What happened
The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari to Michael Lairy after the government told the justices it had mistakenly invoked a limitations defense against his bid to undo a prison sentence that exceeded the lawful maximum.
In a statement respecting the denial of certiorari, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Lairy’s prison sentence for unlawful handgun possession was five years longer than the applicable statutory maximum, but that lower courts had treated his Section 2255 motion as untimely after the government raised a statute-of-limitations defense.
Sotomayor said the government later informed the court that its decision to invoke the defense was an “inadverten[t]” error. She said the government represented that it has a policy of waiving such defenses in cases involving undisputed legal ineligibility for an enhanced noncapital sentence above the applicable statutory maximum.
The statement said the government promised to waive the limitations defense in district court. Shortly after that, the district court granted Lairy’s Section 2255 motion and released him.
That posture left no remaining reason for Supreme Court review, according to Sotomayor. In light of the government’s policy and the fact that Lairy had received all the relief he requested, she concurred in the denial of certiorari.
The order is significant less for any new holding than for the signal it sends about federal sentencing-error cases: where the government acknowledges a prisoner was legally ineligible for an enhanced noncapital sentence above the statutory maximum, Sotomayor’s statement treats waiver of procedural defenses as central to resolving the case without high court intervention.