Justices Side With Defendants Seeking to Undo Long Sentences (1)

The US Supreme Court broadly read a federal law meant to reduce harsh criminal sentences.

The justices, in a 5-4 ruling by Ketanji Brown Jackson on Thursday, sided in the First Step Act case with both the defendants and the federal government, which agreed they were entitled to relief.

The court said the law’s reduced mandatory minimums apply to defendants who were originally sentenced before the act’s passage but later had their punishments vacated, and not only to those who hadn’t yet been sentenced.

The court found a “middle-ground” in leaving intact previously decided sentences to avoid additional litigation, but also returning more discretion to district judges by giving retroactive effect to the act’s more lenient penalties for first-time offenders.

The First Act was signed by President Donald Trump in 2018, aiming to reform the prison system and to address the “much-maligned” stacking of sentences, the court wrote.

The bipartisan law eliminated 25-year stacked sentences for first-time offenders and sought to ensure that judges were no longer constrained to impose them.

The cases were brought by Tony Hewitt and his co-defendants who were convicted for a series of bank robberies in 2008 and sentenced to more than 300 years in prison. Most of that time was for mandatory 25-year sentences that must be served back-to-back.

Hewitt’s sentence and those of his co-defendants were vacated. During resentencing, they argued that the First Step Act reduces the mandatory sentences to five years.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said Hewitt and the others weren’t eligible for the law’s more lenient mandatory minimums because each had been sentenced twice before it came into effect. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded the judgment.

A defendant whose conviction has been vacated “is to be treated going forward as though he were never convicted,” Jackson wrote.

A judge would “correctly conclude at resentencing that, if an offender’s past sentence has been vacated, a sentence ‘has not been imposed’ upon that offender for purposes of the First Step Act; hence, the court can impose a new sentence today,” she said.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissent that was joined by fellow conservatives Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

The ruling was an “indefensible result based on indefensible reasoning,” Alito wrote.

He added that the court didn’t establish a legal-validity interpretation, and even if it did, it would still need to prove its vacatur principle—which he argues doesn’t exist.

He also disagreed with the court’s reading of congressional intent regarding the First Step Act.

The ruling is likely to affect only a handful of defendants, but could mean decades less in prison time.

The cases are Hewitt v. United States, U.S., No. 23-1002, 6/26/25 and Duffey v. United States, U.S., No. 23-1150, 6/26/25.