The Supreme Court granted review in 14 new cases, four of which are criminal cases. SCOTUSblog provides case summaries of the court's docket.
In Terry v. United States, the justices agreed to weigh in on a technical sentencing issue that has significant implications for thousands of inmates: whether a group of defendants who were sentenced for low-level crack-cocaine offenses before Congress enacted the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 are eligible for resentencing under the First Step Act of 2018. The Fair Sentencing Act reduced (but did not eliminate) the disparity in sentences for convictions involving crack and powder cocaine, and the First Step Act made the Fair Sentencing Act retroactive. The specific question that the court agreed to decide is whether the changes made by the First Step Act extend to inmates convicted of the most minor crack-cocaine offenses.
In a “friend of the court” brief urging the justices to grant review in another case presenting the same question, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers explained that the lower courts are divided on this question; as a result, NACDL wrote, Supreme Court review is necessary “to prevent thousands of predominately Black defendants from being forced to spend years longer in prison than identically situated defendants” elsewhere in the country “and to ensure that Congress’s goal of alleviating the racial disparities in sentencing caused by the 1986 law’s harsh sentencing regime is realized.”
Other grants on Friday are:
- Greer v. United States: Whether, when applying plain-error review based on an intervening decision of the Supreme Court, a court of appeals can look at matters outside the trial record to determine whether the error affected a defendant’s substantial rights or affected the trial’s fairness, integrity or public reputation.
- United States v. Palomar-Santiago: Whether charges that a non-citizen illegally reentered the United States should be dismissed when the non-citizen’s removal was based on the misclassification of a prior conviction.
- United States v. Gary: Whether a defendant who pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm is automatically entitled to plain-error relief if the district court did not advise him that one element of that offense is knowing that he is a felon.