Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Wooden v. United States was unanimous, though it didn’t get there through the ordinary route of agreement.

KAGAN, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAVANAUGH, JJ., joined, and in which THOMAS, ALITO, and BARRETT, JJ., joined as to all but Part II–B. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed a concurring opinion. KAVANAUGH, J., filed a concurring opinion. BARRETT, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment, in which THOMAS, J., joined. GORSUCH, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which SOTOMAYOR, J., joined as to Parts II, III, and IV.

But like Fairy Tales, fractured and correct is better than nothing. The crime for which William Wooden got slammed with almost 16 years was discovered by accident.

Fast forward now to a cold November morning in 2014, when Wooden responded to a police officer’s knock on his door. The officer asked to speak with Wooden’s wife. And noting the chill in the air, the officer asked if he could step inside, to stay warm. Wooden agreed. But his good deed did not go unpunished. Once admitted to the house, the officer spotted several guns. Knowing that Wooden was a felon, the officer placed him under arrest. A jury later convicted him for being a felon in possession of a firearm, in violation of 18 U. S. C. §922(g).

It wasn’t that possession of guns, notably in the home, carried such an extreme sentence, but that Wooden was sentenced under the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA), a never-ending source of litigation, confusion and lives lost to prison.

The penalty for that crime varies significantly depending on whether ACCA applies. Putting ACCA aside, the maximum sentence for violating §922(g) is ten years in prison. See §924(a)(2). But ACCA mandates a minimum sentence of fifteen years if the §922(g) offender has three prior convictions for “violent felon[ies]” (like burglary) or “serious drug offense[s]” that were “committed on occasions different from one another.” §924(e)(1).

Writing law is hard on “occasion,” the issue in Wooden being whether his prior ten convictions were committed on one occasion or ten.

In 1997, William Dale Wooden pleaded guilty to 10 counts of burglary, one for each of the adjacent storage units he had broken into in one night. More than a decade later, he was convicted of being a felon in possession of a gun.

Writing for the Court, Justice Kagan explained why the burglarly of ten adjacent storage units, while resulting in ten counts, ten convictions, was more like one occasion.

“Consider first how an ordinary person (a reporter; a police officer; yes, even a lawyer) might describe Wooden’s 10 burglaries — and how she would not,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for eight members of the court.

“The observer might say: ‘On one occasion, Wooden burglarized 10 units in a storage facility,’” she wrote. “By contrast, she would never say: ‘On 10 occasions, Wooden burglarized a unit in the facility.’ Nor would she say anything like: ‘On one occasion, Wooden burglarized a storage unit; on a second occasion, he burglarized another unit; on a third occasion, he burglarized yet another; and so on.’”

And if Kagan’s invocation of how an “ordinary person” might describe it was unclear, she compared it to the typical weddings attended by a Supreme Court justice, the similarities being undeniable.

“The occasion of a wedding, for example, often includes a ceremony, cocktail hour, dinner and dancing,” she wrote. “Those doings are proximate in time and place, and have a shared theme (celebrating the happy couple); their connections are, indeed, what makes them part of a single event. But they do not occur at the same moment: The newlyweds would surely take offense if a guest organized a conga line in the middle of their vows.”

Justice Kagan added, “The same is true (to shift gears from the felicitous to the felonious) when it comes to crime.”

Why a “conga line” is anyone’s guess. Ironically, it’s not as if Justice Kagan applied the same “ordinary person’s” observation as to the original ten counts, ten convictions, on that auspicious occasion. It may not look that way to the observer afterward, but it did to the prosecutor and judge who charged and sentenced Wooden for ten occasions in the first place.

Trying to make sense of the vague language of the ACCA, Justice Kagan crafted another “multifaceted balancing test.”

The inquiry that requirement entails, given what “occasion” ordinarily means, is more multi-factored in nature. From the wedding to the barroom brawl, all the examples offered above suggest that a range of circumstances may be relevant to identifying episodes of criminal activity. Timing of course matters, though not in the split-second, elements based way the Government proposes. Offenses committed close in time, in an uninterrupted course of conduct, will often count as part of one occasion; not so offenses separated by substantial gaps in time or significant intervening events. Proximity of location is also important; the further away crimes take place, the less likely they are components of the same criminal event. And the character and relationship of the offenses may make a difference: The more similar or intertwined the conduct giving rise to the offenses—the more, for example, they share a common scheme or purpose—the more apt they are to compose one occasion.

Well, that cleared it up. Except for Justice Gorsuch, who noted that the owner of each of the ten storage units burglarized might view their loss as more than the happy couple’s first dance.

“When it comes to location, each storage unit had its own number and space, each burglary infringed on a different person’s property, and Mr. Wooden had to break through a new wall to enter each one,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “Suppose this case involved not adjacent storage units but adjacent townhomes or adjacent stores in a mall. If Mr. Wooden had torn through the walls separating them, would we really say his crimes occurred at the same location?”

Among the many problems with Supreme Court interpretations of statutes is that they apply to cases that are somewhat similar but also somewhat different, such that fine-tuned analysis often provides no guidance as to what happens with a tweak here or there in the facts. While concurring in the result, Gorsuch took a more principled approach by applying the Rule of Lenity.

Under that rule, any reasonable doubt about the application of a penal law must be resolved in favor of liberty. Because reasonable minds could differ (as they have differed) on the question whether Mr. Wooden’s crimes took place on one occasion or many, the rule of lenity demands a judgment in his favor.

Rather than the Supreme Court cleaning up the mess of Congress enacting criminal laws that fail to provide clear notice, the oft-neglected Rule of Lenity should apply so that ambiguity is resolved in favor of the defendant. If Congress doesn’t like it, let them work harder on writing precise laws or not enacting laws that can’t be adequately understood and applied to the myriad situations that invariably arise in criminal law.