The two petitioners, Daniel Rutherford and Johnnie Markel Carter, received lengthy sentences under the old stacking regime. According to counsel, Rutherford has served 19 years on a sentence that, under current law, would be 18 years shorter. He also raised COVID-19 health conditions, hypertension, obesity, rehabilitation, and family circumstances — counsel represented that his earlier release would enable him to help find and provide for his deceased sister's children. The Third Circuit barred district courts from considering the non-retroactive change in law as part of the compassionate release calculus, and the consolidated cases ask the Supreme Court to reverse that categorical prohibition.
Counsel for Rutherford, David C. Frederick, argued that the 1984 Sentencing Reform Act confers broad sentencing discretion and that Section 3661 imposes no limitation on the information a court may receive and consider during sentencing. He contended that the government's position amounts to an implied repeal of the 1984 Act's broad-discretion provisions — a repeal Congress never expressed. He also pointed to the Sentencing Commission's policy statement, which authorizes courts to consider non-retroactive changes in law as one factor in an individualized, multi-factor analysis, subject to a requirement that the prisoner have served more than 10 years.
Counsel for Carter, David A. O'Neil, emphasized that the Commission's policy statement does not make the First Step Act retroactive in any categorical sense. It instead permits courts to weigh sentencing disparity as one element of an individualized assessment — a middle ground the Commission adopted after courts split into two camps, with some circuits always allowing the consideration and others categorically forbidding it. O'Neil argued that the government's position rests entirely on inferences drawn from congressional silence, while at least five statutory canons of construction cut against implying a categorical bar Congress never wrote.
Deputy Solicitor General Eric J. Feigin, for the government, argued that Congress made a deliberate judgment in enacting the First Step Act to leave prisoners with final 924(c) sentences stuck with their old sentences, and that the Sentencing Commission effectively created a new form of judicial parole by using its policy statement to authorize sentence reductions that Congress had declined to make retroactive. He contended that the Commission's 10-year threshold provides little real limitation because the minimum sentence for a stacked 924(c) offender is already 30 years, making virtually every such prisoner eligible to argue gross disparity. He also warned that the Commission's rule, which purports to authorize reliance on any non-retroactive change in law, would open the door to claims based on United States v. Booker and other non-retroactive decisions.
The justices pressed hard from multiple directions. Justice Kavanaugh raised separation-of-powers concerns, noting that retroactivity was heavily negotiated in the First Step Act and that the Commission's action arguably countermands Congress's judgment — a concern he said the Commission's own dissenters described as a seismic structural change to the criminal justice system. Justice Gorsuch questioned why the Commission treats congressional non-retroactivity decisions differently from its own, appearing more solicitous of its own work than of Congress's. Justice Barrett probed whether a judge's general disagreement with a mandatory minimum — as opposed to a legislatively created sentencing disparity — could itself be a permissible compassionate release factor, drawing the concession from Frederick that a judge would commit an abuse of discretion by disagreeing with a policy judgment made by Congress. Justice Jackson pushed back on the government's framing, arguing that the court's inquiry is a totality-of-the-circumstances analysis rather than a sequential tick-box exercise, and that 3553(a) already requires courts to consider unwarranted sentencing disparities. Justice Kagan questioned whether the Commission's carefully limited rule — requiring individualized circumstances on top of the disparity finding — really presents the elephant-in-a-mouse-hole problem the government described.
The case was submitted at the close of argument on November 12, 2025.