Supreme Court Makes Sentencing More Lenient Under First Step Act

The Supreme Court issued a decision on June 26 that made it easier for some convicts to obtain more lenient sentencing under the First Step Act.

In a 5–4 decision, the justices said a prior sentence could only be considered as such under the law if it hadn’t been vacated.

That’s important because the act allows lighter sentences if defendants hadn’t already been sentenced before the law’s enactment.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the majority opinion, which was partially joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined more of Jackson’s opinion.

Dissenting from the decision were Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

The case was the latest the Supreme Court took up in reviewing the First Step Act, which President Donald Trump signed during his first term.

Alito’s dissent said the majority had “disfigured” the law with its reasoning and suggested that it was attempting to “overhaul criminal sentencing” rather than interpret the law.

“The Court’s interpretation … unspools the Act’s carefully wound retroactivity command to mean that any defendant whose sentence is vacated at any time and for any reason may claim the benefit of the Act’s reduced mandatory minimum,” he wrote. “But nothing in the text or broader context supports such a boundless interpretation.”

John Koufos, a criminal justice advocate who worked closely with Trump on the First Step Act, praised the decision in a statement to The Epoch Times.

“Today’s decision builds upon President Trump’s promise of a First Step Act that brings fairness, due process, and accountability to our justice system while guarding against potentially weaponized indictments where criminal counts matter more than criminal conduct,” he said.

The case, known as Hewitt v. United States, goes back to at least 2009, when three men—Corey Duffey, Tony Hewitt, and Jarvis Ross—were convicted on counts related to robbery. Their sentences exceeded 325 years because of a law that compounds sentencing if an individual uses a firearm during a crime of violence.

More specifically, that law required that courts impose a mandatory minimum of five years for first offenders, but added 25 years for each additional conviction under that law. After successfully challenging some of their convictions, these individuals received slightly lower sentences in 2012. Nevertheless, they still faced sentences of about 300 years.

However, those sentences were vacated after a Supreme Court decision in 2019. In that case, known as United States v. Davis, a majority of the court stated that a provision in the law on armed offenses—known as Section 924(c)—was unconstitutionally vague. Because that law was used in the sentencing of Duffey, Hewitt, and Ross, another federal court reconsidered their sentences.

This created an unusual situation because by then, Congress had passed the First Step Act in 2018. Part of the First Step Act also addressed Section 924(c) by modifying how first-time offenders like Duffey, Hewitt, and Ross could be sentenced. Instead of receiving a five-year sentence for the first offense under §924(c) and 25 years for subsequent offenses, it states that convicts should get five-year mandatory minimums for each of the offenses they were charged with as first-time offenders.

Another part of the First Step Act—known as Section 403(b)—states that this change in sentencing structure would apply to individuals whose offenses occurred before the act was enacted. However, it contained a caveat stating that the altered sentencing structure would only apply to individuals if sentencing “has not been imposed” as of the First Step Act’s enactment.

This provision is why Duffey, Hewitt, and Ross argued that they should receive substantially lower sentences than they would have in previous years. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit disagreed, but the Supreme Court sided with them.

Jackson’s majority opinion states that the First Step Act’s use of “has not been imposed” was in the present perfect tense and therefore pointed to the status of a sentence at a particular time. Because the sentences had been vacated, they no longer qualified as a caveat under the law, according to Jackson.

She used the example of an Olympic champion who had their medal revoked for using performance-enhancing drugs.

“The fact that she stood on the podium and was declared the winner in 2016 is inapposite for purposes of establishing whether she qualifies for Olympic-champion bragging rights under the rule today,” Jackson said.

By contrast, Alito said the law’s use of the present perfect tense could be read in different ways. In other words, the First Step Act’s use of the term “has … been imposed” could refer to “the historical fact that a district court imposed a sentence.”