Professor Joel Johnson, "Cert Alert: Supreme Court Cases of Interest" Summer 2024 -- ABA Criminal Justice Magazine

Professor Joel S. Johnson's latest installment of his quarterly column, "Cert Alert: Supreme Court Cases of Interest," has been published in the Summer 2024 edition of the ABA Criminal Justice Magazine. The column discusses pending criminal cases before the Supreme Court.

From Supreme Court Cases of Interest:

The government won one of the biggest early criminal cases before the Court, Pulsifer v. United States, which concerned the scope of relief from mandatory minimums provided by the First Step Act of 2018. The question presented in Pulsifer centered on the meaning of the word “and” in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(f)(1), a provision that provides a safety valve for certain nonviolent drug offenders with limited criminal history from otherwise applicable mandatory minimums. Under the statute, the safety valve applies if “the defendant does not have” three separate sentencing characteristics, which are listed and joined by the term “and” in the statute. In a 6-3 opinion authored by Justice Kagan, the Court agreed with the government that, when read in context, the list of characteristics functions as “an eligibility checklist.” Pointing to a number of examples from a wide range of sources—including the children’s book The Very Hungry Caterpillar—Justice Kagan concluded that the statutory term “and” functions as an “or” for purposes of the statute. A contrary conclusion, she reasoned, would “allow relief to defendants with more serious records while barring relief to defendants with less serious ones.” In a lengthy dissenting opinion joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, Justice Gorsuch accused the majority of ignoring the ordinary meaning of “and” in order to account for “policy concerns” that the Court had “no business considering.”

The complete article may be found at American Bar Association