Cite as: 508 U. S. 129 (1993)
Opinion of the Court
example. Or "criminal offense" instead of "crime." But to say that "subsequent offense" means the same thing as "second or subsequent conviction" requires a degree of verbal know-nothingism that would render government by legislation quite impossible. Under the terminology "second or subsequent conviction," in the context at issue here, it is entirely clear (without any "sentence parsing") that a defendant convicted of a crime committed in 1992, who has previously been convicted of a crime committed in 1993, would receive the enhanced sentence.
The dissent quotes extensively from Gonzalez v. United States, 224 F. 2d 431 (CA1 1955). See post, at 138-139. But far from supporting the "text-insensitive" approach favored by the dissent, that case acknowledges that "[i]n construing subsequent offender statutes . . . the decisions of the courts have varied depending upon the particular statute involved." 224 F. 2d, at 434. It says, as the dissent points out, that federal courts have "uniformly" held it to be the rule that a second offense can occur only after conviction for the first. Ibid. But those holdings were not arrived at in disregard of the statutory text. To the contrary, as Gonzalez goes on to explain:
" 'It cannot legally be known that an offense has been committed until there has been a conviction. A second offense, as used in the criminal statutes, is one that has been committed after conviction for a first offense.' " Ibid. (quoting Holst v. Owens, 24 F. 2d 100, 101 (CA5 1928)).
The present statute, however, does not use the term "offense," so it cannot possibly be said that it requires a criminal act after the first conviction. What it requires is a conviction after the first conviction. There is utterly no ambiguity in that, and hence no occasion to invoke the rule of lenity. (The erroneous lower-court decisions cited by the dissent, see post, at 142-144, do not alter this assessment;
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