6
Opinion of the Court
The Court of Appeals also found ambiguity in Congress' decision, in drafting § 924(c), to prohibit concurrent sentences instead of simply mandating consecutive sentences. 65 F. 3d, at 820. Unlike the lower court, however, we see nothing remarkable (much less ambiguous) about Congress' choice of words. Because consecutive and concurrent sentences are exact opposites, Congress implicitly required one when it prohibited the other. This "ambiguity" is, in any event, beside the point because this phraseology has no bearing on whether Congress meant § 924(c) sentences to run consecutively only to other federal terms of imprisonment.
Given the straightforward statutory command, there is no reason to resort to legislative history. Connecticut Nat. Bank v. Germain, 503 U. S. 249, 254 (1992). Indeed, far from clarifying the statute, the legislative history only muddies the waters. The excerpt from the Senate Report accompanying the 1984 amendment to § 924(c), relied upon by the Court of Appeals, reads:
"[T]he Committee intends that the mandatory sentence under the revised subsection 924(c) be served prior to the start of the sentence for the underlying or any other offense." S. Rep., at 313-314.
This snippet of legislative history injects into § 924(c) an entirely new idea—that a defendant must serve the 5-year prison term for his firearms conviction before any other sentences. This added requirement, however, is "in no way anchored in the text of the statute." Shannon v. United States, 512 U. S. 573, 583 (1994).
The Court of Appeals was troubled that this rule might lead to irrational results. Normally, a district court has authority to decide whether federal prison terms should run concurrently with or consecutively to other prison sentences. 18 U. S. C. § 3584(a) (vesting power in district court to run most prison terms either concurrently or consecutively); United States Sentencing Commission, Guidelines Manual
Page: Index Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007