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 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.