High Court Shuts Down Both Rutherford and Fernandez

The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a devastating double blow to federal prison reform, effectively locking the doors on thousands of inmates seeking a second chance at freedom. In two back-to-back 6-3 rulings, the Court’s conservative majority drastically narrowed the scope of “compassionate release” under the First Step Act. For advocates, defense attorneys, and incarcerated individuals who viewed the law as a beacon of historic sentencing reform, today’s decisions represent a crushing regression.

The first major blow came in the case of Rutherford v. United States. In 2023, the U.S. Sentencing Commission had updated its guidelines to allow federal judges to consider an “unusually long sentence” as an extraordinary and compelling reason for early release. This meant if an inmate had served over a decade under old, draconian laws, and a modern change in legislation would give them a vastly shorter sentence today, judges could use compassionate release to bridge that gap. Today, the Supreme Court completely wiped that provision off the books.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett ruled that the Sentencing Commission had completely overstepped its bounds. The Court’s logic was rooted in congressional intent: when Congress passed the First Step Act in 2018 and lowered certain mandatory minimums, it explicitly chose not to make those changes automatically retroactive. The Supreme Court ruled that an administrative agency cannot use a “compassionate release” loophole to force retroactivity when Congress explicitly decided against it.

Minutes later, the Court handed down its second crushing decision in Fernandez v. United States. This case centered on Joe Fernandez, who was released in 2022 after a trial judge cited “strong concerns” about the integrity of the evidence in his decades-old conviction, alongside severe sentencing disparities with his co-defendants. The Supreme Court used his case to draw another hard line in the sand, explicitly ruling that compassionate release cannot be used by inmates to challenge the validity of their original convictions.

Justice Barrett, again writing for the majority, made it clear that the compassionate release statute is not a backdoor shortcut for a retrial. If an inmate wants to argue that they are innocent, that the evidence against them was weak, or that their trial was fundamentally unfair, they cannot do it through a motion for early release. Instead, they are forced back into the grueling, highly restrictive traditional appeals process, such as filing a habeas corpus petition.

The driving force behind both rulings was a palpable fear among the conservative justices of opening the judicial floodgates. During oral arguments, Justice Brett Kavanaugh openly worried about creating a “whole new docket” of thousands of motions that would completely overwhelm the federal court system. To prevent this impending wave of litigation, the majority chose bureaucratic efficiency and strict textualism over judicial flexibility and mercy.

The three liberal justices issued a fierce dissent, led by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who argued that the majority completely misconstrued why Congress created compassionate release in the first place. Justice Jackson noted that the mechanism was specifically designed to preserve “a modicum of mercy” in an otherwise unyielding and harsh sentencing framework. She argued that nothing in the history or text of the law suggested Congress wanted to tie the hands of judges in such a rigid, unforgiving manner.

For federal inmates, today is an undeniably dark day. The combination of Rutherford and Fernandez acts as a legal one-two punch that strips compassionate release of its most progressive teeth. It eliminates the exact tools that reform advocates were using to correct the systemic, historic over-sentencing that has defined the American federal prison system for a generation.

As a result of these decisions, the definition of “compassionate release” has been drastically shrunken back down to its narrow, pre-reform boundaries. Moving forward, federal prisoners can essentially only qualify for early release if they are facing a terminal medical illness, experiencing extreme physical decline due to advanced age, or if their family’s primary caregiver dies. The era of using the program for broader, holistic justice is officially over.

Ultimately, these rulings signal a harsh reality for the future of criminal justice reform: the Supreme Court will not allow administrative agencies or sympathetic trial judges to fix a broken system from the bottom up. If older, outdated sentences are ever going to be corrected, or if non-retroactive laws are ever going to be made fair, it will have to come directly from Congress. Until then, thousands of federal inmates who were holding onto hope for early release find those doors firmly shut.