The justices sided with the government in a case focused on who is eligible for shorter prison sentences under the bipartisan First Step Act passed in 2018.
By Abbie VanSickle
Mar 15, 2024
The Supreme Court sided with the government on Friday, narrowly interpreting a provision of a landmark criminal justice law in a decision likely to limit the number of federal prisoners who are eligible for reduced sentences for nonviolent drug crimes.
The decision , by a vote of 6 to 3, did not split along ideological lines. The majority opinion, written by Justice Elena Kagan, concluded that a criminal defendant must meet a series of criminal history conditions to qualify for relief. A failure to meet any of the criteria, she wrote, would render a prisoner ineligible.
The case focused on who is eligible for shorter prison sentences under the First Step Act, bipartisan legislation passed in 2018 to address the human and financial costs of the country's booming prison population.
Under a provision known as the "safety valve," judges can disregard federal mandatory minimum sentences for people with limited criminal history convicted of certain nonviolent drug offenses.
The law lists three types of criminal history among its criteria for eligibility. The justices were asked to decide whether just one type of criminal history disqualifies a person from a lighter sentence, or whether all three must be present for a disqualification.
Like the arguments, which were focused on grammar -- basically, what does "and" mean in a list -- Justice Kagan's opinion adopted the tone of an English teacher. The opinion, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, was peppered with examples of sentence structure, pulling from childhood classics.
"Consider this perhaps half-remembered line from childhood: 'On Saturday he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake and one slice of watermelon,'" Justice Kagan wrote, citing the book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."
The use of the word "and" meant that the caterpillar ate each one of the foods, she wrote.
In dissent, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, emphasized the purpose of the First Step Act. The legislation, he wrote, promised to give "more individuals the chance to avoid one-size-fits-all mandatory minimums and receive instead sentences that account for their particular circumstances and crimes."
The case, Pulsifer v. United States , No. 22-340, involved Mark E. Pulsifer, who had been accused of twice selling methamphetamine to a confidential informant in southwest Iowa.
After a federal grand jury indicted him, he pleaded guilty to a single count of distributing at least 50 grams of methamphetamine. He had a prior drug conviction from 2013 in the state for possessing a controlled substance with intent to distribute.
Mr. Pulsifer's lawyer had argued that his client was eligible for relief under the First Step Act unless he met all three criteria laid out in the law. The government argued that he was ineligible because he met one of the criteria.
In siding with the government, Justice Kagan gave example after example of uses of the word "and" to explain the court's reasoning.
"Suppose a person says after visiting a bookstore, 'I bought a novel, a memoir and a travel guide,'" Justice Kagan wrote.
"Ordinary people still understand the verb to carry over to all the books in the sentence," she continued, adding that it was "just a more efficient way of saying 'I bought a novel, bought a memoir and bought a travel guide.'"
She shared an example of a doctor dispensing medical advice: "A hospital tells you that it can perform a medical procedure only if you 'don't eat, drink and smoke for the preceding 12 hours.'"
Even Mr. Pulsifer's lawyer agreed that "he would not feel free to have a steak and martini so long as he abstained from tobacco," the justice wrote.
Although Mr. Pulsifer had argued that "Congress could have expressed its intent more clearly," she added that "we do not demand (or in truth expect) that Congress draft in the most translucent way possible."
She found that Mr. Pulsifer's interpretation strained credibility and would lead to a reading of the law that made no sense.
"Pulsifer's reading would negate one of three -- indeed, the first of three -- provisions in the very paragraph he is trying to interpret," Justice Kagan wrote.
The majority dismissed the argument by Mr. Pulsifer that the court should broadly interpret the law because it was aimed at reducing prison sentences and lowering the number of people behind bars.
That was "a misguided argument about legislative purpose" that did "not assist in interpreting the statutory text before us," Justice Kagan wrote.
In the dissent, Justice Gorsuch explained that in the 1980s and 1990s, Congress adopted a series of mandatory minimum prison sentences that led, in part, to a skyrocketing increase in the federal prison population in less than a decade. The First Step Act, he wrote, was Congress's effort "to recalibrate its approach."
"The dispute before us matters profoundly," Justice Gorsuch added. "Our decision today thus promises to affect the lives and liberty of thousands of individuals."
The dissent had none of the playful grammatical examples of the majority.
Justice Gorsuch wrote that the interpretation of "and" in the law meant the difference between incarceration and freedom for thousands.
"If this difference seems a small one, it is anything but," Justice Gorsuch wrote. "Adopting the government's preferred interpretation guarantees that thousands more people in the federal criminal justice system will be denied a chance -- just a chance -- at an individualized sentence."
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/us/politics/supreme-court-sentencing-first-step-act.html
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