SCOTUS Continues to Hack Away At First Step Act
by Chuck Sharman
With a pair of rulings issued on May 26, 2026, the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) continued to limit the relief offered by Congress to federal prisoners with passage of the First Step Act (FSA) in 2018. That law—signed during the first term of Pres. Donald J. Trump (R)—was adopted by a Congress in which the GOP held majorities in both houses, reflecting a bipartisan agreement that federal sentences had become too harsh, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Jan. 2019, p.34.]
Offered among the FSA’s 36 sections were reductions in mandatory minimum sentences for certain serious drug-related crimes, including those for “three strike” drug offenders, plus a broadening of the federal “safety valve” provision, which grants exceptions to mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders with little or no criminal history. That was the victim of the high Court’s first stab at the FSA in a 2024 ruling that said the three criteria enumerated to disqualify a defendant from the safety valve provision must be read individually—meaning that prisoner Mark Pulsifer’s failure to satisfy just one of them foreclosed all sentencing relief for him. Nevermind, as Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed out in his dissent, that such a reading of the law “requires us to abandon one principle of statutory interpretation after another.” See: Pulsifer v. United States, 601 U.S. 124 (2024).
With its latest rulings, the Court has moved from sentencing concerns facing criminal defendants to petitions filed by sentenced prisoners for compassionate release under the FSA’s expanded criteria. Prisoners confined by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) will therefore want to take note of the ways in which SCOTUS says that the FSA does not extend the opportunity for compassionate release to them.
Sentence Disparity Not Grounds for Compassionate Release
First up were the consolidated cases of BOP prisoners Daniel Rutherford and Johnnie Markel Carter. Both are serving long prison terms, thanks to the practice of “stacking” of mandatory minimum sentences—a practice that the FSA ended. Congress stopped short of making the FSA’s provisions retroactive, which would have flooded federal courts with resentencing applications from prisoners like Rutherford and Carter, whose prison terms would be vastly shorter—Rutherford’s by at least 14 years and Carter’s by a whopping 21 years.
However, Congress had already provided a vehicle for prisoners to seek such relief via compassionate release. Under §3582(c)(1)(A)(i), federal district courts are allowed to modify a sentence if “extraordinary and compelling reasons warrant such a reduction.” Rutherford and Carter argued that this criteria was satisfied by the enormous disparity between the sentence they got and the one that the FSA would provide them. In support of their position, they pointed to a 2023 policy statement from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) which specifically added “Unusually Long Sentence” to the list of “extraordinary and compelling” reasons that might justify granting compassionate release.
In a 6-3 decision, SCOTUS disagreed and affirmed denial of the compassionate release petitions. Quoting the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the Court said that “it makes no sense to ‘construe Congress’s nonretroactivity directive as simultaneously creating an extraordinary and compelling reason for early release.’” The Court was also unbothered that this result put it at odds with the USSC; citing Batterton v. Francis, 432 U. S. 416 (1977), it insisted instead “[w]e are not bound to follow the Commission’s guidance when it ‘exceed[s its] statutory authority’ by adopting a definition of a term that is inconsistent with the statute.”
Did it occur to the majority that Congress might have punted resentencing so many federal prisoners because it already had a compassionate release mechanism in place—one that the Congressionally authorized USSC had dutifully extended? As dissenting Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Katanji Brown Jackson pointed out, “Congress directed the [USSC], not this Court, to define what constitutes ‘extraordinary and compelling reasons’ for incarcerated individuals to receive a sentence reduction under the compassionate-release statute.” However, the majority was willing to tolerate the blatant unfairness inflicted on prisoners like Ruthford and Carter “to reinforce” Congress’s supposed “interest in finality.” See: Rutherford v. United States, 146 S. Ct. 1320 (2026).
Compassionate Release No Substitute for Habeas Petition
In the other case, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York had granted compassionate release to federal prisoner Joe Fernandez, agreeing that evidence which was strongly suggestive of his innocence counted as an “extraordinary and compelling” reason. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed that decision, holding that habeas corpus, not compassionate release, was the only way to challenge the validity of a conviction. To resolve a split among circuits considering the issue, SCOTUS granted a writ of certiorari to hear the case and affirmed the Second Circuit’s decision.
Only Justice Jackson dissented. Considering the hypothetical case of a prisoner in possession of evidence that both (1) undermines his conviction and (2) was unavailable to him at trial for reasons beyond his control, she noted that the federal habeas statute, 28 U. S. C. §2255(a), would offer no relief because the sentence itself was not “imposed in violation of the … Constitution or laws of the United States.” Indeed, Fernandez’s habeas petition had been denied for this very reason—and having filed one, he may never again file another. As Jackson noted, “this manifest injustice would seem to be the quintessential situation in which the compassionate-release safety valve would apply.”
But the majority was unpersuaded. Instead, the Court determined that Fernandez was attempting an impermissible end-run around the habeas statute and moved to shut him down. Accordingly, the judgment of the Second Circuit was affirmed. See: Fernandez v. United States, 146 S. Ct. 1292 (2026).
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Related legal case
Fernandez v. United States
| Year | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Cite | 146 S. Ct. 1292 (2026) |
| Level | Supreme Court |