States v. Campbell, 122 F.4th 624, 630-31 (6th Cir. 2024), and instead applied harmless error review. (See App. at 3.) To find the error harmless, it considered—over Mr. Bradley’s objection—all the information in the district court record, not just the record of the plea proceeding and including documents presented only at sentencing where the rules of evidence do not apply. (Id. at 2-3.) Relying on documents never submitted to a jury, and in the absence of any admission by Mr. Bradley that he committed the prior offenses on different occasions as defined by Wooden for purposes of the greater ACCA offense, the panel determined that the Erlinger error in Mr. Bradley’s case was harmless and affirmed the ACCA sentence. 6. The lower court also rejected Mr. Bradley’s separate double-jeopardy challenge to the district court’s imposition of the ACCA punishment, even though had been charged with and pled guilty (with the government’s consent) only to the simple § 922(g) offense. The court reasoned that because he raised the double jeopardy challenge only after Erlinger was decided, the issue was forfeited so subject to plain error review (id. at 3-4)—despite Mr. Bradley’s insistence in the district court that he could not be punished for the greater ACCA offense once he pled guilty for the lesser § 922(g) offense. Indeed, the Sixth Circuit has since held in a published decision that an identical double jeopardy claim raised in a supplemental brief after and in light of Erlinger was neither waived nor forfeited. United States v. Kimbrough, 138 F.4th 473,