Brief filed: 08/15/2025
Documents
Rutherford v. United States; Markel v. United States
United States Supreme Court; Case No. 24-820, 24-860
Argument(s)
For decades, courts handed out mandatory minimum sentences while judges lamented being forced to impose punishments that spanned generations. Congress sought to correct that travesty through reforms reducing some of the harshest penalties and, for the first time, allowing incarcerated people to seek sentence reductions. In the ensuing years, however, courts divided on whether movants could invoke changes in the law as part of the rationale for reducing a sentence. That left incarcerated people at the mercy of their zip code, with motions granted in some circuits and summarily rejected in others.Enter the U.S. Sentencing Commission (the “Commission”), which provided a carefully considered solution: courts may consider changes in overly punitive laws, but only as one of several factors when evaluating whether an “extraordinary and compelling reason” under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A) exists. Exercising its express statutory authority, the Commission crafted U.S.S.G. §1B1.13(b)(6), a narrow and balanced provision addressing rare but real cases in which people are serving unusually long sentences that are grossly inconsistent with modern standards of fairness and justice. Ignoring that the Commission did precisely what Congress had directed, the decisions below disregarded the Commission’s authority, elevated imagined congressional prerogatives over statutory text, and stripped judges of important sentencing discretion. They also condemn people across the country serving extreme and unjust sentences to life—and maybe death—in prison. Reversal is required.
Author(s)
Shanna Rifkin, FAMM, Washington DC; Joshua L. Dratel, Co-Chair, NACDL Amicus Commitee, Law Offices of Dratel and Lewis, New York, NY; Jarrod L. Schaeffer, Abell Eskew Landau LLP, New York, NY
