Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blasted her colleagues in a fierce dissent on Thursday over a decision limiting how federal prisoners can seek early release.
Jackson, who was appointed by the U.S. Supreme Court by former President Joe Biden in 2022, was the sole dissenter to a decision that found that alleged invalidities of a conviction are not a valid basis for compassionate release.
The court’s conservative majority, led by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, argued that federal prisoners cannot use compassionate release motions—which authorize district courts to permit reductions of federal prison sentences for “extraordinary and compelling reasons”—to challenge the validity of their convictions.
“The compassionate release provision is not a vehicle for attacking the validity of a conviction,” Barrett, who was appointed by President Donald Trump during his first term, wrote in the majority opinion.
The court ruled that such claims must instead go through the traditional habeas corpus process, the customary procedure for post-conviction challenges.
The case in question centered around Joe Fernandez, who is serving a life sentence for his alleged role as a backup shooter in a double assassination plot in the Bronx, New York, in 2000.
Fernandez has repeatedly challenged his two consecutive life sentences since he was sentenced in 2013, seeking compassionate release through the argument that doubts about his guilt fall under the “extraordinary and compelling reasons” for a sentence reduction.
A trial judge granted his release based on concerns about the validity of the conviction, but his release was reversed by Thursday’s majority opinion.
While Jackson’s liberal colleagues on the bench, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan—both appointed by former President Barack Obama—agreed with Barrett’s opinion that Fernandez’s release should be overturned, they did not agree with the broader reasoning behind it.
Jackson, however, fully disagreed with all of her colleagues on the bench. She argued that the language of the compassionate-release statute “is no accident,” and “reflects Congress’s intent to preserve some of the traditional discretion afforded to district courts to ensure just treatment of defendants in criminal cases.”
“Today, the Court arbitrarily restricts that discretion by grafting an atextual rule onto [the compassionate-release statute],” Jackson, 55, wrote. “It holds that a district court may not base its ‘extraordinary and compelling’ findings on any reason that ‘collaterally attacks the validity’ of the prisoner’s conviction.”
”Such ‘attacks,’ the majority says, must be brought through motions for habeas relief under 28 U.S.C. §2255," the Justice continued. “But this restriction comes out of nowhere—it finds no support in the statute’s text or history, nor can it be justified by our precedents."
“What, then, explains the new categorical rule that the Court adopts today? The answer appears to be the majority’s intuition that the District Court’s grant of petitioner Joe Fernandez’s compassionate-release motion qualifies as an abuse of discretion under the circumstances presented here,” she added. “That may well be true—but not because of an implicit, habeas-based limitation on the reach of [the compassionate-release statute]."
“Because the Court of Appeals erroneously relied on such a habeas-based rule in reversing the District Court’s grant of compassionate release, and the majority now endorses that approach, I respectfully dissent. I would vacate, rather than affirm, the decision of the Court of Appeals,” Jackson concluded.
