In 2018, Congress passed the First Step Act with rare bipartisan support. Hailed as “the most significant criminal justice reform bill in a generation,” the basic premise of the act was straightforward: Federal sentences had grown too harsh, and, not coincidentally, were imposed in racially disparate ways. Congress therefore concluded that many of the people serving these draconian sentences deserved a second chance. In the words of then-Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Senator Chuck Grassley: The First Step Act “addresses unfairness in prison sentencing and revises policies that have led to overcrowded prisons and ballooning taxpayer expenses.” And as President Donald Trump declared when signing the act into law: “Americans from across the political spectrum can unite around prison reform legislation that will reduce crime while giving our fellow citizens a chance at redemption.”
Since then, the Supreme Court has done what it can to make the First Step Act smaller.
Take 2023’s Pulsifer v. United States, where the court narrowed the act’s expansion of the federal “safety valve,” a provision of the act that allows sentencing courts to forgo imposing mandatory minimum sentences if defendants meet certain criteria. The majority read the provision to exclude a substantial class of defendants, which, as Justice Neil Gorsuch charged in his dissent, guaranteed that “thousands more people in the federal criminal justice system will be denied a chance—just a fair chance—at an individualized sentence.” Gorsuch made clear that this was so not because the statutory text demands it, but because the court adopted the government’s policy-driven argument for a narrower reading – one that limited district courts’ discretion to grant relief and curtailed the act’s overall reach.
Then late last month the court decided two First Step Act cases involving compassionate release, which permits certain incarcerated individuals to seek early release or a sentence reduction based on “extraordinary and compelling reasons.” In both cases, the court once again limited the First Step Act’s reach, this time by cabining what qualified as “extraordinary and compelling.”
|
