Darrell Wickware v. United States

I. In Taylor v. United States, this Court announced a categorical approach to recidivism enhancements in federal sentencing. See 495 U.S. 575, 602 (1990). The basic analysis requires an elements-to-elements comparison between a defendant’s prior convictions and the generic offense or offenses singled out for special treatment by a sentencing statute or the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines Manual. Since the test focuses on substance, not labels, “minor variations in terminology” cannot overcome actual correspondence between elements. See id. at 599. Here, the Fifth Circuit relied on Taylor’s minor-variation-interminology language to declare irrelevant a substantive difference between Texas robbery and the new Hobbs Actinspired “robbery” definition from the Guidelines. In Texas, a thief becomes a robber by causing injury to a random passerby during an escape from the scene of an ordinary theft, but the same after-the-fact injury would be insufficient to prove a taking “by means of” force as required by the Hobbs Act and the Guidelines. To date, no other Court of Appeals has misapplied Taylor’s minor-variation-in-terminology caveat to paper over a substantive mismatch between corresponding elements reaching different types of conduct. The question presented is this: did the Fifth Circuit misapply the categorical approach by dismissing an elemental mismatch as a mere variation in terminology?