Supreme Court limits compassionate release to sentence-length challenges only

Joe Fernandez has been in federal prison since 2014, serving two consecutive life terms for his role in a Bronx double murder-for-hire on Feb. 22, 2000. A drug organization paid Fernandez $40,000 to serve as a backup shooter when the primary hitman's weapon jammed. He fired 14 rounds and killed Arturo Cuellar and Ildefonso Vivero Flores, two men who had delivered 274 kilograms of cocaine to the ring and were waiting for payment they never received.

Fernandez's co-defendants — including Patrick Darge, the primary hitman who testified against him — received far lighter sentences, ranging from 2 to 30 years. Fernandez maintained he was innocent, arguing that Darge's testimony was unreliable and that the jury's verdict was wrong.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who had sentenced Fernandez in 2014, reconsidered the case in 2021 and 2022. He wrote that he felt "disquiet" and "doubt that the jury's verdict was correct" based on inconsistencies in Darge's testimony, the significant sentencing gap between Fernandez and his co-defendants, and Fernandez's law-abiding life in the 11 years between the murders and his 2011 arrest. In November 2022, Hellerstein granted Fernandez's motion under 18 U.S.C. §3582(c)(1)(A) and reduced his sentence to time served.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed Hellerstein's ruling in 2024. In United States v. Fernandez, 104 F.4th 420 (2d Cir. 2024), the panel held that a prisoner's challenge to conviction validity — questions about witness credibility, whether the jury got it right — isn't a valid "extraordinary and compelling reason" under the statute. Those arguments belong in a petition under 28 U.S.C. §2255.

The ruling created a three-way circuit split: the Second, Fourth, and D.C. Circuits barred conviction challenges in proceedings, while the First and Ninth Circuits allowed courts to consider such claims. In 2022, the Supreme Court had signaled broad judicial discretion in First Step Act cases in Concepcion v. United States, 597 U.S. 481, but left the specific question in Fernandez unresolved.

The Supreme Court granted certiorari in May 2025 and heard oral argument on Nov. 12, 2025. The central legal question was whether claims that might also qualify as grounds to vacate a sentence under §2255 could simultaneously count as "extraordinary and compelling reasons" for compassionate release under §3582. The case resolved a circuit split among five circuits on whether conviction-validity challenges have any role in compassionate release proceedings.

On May 28, 2026, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority that "the supposed invalidity of a conviction is not among the 'extraordinary and compelling reasons' that justify compassionate release." Barrett wrote that challenges "close to the core of habeas corpus" must go through the specific habeas statute — 28 U.S.C. §2255 — which Congress designed for exactly that purpose. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh joined the full majority opinion.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan concurred only in the judgment. They agreed Fernandez should lose because his claims weren't genuinely new, but warned that the majority's categorical approach risks blocking meritorious claims simply because they happen to overlap with habeas arguments.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed by President Biden and confirmed 53-47 in April 2022, was the sole dissenter. She wrote: "An innocent man stuck in prison for life: Can there be a more 'extraordinary and compelling' reason to shorten a prison sentence than that?" Jackson argued the statute doesn't expressly prohibit considering wrongful conviction claims, and that the majority had adopted an unnecessarily broad rule that guts the compassionate release safety valve for its most important use cases.

Jackson broke from Sotomayor and Kagan, who agreed with her that the majority went too far but concluded the outcome was correct on the specific facts. Newsweek reported that Barrett's majority directly responded to Jackson's dissent, calling it "perplexing."

Congress created the compassionate release statute — 18 U.S.C. §3582 — in 1984 as part of the bipartisan Sentencing Reform Act, authored in the Senate by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC). The law abolished federal parole and replaced it with determinate sentencing under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. Compassionate release was written in as a narrow safety valve — a way for judges to still grant relief to prisoners whose continued incarceration posed little public safety benefit after parole was gone. For more than three decades, only the Bureau of Prisons Director could file a motion, and the agency used the power sparingly: between 2013 and 2017, the BOP received 5,400 compassionate release requests but approved only 312, while 266 prisoners died waiting for a response.

The First Step Act of 2018, which unlocked compassionate release for prisoners themselves to file, passed the Senate 87-12 on Dec. 18, 2018 and the House 358-36 two days later. President Trump signed it Dec. 21, 2018. The bill was championed in the Senate by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Mike Lee (R-UT). In the House, Reps. Doug Collins (R-GA) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) led the effort. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, drove the White House push after his own family's experience with the federal justice system. CNN commentator Van Jones organized progressive advocacy alongside Kushner in an unusual coalition that also included the Koch network and the ACLU. Sens. Durbin and Booker later filed an amicus brief in Fernandez urging the Court to preserve broad judicial discretion.

The habeas corpus alternative the Court pointed Fernandez toward carries its own hard constraints — most of them installed in 1996. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, signed by President Clinton on April 24, 1996 in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, imposed a one-year statute of limitations on §2255 motions, tightly restricted successive petitions, and required federal courts to defer to state courts on most constitutional claims. The writ of habeas corpus itself dates to the Magna Carta of 1215 and was codified in the U.S. Judiciary Act of 1789 — the Constitution's Suspension Clause (Article I, Section 9) bars Congress from eliminating it except during rebellion or invasion. President Lincoln suspended it unilaterally during the Civil War and Congress retroactively approved the suspension in 1863. AEDPA didn't eliminate habeas but made it far harder to win: it's now described by law professors and judges alike as a law that "keeps people on death row despite flawed trials." For Fernandez, AEDPA's one-year clock expired years ago.

In fiscal year 2024, approximately 2,700 federal prisoners filed compassionate release motions and 391 were granted — a 16% success rate that varied from 7.2% in the Eighth Circuit to 34.9% in the Second Circuit. Of those granted relief, 42.4% were Black, even though Black prisoners make up 34.9% of the federal prison population — a higher grant rate than their share of the incarcerated population. Nearly all motions, 96.5%, were filed by the prisoners themselves rather than the BOP Director, reflecting how completely the First Step Act shifted the power to initiate relief.

For Fernandez, the ruling means he stays in prison with no clear path to relief. He can't easily file a §2255 petition — the statute of limitations expired years ago and his successive petition options are tightly constrained. The case drew substantial pro bono legal support, and criminal defense lawyers warn the ruling will shut off relief for a category of prisoners who have no viable alternative remedy.