“Context Is Everything In Justices’ Sentencing Relief Decision”

The title of this post is the title of this new Law360 commentary that I authored regarding the Supreme Court’s work in its recent Pulsifer ruling.  Here is how the commentary starts and closes:

“Context is everything.” This adage could have been a mantra for both the U.S. Supreme Court majority and the dissenters in Pulsifer v. U.S., decided March 15. Pulsifer resolved an intricate statutory interpretation issue turning on a single word in a provision of the First Step Act.  The dispute concerned how to interpret the word “and” in the FSA’s expansion of the “safety valve” provision of federal sentencing law, which exempts certain drug defendants from severe mandatory minimum sentences.

According to the Pulsifer majority, the narrow context of surrounding words and the provision’s function called for reading “and” to limit the safety valve.  The dissent stressed the broader context of federal sentencing reform and practices to argue that “and” should be read to loosen that valve.  In the end, some even broader contexts help account for Pulsifer‘s resolution and the court’s division….

The court repeatedly acknowledges that there “are two grammatically permissible” ways to interpret the revised safety valve, but the government’s interpretation is to be adopted because it will “function without a hitch” as it “sorts defendants for relief (or not).”  A particular vision of how Congress would want the safety valve to “function” — and especially the notion that Congress likely would not want too many defendants eligible for a sentence below mandatory minimums — provides a critical undercurrent for the majority’s application of the word “and” in this context.

In notable contrast, the dissent stresses individual liberty throughout: early on, the dissent highlights that “the lives and liberty of thousands of individuals” are at issue, and the importance of interpreting laws “in favor of liberty” is stressed at the close.  For the dissent, a particular vision of the court’s role in protecting individual liberty — especially given that doing so here means only that a sentencing judge will have the usual authority to “‘consider every convicted person as an individual’ and pick punishments that ‘fit the offender and not merely the crime'” — constitutes a purpose more transcendent than figuring out what interpretation of a criminal statute may “function” better. 

In the end, then, the justices’ divergent visions of the judiciary’s role may best account for their divergent visions of the meaning of the word “and” in Pulsifer.  The majority, comfortable having the court serve as a kind of agent of Congress, excogitated an interpretation of “and” that ensures not too many defendants “escape from otherwise applicable mandatory minimums.”  The dissent, believing the court’s work should always advance how a “free nation operates against a background presumption of individual liberty,” castigates the majority for adopting “an interpretation that restricts safety-valve relief to thousands more individuals.”  And these divergent visions are sure to influence how these justices interpret other words in other statutes in the future.