Supreme Court bars First Step Act sentence reductions for pre-2018 stacking

The Supreme Court decided Rutherford v. United States (No. 24-820) on May 28, 2026, a 6-3 ruling that bars federal courts from using sentencing disparities created by the First Step Act of 2018 as grounds for . Justice Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by President Trump and confirmed 52-48 in October 2020, wrote the majority opinion. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh joined her.

The case arose from two consolidated appeals. Daniel Rutherford was convicted of two counts of using a firearm during a violent crime under 18 U.S.C. §924(c), one count for each of two armed robberies of a chiropractic office he committed in 2003 at age 25. Under the stacking rules in effect at his sentencing, he received a seven-year mandatory minimum for the first count and a 25-year mandatory minimum for the second, running consecutively. Combined with his sentences for the underlying robberies, he received 42.5 years total.

Johnnie Markel Carter was convicted in 2011 of bank robbery and three counts of using a firearm during a crime of violence. The stacking rules produced consecutive mandatory minimums of 7 years, 25 years, and 25 years, totaling 57 years in firearm sentences alone, combined with 13 years for the robberies. Carter's total sentence was 70 years. His co-conspirators received sentences ranging from 10 to 23 years.

Congress passed the First Step Act on December 21, 2018, signed by President Trump. The law changed §924(c) so that the 25-year mandatory minimum for a second conviction applies only when a defendant has a prior, final §924(c) conviction from a separate case. If Rutherford were sentenced today, his §924(c) sentences would total 7 years instead of 32. Carter's would total 21 years instead of 57.

Both men filed for compassionate release under 18 U.S.C. §3582(c)(1)(A), arguing that the sentencing disparity constituted an extraordinary and compelling reason warranting a reduction. The compassionate release statute was expanded by the First Step Act itself, which let prisoners file their own motions. Before 2018, only the BOP director could initiate these motions, and the agency used that authority so sparingly that it averaged just 24 releases per year across the entire federal prison population. A 2013 DOJ Inspector General report found the program had been poorly managed and inconsistently applied, resulting in terminally ill prisoners dying before decisions were made. Between 2013 and 2017, 266 prisoners died while waiting for BOP decisions. That report directly pushed Congress to let prisoners file their own motions.

In 2023, the U.S. Sentencing Commission amended its policy statement to allow courts to consider sentencing disparities caused by non-retroactive changes in law as one factor in a compassionate release analysis. This set the stage for a circuit split that the Supreme Court agreed to resolve.

Justice Barrett's majority opinion held that courts can't treat the disparity between a defendant's actual sentence and what they'd receive today as extraordinary and compelling. Barrett wrote: "When Congress declines to make a sentencing amendment retroactive, the fact that a preamendment sentence is longer than it would have been postamendment is not an extraordinary and compelling reason that warrants a sentence reduction."

The majority reasoned that Congress made a deliberate choice to apply the §924(c) anti-stacking reform only to future defendants. Treating the resulting disparity as grounds for compassionate release would effectively override that deliberate legislative choice, even as just one factor among many in a totality-of-circumstances analysis.

The Court consolidated Carter v. United States (No. 24-860) with Rutherford's case. Both cases were argued together on November 12, 2025. David C. Frederick argued for Rutherford, David A. O'Neil argued for Carter, and Deputy Solicitor General Eric J. Feigin argued for the United States.

The ruling leaves intact other grounds for compassionate release: terminal illness, family hardship, and abuse by correctional officers. It applies specifically to whether Congress's deliberate choice to make sentencing reforms nonretroactive can be treated as an extraordinary circumstance.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, appointed by President Obama and confirmed 68-31 in 2009, wrote the principal dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sotomayor argued that Congress assigned the Sentencing Commission, not the Supreme Court, the lead role in defining extraordinary and compelling reasons. The Commission exercised that authority in its 2023 policy statement.

Sotomayor wrote: "Under the statutory scheme that Congress created, the Commission has the leading role of defining the words extraordinary and compelling and thus setting the scope of compassionate release." The Constitutional Accountability Center argued the majority's approach departed from the Court's stated commitment to text and historical practice.

The ruling forecloses a legal avenue that thousands of people in federal prison had pursued. The Sentencing Project estimated that while approximately 30,000 people benefited from First Step Act reforms between 2019 and early 2023, many sentenced under pre-Act stacking rules remain in federal custody serving sentences that today's guidelines would never impose.

