Sentencing; Armed career criminal designation; The Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA); Whether defendant’s Michigan convictions could be a predicate “serious drug offense” for an ACCA enhancement; Brown v United States; The “time-of-offense rule”

[This appeal was from the WD-MI.] In a successive opinion after holding this case in abeyance pending the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown, the court held that under Brown, “because Michigan’s definition of cocaine matched the definition contained in the federal drug schedules at the time of his offenses,” defendant-Wilkes’s Michigan cocaine convictions counted “as ‘serious drug offenses’ under the ACCA.” Wilkes pled guilty in this case to FIP. He challenged his sentence enhancement under the ACCA, arguing that his prior Michigan cocaine-related convictions could not constitute “serious drug offenses” where Michigan’s law includes [¹²³ I]ioflupane in its definition of cocaine but federal law does not. Under Brown, “‘[a] state drug offense counts as an ACCA predicate only if the State’s definition of the drug in question “matche[s]” the definition under federal law.’” As a result, “[i]f the state law criminalizes more conduct than the federal law does, then the state conviction cannot count as a sentencing-enhancement predicate.” However, when Wilkes was convicted of his offenses, both the Michigan and federal laws included [¹²³ I]ioflupane in their definition of cocaine. By the time he was sentenced in this case, it had been removed from the federal law. Wilkes, like the defendant in Brown, argued “that a sentencing court should apply the ACCA ‘as it reads’ at the time of federal sentencing.” But in Brown, the Supreme Court held that “a ‘state drug conviction counts as an ACCA predicate if it involved a drug on the federal schedules at the time of that offense.’” Affirmed.