Beaird v. United States
Brief Details
- Case No.: 25-5343
- Brief Filed: June 29, 2026
- Jurisdiction: United States Supreme Court
Key Topics in the Brief
Briefs
Prior Decision
Decision below United States v. Beaird, 2025 WL 1410410 (5th Cir. May 15, 2025)
Petitioner argues that based on the text of the Sentencing Reform Act and the Sup. Ct's principles for deference, Courts should not defer to the commentary when interpreting the Guidelines; and at a minimum Stinson's reflexive-deference rule cannot survive Kisor's cabining of Seminole Rock and that the Commission's commentary defining a 17-round magazine as "large" expanded the text of U.S.S.G. § 2K2.1 beyond what the Guideline says. NACDL's brief offers a complementary analysis from the federal sentencing practitioner's vantage. Every federal sentence begins with the Guidelines calculation, and the question in this case is who interprets them: the Commission through commentary, or the court through independent textual analysis. The brief shows that Stinson borrowed its standard from Seminole Rock; Kisor reformed that standard; and the doctrinal logic — together with the Solicitor General's concession in this case that Kisor governs — leaves no basis for reflexive deference. To make the framework administrable, the brief sorts commentary into three functional categories: operational commentary that instructs courts on calculation mechanics and remains unaffected; illustrative or definitional commentary that informs interpretation and earns persuasive weight when it tracks a plausible reading of an ambiguous term; and additive commentary that supplies substantive rules, numerical thresholds, or categorical directives the text cannot bear. The brief also confronts the Commission's 2006 adoption of the 15-round threshold that did not reflect the "fair and considered judgment" Kisor requires. Finally, the brief argues that the rule of lenity provides an independent path to the same result. Lenity is one of the traditional tools courts must exhaust before finding genuine ambiguity, and it serves as the residual tiebreaker where ambiguity persists.
Author(s)
Adeel Bashir (Counsel of Record), Eleventh Circuit Vice-Chair, NACDL Amicus Committee, Tampa, FL; Katherine Howard, Assistant Federal Public Defender, Appellate Chief, Middle District of Florida, Tampa, FL; Samuel Landes, Partner, Flannery Georgalis, LLC, Cleveland, OH; Barbara E. Bergman, National Co-Chair, NACDL Amicus Committee, Washington, DC
