April 17, 2018
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a law subjecting immigrants to deportation for crimes of violence is unconstitutionally vague, handing the Trump administration an early defeat — thanks to the vote of Justice Neil Gorsuch. President Trump's nominee to the high court joined most of the ruling by the court's liberal minority that the law failed to define what would qualify as a violent crime. He based his concurrence on a similar decision written in 2015 by his predecessor, Justice Antonin Scalia. Vague laws, Gorsuch wrote, "can invite the exercise of arbitrary power ... by leaving the people in the dark about what the law demands and allowing prosecutors and courts to make it up. The law before us today is such a law." "The void-for-vagueness doctrine, as we have called it, guarantees that ordinary people have 'fair notice' of the conduct a statute proscribes," Kagan wrote. "And the doctrine guards against arbitrary or discriminatory law enforcement by insisting that a statute provide standards to govern the actions of police officers, prosecutors, juries and judges."
During oral argument on the first day of the 2017 term in October, Gorsuch wondered how the court could define a crime of violence if Congress did not. "Even when it's going to put people in prison and deprive them of liberty and result in deportation, we shouldn't expect Congress to be able to specify those who are captured by its laws?" Gorsuch asked Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler. The vagueness doctrine is meant to apply in cases in which the criminal or civil penalty is severe. During oral argument, Justice Samuel Alito wondered how to define severity. Gorsuch had a ready answer. "Life, liberty or property," he said. "It's right out of the text of the Due Process Clause itself." The majority opinion, written by Justice Elena Kagan, was a victory for James Garcia Dimaya, whose two burglary convictions were considered violent crimes under the statute — despite not having involved violence. Joshua Rosenkranz, who represented Dimaya at the high court on the 2017 term's first day in October, hailed the verdict. "This decision is of enormous consequence, striking down a flawed law that applies in a vast range of criminal and immigration cases and which has resulted in many thousands of immigrants being deported for decades in violation of their due process rights,” he said.
