Portal:Supreme Court of the United States

“ Clark & Marshall 553 (“Sufficient force must be used to overcome resistance.... If there is any injury to the person of the owner, or if he resists the attempt to rob him, and his resistance is overcome, there is sufficient violence to make the taking robbery, however slight the resistance” (emphasis added) ) . The common law also did not distinguish between gradations of “violence.” If an act physically overcame a victim’s resistance, “however slight” that resistance might be, it necessarily constituted violence. ”

“ In short, the statutory history does not undermine the conclusion that the ACCA’s elements clause, under our precedents, is not broad enough to encompass Florida’s robbery statute. Congress deleted the word “robbery,” kept the word “burglary,” supplemented burglary with the catchall residual clause that still captured many robberies outside the elements clause, and used the phrase “physical force” in the elements clause to define a type of “violent felony,” which Johnson tells us requires more force than the term’s common-law meaning denotes. ”

“ We decline to impose yet another indeterminable line-drawing exercise on the lower courts.
Stokeling next contends that Castleman held that minor uses of force do not constitute “violent force,” but he misreads that opinion. In Castleman, the Court noted that for purposes of a statute focused on domestic-violence misdemeanors, crimes involving relatively “minor uses of force” that might not “constitute ‘violence’ in the generic sense” could nevertheless qualify as predicate offenses. ”

“ And Stokeling points to at least one person who was convicted of Florida robbery after causing a bill to rip while pulling cash from a victim’s hand. See App. B to Brief for Petitioner.
While these acts can, of course, be accomplished with more than minimal force, they need not be. The thief who loosens an already loose grasp or (assuming the angle is right) tears the side of a $5 bill has hardly used any force at all. ”

“ Stat. §812.13 (2) (a) (distinguishing armed robbery from robbery by requiring the additional element of “carr [ying] a firearm or other deadly weapon” during the robbery) . Thus, as Stokeling’s counsel admitted at oral argument, “armed robbery in Florida” would not qualify under ACCA if his view were adopted. Tr. of Oral Arg. 3–4; see United States v. Lee, 886 F. 3d 1161, 1163, n. 1 (CA11 2018) (treating “Florida strong-arm robbery [i. e., basic robbery] , armed robbery, and attempted robbery... the same for purposes of analyzing the ACCA’s elements clause”) . ”

“ First, it explained that the modifier “physical” “plainly refers to force exerted by and through concrete bodies–distinguishing physical force, from, for example, intellectual force or emotional force.” ”

“ N. Y. Penal Law Ann. §§160.10 (2) (a) – (b) , 160.15 (1) , (3) – (4) (West 2015) ; N. D. Cent. Code Ann. §§12.1–22–01 (1) – (2) (2012) ; Ohio Rev. Code Ann. §§2911.01 (A) (1) , (3) (Lexis 2014) ; Okla. Stat. ”