The decision doesn't prevent Congress from passing new legislation making the anti-stacking reform retroactive, or prevent executive clemency. For prisoners like Rutherford and Carter, the only institutional remedy left runs through Congress or the President, not the courts.

The First Step Act passed Congress with bipartisan support — 87-12 in the Senate and 358-36 in the House — and was signed by President Trump as a signature criminal justice accomplishment. The Act's nonretroactivity for §924(c) changes was a deliberate legislative compromise. Supporters of the anti-stacking reform pushed for ; opponents resisted it. The Rutherford ruling effectively enforces that compromise against judicial work-arounds.

Federal public defenders, the NACDL, and the Cato Institute each filed amicus briefs supporting Rutherford and Carter, arguing the old stacking guidelines produced mass incarceration penalties for crimes that under contemporary standards wouldn't generate those sentences. Despite these arguments, the Court's majority drew a clear line: the compassionate release statute can't accomplish retroactivity that Congress chose not to grant.

The mandatory minimum laws that created §924(c) stacking didn't emerge from nowhere. In 1973, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed what became known as the Rockefeller Drug Laws — requiring 15 years to life in prison for possessing four ounces or selling two ounces of narcotics. Rockefeller had previously backed rehabilitation and treatment, but reversed course as public anxiety about crime grew. Historians have noted that his push for harsh drug laws coincided with his ambitions for the Republican presidential nomination. He became Vice President in 1974.

Thirteen years later, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 in six weeks, after basketball star Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose. Even though Bias used powder cocaine, not crack, House Speaker Tip O'Neill drove an omnibus anti-drug bill that created the 100-to-1 crack-to-powder sentencing disparity: five grams of crack triggered a five-year mandatory minimum, while it took 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same sentence. The §924(c) stacking provision — 25-year consecutive terms for each firearm count after the first — came from the same mandatory minimum wave.

The stacking sentences in this case didn't fall evenly. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission's fiscal year 2021 quick facts on §924(c) offenses, 51.2% of people convicted under that statute were Black, compared to 21.8% who were White. People convicted of multiple §924(c) counts — the stacking scenario at issue in Rutherford — received average sentences of 256 months, or more than 21 years, for the firearm counts alone.

The cooperation disparity compounds the racial math. Carter's co-conspirators, who cooperated with prosecutors, received sentences of 10 to 23 years. Carter, who didn't cooperate, received 70. Federal cooperation agreements routinely allow defendants who provide information to receive sentences well below mandatory minimums — an avenue that effectively makes the harshest sentences available only to defendants who either don't cooperate or don't have information valuable enough to trade.

The First Step Act passed because of an unlikely alliance that took years to assemble. Jared Kushner, whose father Charles Kushner had served 14 months in federal prison for tax evasion, became the White House's driving force behind the bill. Kushner later wrote that his father's experience left him committed to reform: "This topic was too important to me not to give it attention." He lobbied Trump directly and worked the Hill to find votes.

The coalition that formed around him was genuinely strange by Washington standards. The Koch brothers' network, Americans for Prosperity, partnered with the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had said he wouldn't schedule a vote until 2019, then reversed himself on December 13, 2018, and put the bill on the floor. Trump signed it eight days later. The deliberate decision not to make the §924(c) anti-stacking change retroactive was part of the negotiated compromise to bring reluctant senators aboard.

What these sentences mean in human terms: Daniel Rutherford was 25 years old when he committed the 2003 robberies. Under his 42.5-year sentence, he won't be released until he's approximately 67. Under the sentence he'd receive today for identical conduct, he'd be released at roughly 46. Johnnie Carter was sentenced in 2011. Under his 70-year sentence, he'd be released at roughly 82. Under today's law, he'd be released at around 56.

The Supreme Court's ruling means neither man can use the courts to address this gap. The only institutional paths remaining are a congressional act making the 2018 reform retroactive, or a presidential pardon or commutation. Neither has shown signs of materializing.

Supreme Court bars First Step Act sentence reductions for pre-2018 stacking

Mandatory Minimum Sentencing: From Rockefeller to Rutherford

Supreme Court rules 6-3 in Rutherford that federal courts cannot treat First Step Act sentencing disparities as grounds for compassionate release

Supreme Court bars First Step Act sentence reductions for pre-2018 stacking