Additional opinions from Thursday, June 26

On Thursday, June 26, the Supreme Court also released the following opinions:

— In Hewitt v. United States, the justices considered whether the First Step Act’s sentencing reduction guidelines apply to someone who was originally sentenced before the FSA was enacted but whose sentence was later vacated.  

In a 5-4 decision by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court held that the act’s more lenient penalties apply to such defendants. “Under the interpretation … we adopt today, all first-time offenders who appear for sentencing after the First Step Act’s enactment date—including those whose previous sentences have been vacated and who thus need to be resentenced—are subject to the Act’s revised penalties,” Jackson wrote. 

Jackson’s opinion was joined in full by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan and in part by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch. In the parts of the opinion that Roberts and Gorsuch didn’t join, Jackson discussed the legislative history of the FSA.  

Justice Samuel Alito filed a dissenting opinion, in which he was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Alito argued that the court’s opinion “disfigures the Act” in interpreting the FSA’s sentencing reduction guidelines to apply to people being resentenced. “The Court’s interpretation … unspools the Act’s carefully wound retroactivity command to mean that any defendant whose sentence is vacated at any time and for any reason may claim the benefit of the Act’s reduced mandatory minimum. But nothing in the text or broader context supports such a boundless interpretation,” Alito wrote. 

— In Riley v. Bondi, the court considered whether and when a noncitizen who overstayed his visa and is subject to a deportation order can challenge an order denying his request for withholding of removal – a remedy that prevents him from being deported to his home country but does not necessarily bar the government from sending him to another country. The case centered on Pierre Riley, a Jamaican citizen who overstayed his visa in the U.S. and did not challenge his final order of removal within the 30-day deadline to do so because he was waiting on word about a separate order on withholding, or relief from, removal. 

In a 5-4 decision by Alito, the court held that the latter order is not the same as a final order of removal. “[T]he statutory text and our precedents make clear that … withholding-only proceedings do not disturb the finality of an otherwise final order of removal,” Alito wrote. The court also held that the lower court can reconsider the case because the 30-day filing deadline to challenge a final order “is not jurisdictional” – that is, it can be waived or forfeited. 

Roberts, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joined the court’s opinion in full, while Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, and Jackson joined in part. Thomas filed a concurring opinion. 

Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion, which was joined in full by Kagan and Jackson and in part by Gorsuch. She argued that the court has “[i]ncomprehensibly” held that Riley should have challenged the order on withholding of removal before it existed. “[The court] acknowledges that the immigration laws required Riley to appeal the Department’s decision that he was ‘deportable’ together with the Board’s (much later) order denying him relief from removal to Jamaica. It admits that the only way to review both orders is to do so after the latter of the two issues. Yet it concludes that Riley’s appeal was due before the Board issued the second order,” Sotomayor wrote. “Because Congress did not write so incoherent a judicial-review provision, I respectfully dissent.”