Page:Denard Stokeling v. United States.pdf/27

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STOKELING v. UNITED STATES

Sotomayor, J., dissenting

enhancement’s reach in a general sense, Congress must have meant for the phrase “physical force” in the new law also to carry the common-law meaning of robbery. See ante, at 4–7. The conclusion that the majority draws from these premises does not follow, for at least four reasons.

First, as already discussed, the question whether Congress’ use of the phrase “physical force” in the new law–that is, in the ACCA’s elements clause–carries the common-law meaning of “force” was already asked and answered by Johnson: It does not. See 559 U. S., at 138–143, 145; supra, at 9–10. This part of the majority’s argument may be couched in statutory history, but it is no more than an attempt to relitigate Johnson.

Second, Congress deleted the word “robbery” from the statute altogether while still enumerating robbery’s former neighbor, “burglary,” in the enumerated clause. See supra, at 2, 11. When Congress keeps one piece of statutory text while deleting another, we generally “have no trouble concluding that” it does so with purpose, see, e. g., Director of Revenue of Mo. v. CoBank ACB, 531 U. S. 316, 324 (2001), absent some reason to believe that the missing term simply got “lost in the shuffle,” United States v. Wilson, 503 U. S. 329, 336 (1992). See also, e. g., Russello v. United States, 464 U. S. 16, 23–24 (1983) (“Where Congress includes limiting language in an earlier version of a bill but deletes it prior to enactment, it may be presumed that the limitation was not intended”). Here, it is inconceivable that Congress simply lost track of robbery, one of only two generic crimes that it enumerated in the old statute. Accordingly, if Congress had wanted to retain the old statute’s specific emphasis on robbery, the natural reading is that it would have accomplished that goal the same way it did with burglary: by making it an enumerated offense. That it did not do so is telling.

Third, the fact that Congress wished to “expan[d] the predicate offenses triggering the sentence enhancement,”