Fourth Circuit to BOP Prisoner: Any “Disqualifying Offense” Means Zero FSA Credits
by Chuck Sharman
In a stark warning to federal prisoners on November 25, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit declared that federal courts will not disaggregate a combined sentence to apply credits offered under the First Step Act (FSA), 18 U.S.C. § 3632. If the underlying conviction for any part of the sentence is for a “disqualifying offense” listed under the law, the Court said that prisoners are ineligible for any sentence credits at all. Therefore, though just 24 months of prisoner Gregory Bonnie’s 144-month sentence were imposed for an excluded offense, the law’s sentence credits are completely unavailable to him.
Bonnie, 49, was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for a pair of 2005 convictions: one for drug trafficking in violation of 21 U.S.C. §§ 841 and 846, and one for related firearm possession, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). For the former he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and five years of supervised release, and for the latter another five years in prison and three years of supervised release, running consecutively.
After his 2017 release, Bonnie was again charged with drug trafficking and pleaded guilty. In May 2021, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison on the new charge. His supervised release was also revoked on the earlier convictions, and he was sentenced to a consecutive two-year prison term for them, all to be served at the satellite prison camp at the Federal Correctional Institution in Williamsburg, South Carolina.
Between Bonnie’s release and reincarceration, Congress passed the FSA, providing sentence credits for completion of specified programing to federal prisoners, except those convicted of 68 “disqualifying” offenses. Importantly, one of those was violation of § 924(c). Bonnie didn’t try to parse his reincarceration but conceded that the entire two-year term was ineligible for credits because part of it was being served for violating § 924(c). However, he asked the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to declare him eligible for FSA credits for his 10-year term for drug trafficking, which is not a “disqualifying offense” under the law.
The BOP refused. “Multiple terms of imprisonment ordered to run consecutively or concurrently shall be treated for administrative … purposes as a single, aggregate term of imprisonment,” the prison system declared. Bonnie filed a grievance and exhausted his administrative remedies, as required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1997e. He then filed a petition for habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina.
The district court granted summary judgment to Defendant Warden R.S. Dunbar, declaring that “the plain text and statutory context of the FSA indicate Congress’s intention that an inmate convicted of multiple offenses, at least one of which is ineligible to earn time credits under the FSA, is ineligible to earn time credits under the FSA because the BOP is statutorily mandated to … aggregate the sentence.” Bonnie timely appealed.
Fourth Circuit Rejects
Prisoner’s Arguments
At the Fourth Circuit, Bonnie argued that the BOP’s interpretation of the FSA was wrong; the BOP must “calculate credits on any permitted sentence, and consecutive sentences are different sentences,” he reasoned. Because this presented a question of statutory interpretation, the Fourth Circuit conducted de novo review, citing Rosemond v. Hudgins, 92 F.4th 518 (4th Cir. 2024), and United States v. Thomas, 32 F.4th 420 (4th Cir. 2022).
The Court began by noting that the FSA’s credits are included in the section titled “Recidivism Reduction,” which also directs the BOP to assess a prisoner’s recidivism risk when assigning him to “appropriate evidence-based recidivism reduction programs or productive activities,” completion of which is required to earn credits. The parties agreed that it was Congress’ intent to identify and reward low-risk prisoners, while denying credits to higher-risk prisoners. But Bonnie argued that his sentence should be parsed. Agreeing with the BOP, the Court said that Congress didn’t tie the FSA’s credits to the risk represented by a particular sentence. Rather, it said that the text “categorically disqualifies a prisoner, not a sentence, from receiving FSA time credits.”
Furthermore, nothing in the FSA changed the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, 18 U.S.C. § 3584, which said that “[m]ultiple terms of imprisonment ordered to run consecutively or concurrently shall be treated for … administrative purposes as a single, aggregate term of imprisonment.” Bonnie argued that “administrative purposes” in this context did not include the awarding of FSA credits. But the Court disagreed, pointing to United States v. Wilson, 503 U.S. 329 (1992), in which the Supreme Court of the U.S. specifically called award of sentence credit an “administrative matter” for the BOP.
Bonnie attempted to refute this by reference to the Second Chance Act, 34 USCS § 60541, which explicitly incorporated § 3584(c) to deny its home detention provisions to those convicted of any disqualifying offense, even if they were also convicted of offenses that qualified. Since Congress didn’t make the same explicit incorporation in the FSA, he argued, there was no clear evidence that its intent was similar. But again, the Court disagreed, declaring that the terms of § 3584(c) are “clearly applicable” to the FSA.
Dissenting Judge James Andrew Wynn, Jr. put his argument succinctly: “Can a prisoner ‘serve’ a 24-month sentence for 144 months? Of course not. The proposition refutes itself. That obvious ‘no’ answer should resolve this case.” The panel’s majority, however, was unpersuaded, and the district court’s dismissal of Bonnie’s habeas petition was thus affirmed. A request for rehearing before the full Fourth Circuit en banc was denied on January 5, 2026. Before the Court, Bonnie was represented by Federal Public Defender Patricia L. Richman, with attorney John L. Warren III on brief from the Law Office of Bill Nettles in Columbia. See: Bonnie v. Dunbar, 157 F.4th 610 (4th Cir. 2025); and 2026 U.S. App. LEXIS 241 (4th Cir.)
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Related legal case
Bonnie v. Dunbar
| Year | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Cite | 157 F.4th 610 (4th Cir. 2025) |
| Level | Court of Appeals |