SCOTUS respects mandatory minimum wages for certain drug traffickers

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Friday that 1000’s of small-time drug dealers are ineligible for reduced prison sentences under a bipartisan Trump-era criminal justice overhaul.

The justices took up the case of Mark Pulsifer, an Iowa man convicted of distributing at the least 50 grams of methamphetamine, to resolve a dispute between federal courts over the meaning of the word “and” in an obscure provision of the 2018 law. First Step Act.

Contained within the law of the so-called The safety valve provision is meant to guard nonviolent, low-level drug dealers who conform to plead guilty and cooperate with prosecutors from facing often longer, mandatory sentences.

Some courts have concluded that the usage of the word actually means “and”, while others have concluded that it means “or”. The defendant’s eligibility for a shorter sentence trusted the end result.

“Today we agree with the government’s view of the criminal record provision,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the bulk in a 6-3 decision that didn’t divide the justices along liberal-conservative lines.

In his dissent, Justice Neil Gorsuch described the First Step Act as perhaps “the most important criminal justice reform bill in a generation.” But under the court’s decision, “thousands more people in the federal criminal justice system will be deprived of a chance — simply a chance” at a reduced sentence, wrote Gorsuch, who was joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor.

Nearly 6,000 people convicted of drug trafficking in fiscal yr 2021 alone are amongst those that could qualify for reduced sentences, in accordance with data collected by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

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This provision lists three criteria enabling judges to depart from mandatory minimum sentences, which generally bear in mind the seriousness of previous offenses. Congress wrote this section negatively in order that a judge could exercise sentencing discretion if a defendant “does not have” the three varieties of criminal history.

Before making their decision, the judges considered how one can determine safety valve eligibility – whether any one in every of the conditions was enough to disqualify someone, or whether all three were required for exclusion.

Pulsifer’s lawyers argued that every one three conditions have to be met before an extended sentence might be imposed. The government stated that one condition was enough to acquire the mandatory minimum.

Kagan wrote that the language “creates an eligibility checklist and requires the defendant to meet each of its conditions.”

Two of the three conditions involved Pulsifer. The trial court and the eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in St. Louis ruled he was entitled to a mandatory sentence of at the least 15 years. In fact, he received 13 and a half years in prison for unrelated reasons.

Pulsifer, now 61, just isn’t scheduled to be released from prison until 2031, in accordance with federal Bureau of Prisons records.

Congress can still change the law if it decides the court was incorrect.

The case is Pulsifer v. U.S., 22-340.