Fernandez v. United States
Digest
A federal judge, plagued by "disquiet" over a jury's verdict that sent a man to prison for life, used a compassionate release law years later to reduce his sentence. The Supreme Court must now decide if this law, intended as a safety valve for "extraordinary and compelling reasons," can be used to address claims of trial errors or potential innocence, or if those arguments belong exclusively to the much stricter habeas corpus process.
During arguments, the prisoner's attorney contended that the statute’s broad text does not limit the types of reasons a judge can consider, allowing for a remedy when the system creates a profound injustice. The government countered that this interpretation would create an end-run around the strict procedural deadlines Congress placed on habeas petitions, turning compassionate release into a loophole for endless legal challenges. Justices across the ideological spectrum worried this would undermine the finality of criminal sentences.
A ruling for Fernandez could open a new path for prisoners to seek sentence reductions based on legal claims that are otherwise barred from review. A ruling for the government would maintain a firm wall between compassionate release—reserving it for personal circumstances like terminal illness—and the formal process for challenging the validity of a conviction.
Key Moments
Justice Kagan asked what happens if a prisoner misses the strict one-year deadline for a normal legal challenge (a '2255 motion') by just a few days. She worried that allowing them to then use compassionate release would become an 'end-run around those prohibitions.'
This question perfectly captured the core of the government's argument and a major concern for the Court: that a broad reading of the compassionate release law would effectively gut the specific rules and deadlines Congress deliberately created for other types of appeals, upsetting the entire system.
Following up on Justice Kagan's point, Justice Barrett asked bluntly, 'Why would you ever bother with 2255?' if a prisoner could just use the easier compassionate release route instead.
This showed that the 'end-run' concern was shared by multiple justices. It's a practical, common-sense question that highlights a fundamental structural problem with the petitioner's argument: it seems to create a redundant and more lenient path that would render the stricter one obsolete.
The Chief Justice was deeply skeptical of the petitioner's claim that allowing these motions would be rare. He asked, 'Why in the world would that be the case?' suggesting that any prisoner with '20 more years to look at' and even a 1% chance of success would file such a motion.
This reveals the 'floodgates' concern. The Chief Justice is worried about the practical consequences of the petitioner's rule, foreseeing an explosion of litigation that would overwhelm district courts and undermine the finality of sentences.
Pushing back on the government, Justice Kagan proposed a powerful hypothetical: What if a person is in prison for conduct that, due to a later court ruling, is no longer considered a crime at all? Can that person's 'legal innocence' be considered for compassionate release?
This was the sharpest challenge to the government's rigid position. It tests the limits of their rule by presenting a scenario of profound unfairness, forcing them to defend a system where finality might trump actual innocence, which clearly troubled some justices.
He pointed out that neither Congress nor the Sentencing Commission—the expert body tasked with defining the rules—has ever 'authorized or envisioned or articulated anything close to this kind of legal error' being a basis for compassionate release.
This was a crucial point that undermined the petitioner's argument. Petitioner claims the Commission should set the rules, but Justice Kavanaugh noted the Commission has been silent on this, suggesting there is no institutional support for using compassionate release as a tool to correct legal errors.
Justice Jackson challenged the government's attempt to draw a clean line between 'personal circumstances' (allowed) and 'habeas-type claims' (not allowed). She noted that an 80-year-old's cancer could be a reason why they missed a legal deadline, blurring the two categories.
This critique focused on the real-world workability of the government's proposed rule. It suggests that the neat distinction the government wants the Court to adopt is messy in practice and might be an impossible line for lower courts to draw consistently.
Justice Alito cornered the petitioner's lawyer, stating, 'You can't have it both ways.' He accused the lawyer of arguing both that the meaning of 'extraordinary and compelling' didn't change after a 2018 law, and that it did, depending on which question he was answering.
This moment exposed a potential inconsistency in the petitioner's legal theory. By highlighting the contradiction, Justice Alito signaled his deep skepticism about the logical foundation of their argument regarding the evolution of the statute.
Under pressure from Justice Kagan about the exact wording of his proposed rule, the government's lawyer pivoted from the version in his brief ('could have been raised under 2255') to a broader one ('attacks the validity of the conviction or sentence').
This was a significant strategic shift during the argument. It suggested the government recognized a weakness in its primary formulation and was trying to find a more defensible position on the fly, a move the justices immediately noticed and questioned.
