Case Citator › United States v. Johnny Craig Harp

United States v. Johnny Craig Harp

Is it still good law? What later courts have actually done to this case.

Overruled
Court
Fourth Circuit
Citation
406 F.3d 242
Decided
Confirmed treatments
1
Flagged citations read
105 of 105
Citing cases (total)
264
Treatment dates
2011
Overruled
A reviewed court has overruled this case. United States v. Johnny Craig Harp has been fully screened: all 105 flagged citations have been read, with the 1 confirmed treatment listed below. United States v. Simmons, sitting en banc, expressly held that Harp no longer remained good law and replaced its hypothetical worst-offender approach with an inquiry into the maximum punishment applicable to the actual defendant.
More on how this was screened

Later citing opinions uniformly reported or applied that en banc treatment; they are not duplicated as separate overrulings. Earlier opinions either applied Harp, rejected premature arguments that it had already been displaced, or lacked live precedential status.

Every treatment on this page is written from the citing opinion itself, with a verbatim quote, never copied from a commercial citator. A citation flagged by our screen but not shown here was read and found not to weaken this case.

264 later cases cite United States v. Johnny Craig Harp; 105 of those citations sat close to treatment language and were flagged for reading, and all of them have been read. Citations that did not sit near treatment language were not flagged and were not read one by one, so a court that weakened this case without using any of that language would not appear here.

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Treatments

Overruled

  • The en banc Fourth Circuit overruled Harp's hypothetical worst-offender rule and held that a prior North Carolina offense qualifies as punishable by more than one year only when the actual defendant's conviction exposed that defendant to such punishment.

    United States v. Simmons · Fourth Circuit (en banc) · filed

    In Harp, we held that “to determine whether a conviction is for a crime punishable by a prison term exceeding one year” under North Carolina law, “we consider the maximum aggravated sentence that could be imposed for that crime upon a defendant with the worst possible criminal history.” Id. at 246 (emphasis omitted). In our original 2009 unpublished opinion resolving Simmons’s appeal, we followed Harp and held that Simmons was convicted of an offense “punishable” by more than one year’s imprisonment. The Supreme Court has vacated that judgment and ordered us to reconsider the case in light of its subsequent precedent. After consideration of that precedent, we now conclude that Harp no longer remains good law.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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