504
Souter, J., dissenting
fendant can show to be invalid, a Congress that intended to require sentencing on the basis of such convictions can be expected to have made its intention explicit.
Finally, the Court turns for support to Lewis v. United States, 445 U. S. 55 (1980), which held that the federal "felon in possession" law does not permit a defendant, during his prosecution, to challenge the constitutional validity of the predicate felony conviction. The Court's reliance on Lewis, however, assumes an equivalence between two different types of laws that Lewis itself disclaimed: between a law disabling convicted felons from possessing firearms (at issue in Lewis), and a law requiring sentence enhancement based on prior convictions (at issue here, as well as in Burgett and Tucker). Lewis explained that the "felon in possession" law is "a sweeping prophylaxis" designed "to keep firearms away from potentially dangerous persons," 445 U. S., at 63, 67, whereas a sentence-enhancement law "depend[s] upon the reliability of a past . . . conviction," id., at 67. While the unlawfulness of a past conviction is irrelevant to the former, it is not to the latter, or so the Lewis Court thought in expressly distinguishing Burgett and Tucker: "[e]nforcement of [the federal gun disability] does not 'support guilt or enhance punishment' . . . on the basis of a conviction that is unreliable." 445 U. S., at 67 (quoting Burgett, 389 U. S., at 115).
Because of the material way in which a "felon in possession" law differs from a sentence-enhancement law, Burgett and Tucker were not part of the relevant legal backdrop against which Congress enacted the law interpreted in Lewis, and the Lewis Court could thus fairly presume that "conviction" in the statute before it was used as shorthand for "the fact of a felony conviction." 445 U. S., at 60, 67. As Lewis itself recognized, however, Burgett and Tucker are part of the backdrop against which sentence-enhancement laws are enacted, and against that backdrop Congress must be presumed to have used "conviction" in § 924(e) to mean "lawful conviction," and to have permitted defendants to
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