Hewitt v. United States

Majority — Jackson

Joined by: Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch

The majority held that the key phrase in the First Step Act — "a sentence has not been imposed" — is written in the present-perfect tense, which refers to something that continues to be true up to the present, not merely something that happened at some point in the past. The Court reasoned that a vacated sentence, by longstanding legal principle, is treated as though it never legally existed — courts call this being "void ab initio" (meaning invalid from the very beginning) — so a defendant whose sentence was vacated has no currently valid sentence for purposes of the Act. The majority also pointed to the contrast between the present-perfect tense used in the retroactivity provision and the simple past tense used in neighboring provisions of the same law, concluding that Congress's word choice was deliberate and meaningful. The Court further reasoned that its reading is more straightforward to administer: judges sentencing any first-time §924(c) offender after the Act's passage simply apply the new, lower minimums without needing to dig into a defendant's prior sentencing history. Finally, the majority found that requiring judges to revert to the old stacking regime for defendants at resentencing would undermine Congress's clear goal of moving away from those harsh sentences.

Dissent reasoning

The dissent argued that the most natural reading of "a sentence has not been imposed" is a straightforward historical question: was the defendant ever sentenced before the Act's enactment date? Because petitioners were sentenced in 2010 and again in 2012 — years before the Act passed in 2018 — the dissent concluded they plainly do not qualify for its benefits. The dissent contended that the word "imposed" refers to the concrete act of a court pronouncing a sentence at a specific moment in time, not to whether that sentence remains legally valid today, and that the word "a" before "sentence" signals any sentence ever pronounced, including one later vacated. The dissent further argued that the majority's "vacatur voids everything" principle does not exist as a recognized background legal rule — pointing to cases like Lewis v. United States, where the Court upheld a felon-in-possession conviction even though the underlying predicate conviction was later invalidated, and to a federal sentencing statute that expressly requires judges at resentencing to apply the Sentencing Guidelines that were in effect at the time of the original sentencing. The dissent also noted that the section heading "Applicability to Pending Cases" suggests Congress was thinking of a fixed, finite group of defendants who had not yet been sentenced at all when the Act passed — not an ever-expanding group whose sentences might be vacated years later for unrelated reasons. Finally, the dissent argued that the presumption against retroactivity counsels reading the Act's retroactivity command narrowly, not as broadly as the majority does.