SCOTUS widens door to First Step Act sentencing relief

Bank robbery defendants whose 2010 sentences have been vacated in postconviction proceedings should be resentenced in accordance with the penalty scheme established under the 2018 First Step Act, which eliminated “stacked” 25-year periods of incarceration for certain first-time offenders convicted of possessing firearms during the commission of their crimes in violation of 18 U.S.C. §924, a divided U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in reversing a decision from the 5th Circuit.

In reaching that conclusion, the court interpreted the First Step Act’s retroactivity provision, §403(b), to mean that the act’s more lenient penalties apply to defendants whose previous §924(c) sentences have been vacated and who need to be resentenced following the act’s enactment.

Click here to read the full text of the June 26 decision in Hewitt v. United States.

• “The Fifth Circuit held, and amicus and the dissent contend, that §403(b) excludes any defendant who was sentenced prior to the enactment date of the First Step Act — even if his sentence was later vacated. That is so, in their view, because the Act applies only ‘if a sentence for the offense has not been imposed as of’ the Act’s enactment date, and a sentence ‘has … been imposed’ upon that defendant as a matter of historical fact.’ But based on the text of §403(b) and the nature of vacatur, we conclude that a sentence has been imposed for purposes of that provision if, and only if, the sentence is extant — i.e., has not been vacated.”
  — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, opinion of the court, except as to Parts IV and V, which Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch did not join

• “In the First Step Act of 2018, Congress reduced the mandatory-minimum sentence for certain firearm offenses. Like all changes to sentencing law, this amendment applies prospectively. But Congress also thought it wise to apply the amendment to ‘Pending Cases.’ Of course, ‘Pending Cases’ does not mean ‘All Cases,’ and Congress limited the retroactive reach of the amendment to defendants for whom ‘a sentence for the offense has not been imposed as of [the Act’s] date of enactment.’ In other words, the amendment applies retroactively only if the defendant had yet to be sentenced when Congress passed the Act in 2018. Petitioners, who were sentenced in 2010, do not come close to meeting that test.
  “Today, the Court disfigures the Act in order to reach a different result. Its interpretation relies on two necessary premises. First, the Court insists that what Congress really meant to say is that the amendment applies retroactively unless ‘a legally valid sentence’ is in force on the Act’s date of enactment. Second, to get around the fact that petitioners did have ‘legally valid’ sentences when the Act was passed, the Court invents a novel ‘vacatur’ principle. The Court tells us that the 2022 vacatur of petitioners’ sentences rendered those sentences legal nullities from their inception. The Court’s interpretation thus 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. But nothing in the text or broader context supports such a boundless interpretation. Indeed, the portions of today’s decision that command the votes of only three Justices give the game away. Animating the Court’s atextual interpretation is a thinly veiled desire to march in the parade of sentencing reform. But our role is to interpret the statute before us, not overhaul criminal sentencing.”
  — Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, dissenting