Arguments
Petitioner
The petitioner argues that when Congress created a law allowing judges to reduce a prison sentence for "extraordinary and compelling reasons," it meant exactly what it said: a judge can consider any reason that is truly out of the ordinary and persuasive. This law, often called the "compassionate release" statute, was designed as a safety valve. The petitioner contends that this valve shouldn't be limited only to personal circumstances like a prisoner's terminal illness or old age. If a person is serving a sentence that is wildly longer than it should have been due to a significant legal error or a fundamental unfairness that has since come to light, that situation can be just as extraordinary and compelling as a medical diagnosis. The core of their argument is that the words in the law are intentionally broad, giving judges the flexibility to do justice in the rare, unforeseen cases where the system produced a profoundly wrong result.
The main counterargument is that allowing judges to consider legal errors would create an "end-run" around the proper legal process for those claims. That process, known as a habeas corpus petition, has very strict rules and deadlines for challenging the legality of a conviction or sentence. The government fears that if the petitioner wins, every prisoner who missed their habeas deadline will simply repackage their legal complaint as a compassionate release motion, making the strict rules of habeas meaningless. The petitioner responds by explaining that this is not a replacement for habeas, but a last resort for exceptional cases. The standard is incredibly high—not just a reason, but an extraordinary and compelling one. A judge would naturally consider the whole picture, including why the prisoner failed to use the proper channels in the first place.
For example, simply having a legal claim and missing the deadline to file it would not be extraordinary. However, if a person is serving a life sentence that a later Supreme Court decision reveals was based on a complete misreading of the law, and they missed their deadline to challenge it because of incompetent legal help or a severe mental health crisis, the combination of those facts could rise to the level of "extraordinary and compelling." The petitioner argues that a judge must be allowed to weigh all these circumstances together. Forbidding a court from even considering the fundamental injustice of the sentence itself ties the judge's hands in precisely the rare situations where the safety valve is most needed.
Finally, the petitioner points out that Congress explicitly gave the power to define and limit what qualifies as "extraordinary and compelling" to an expert agency called the Sentencing Commission. The argument is that if Congress wanted to create a rule that says "you can never consider legal errors," it would have written that into the law or instructed the Commission to do so. Since it did neither, courts should not invent this major limitation out of thin air. By sticking to the plain, broad text of the law, courts would be respecting Congress's decision to trust judges and the Sentencing Commission to identify the truly exceptional cases that warrant a second look.
Respondent
The respondent argues that Congress created two entirely separate tools for prisoners seeking release, and they cannot be mixed. The first tool, called compassionate release (under § 3582), is a narrow safety valve designed to reduce a perfectly valid sentence when something new and personal happens to the prisoner, like developing a terminal illness or becoming incapacitated by old age. It assumes the conviction and sentence were correct, but circumstances have changed so dramatically that continued imprisonment is no longer just. The second tool (under § 2255, a form of habeas corpus) is the one and only path for a prisoner to argue that their conviction or sentence was legally invalid from the start due to a mistake made during their trial. The government’s core point is that you cannot use the tool for personal circumstances to fix a legal error.
The reason this separation is so critical is that Congress deliberately made it very difficult to challenge a conviction after the fact. Under § 2255, prisoners face strict, one-year deadlines and are generally allowed only one chance to make their case. This creates finality, ensuring that legal battles don't drag on forever. The government warns that if courts start considering old, failed legal arguments as "extraordinary and compelling reasons" for compassionate release, it would create a massive loophole. Prisoners who missed their deadline or already lost their § 2255 case could simply relabel their legal complaint as a compassionate release motion and get a second, third, or fourth bite at the apple, completely bypassing the strict limits Congress put in place. It would render the rules of finality meaningless.
The respondent contends that a legal claim that is too weak or too late to succeed under the specific law designed to handle it cannot magically become an "extraordinary and compelling" reason for release under a different statute. For a reason to warrant a sentence reduction, it must be evaluated against the backdrop of the entire legal system. From this perspective, a procedurally failed legal challenge isn't an "extraordinary" reason for mercy; it's a routine outcome of a system designed to bring cases to a definitive close. Allowing a judge to use a legally flawed claim—like a judge’s personal "disquiet" with a jury's verdict—and combine it with other factors is like trying to build a house on a rotten foundation. The core reason for the release becomes an attack on the conviction's validity, which is precisely what compassionate release was never meant to address.