Two years after his release from prison, Patrick Dewayne Smith spends Sundays with his family in a modest brick church with a white steeple in rural Tennessee. He works two jobs. He goes to ball games to cheer for nieces and nephews he had never met. After serving 13 years for a nonviolent drug conviction, he is trying to rebuild his life.
Now Smith could be sent back to prison for the rest of it.
A federal judge released him in 2024 under rules adopted after Congress passed the First Step Act, a landmark criminal justice law during Donald Trump’s first term. But the Supreme Court ruled in May that people sentenced under older, harsher laws cannot rely on the disparity between their sentences and current penalties to seek early compassionate release.
I ctrl+f’d the article and can’t find that quote in it. Can you point me to it? Or is it from another source?
You are right! I clicked through to another article about the issue that was on the page, and AP News did some edits apparently as it no longer shows up. Here’s the article they had previously included. My apologies.
Okay, that took some finding, but I did find the original language in the act. I agree that the “does and mean or” snippet reads bad, but I think it probably does actually mean or. The snippet reads like (not the actual language, just the form)
In order to qualify, the candidate must have never:
It does say “and,” which means technically a candidate who just killed a man is fine, since he didn’t also steal a car and beat his wife. The “and” side is saying that unless you’re guilty of all three things, you’re an eligible candidate. The “or” side is saying any one is disqualifying by intent of the law.
Here’s the actual text, for clarity:
My read is that saying “must have a 3pt offense and a 2pt offense” is a pretty clear signal of intent for “or.” It’s tough to imagine a scenario where lawmakers intentionally decided to only block people with both types of offense, but not with just one or the other.
But RAW says and, which is probably why the courts ruled that way.
Thanks for digging that up!
No problem.
Looking through the full act, I think it was just a boolean logic issue when writing it.
Every other list in the thing says “and”, but the query at the top of every other list is positively phrased. Like, the guy must do x, y, and z. But when they went to do that one they added a “not” to the beginning, but didn’t realize that that requires you to change the ands to ors.
!(A && B) -> !A || !B
Easy mistake to overlook.
I don’t get why they group stealing a car with battery and killing someone. also why is battery to a spouse specifically and not anybody else?
Stealing someone’s car is pretty disruptive to their lives. It can be several years salary for some people you’ll miss work, it likely won’t be recovered or at least not intact. It’s not some trivial thing. It’s one of the more assholish things you can do to a person. I’d rather someone just kick my ass than steal my car.
It really should not be that way though. I got clarification though and that part was him giving his own examples and not part of the law aparently.
It shouldn’t be that way but it is and the law should treat it with the severity it merits. Fix society and it can be reevaluated.
Those were random examples, not the actual examples from the law.
The ones from the law ere just more abstract about the number of points associated with the offense, so I was trying to make it plainer.
I didn’t validate the examples matched the point values. But I imagine there are a range of valid offenses for each point value.
ah I thought the first part was the actual criteria and the second was some sort of secondary thing. Thanks for clarifying.