In April 2020, at a gas station about fifteen minutes east of Omaha, Mark Pulsifer sold roughly 112 grams of meth. Mark made a second sale of about 29 grams of meth later that month. Unbeknownst to him, the buyer at both these sales was a confidential informant. Mark was indicted by a federal grand jury and pleaded guilty to one count of distributing 50 grams or more of methamphetamine, a felony. And because Mark had a prior drug conviction back in 2013, he faced a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison.
Mark has appealed his sentence all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where his case, Pulsifer v. United States, will be the first the justices hear when the Court’s new term begins on October 2. Years of Mark’s life—and the lives of thousands of others—hang in the balance. And whether or not they will spend those years incarcerated depends on what nine life-tenured Supreme Court justices decide a recently-enacted federal law means by the word “and.”
The First Step Act was a bipartisan criminal law reform bill signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018. One of its key sentencing provisions is its so-called “safety valve,” which essentially makes mandatory minimums not mandatory anymore for some people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. The statute assigns a point value to various offenses and says, in relevant part, that courts can deviate from mandatory minimums when sentencing a defendant who “does not have a) more than 4 criminal history points; b) a prior 3-point offense; and c) a prior 2-point violent offense.”
Mark has more than four criminal history points, and a prior three-point offense. But he doesn’t have a prior two-point violent offense, so his lawyers argued that he is eligible for relief under the Act. Their argument is pretty straightforward for anyone who understands how lists work: The law says you’re eligible if you don’t have A, B and C. WIthout C, you can’t have A, B, and C. Thus, he’s eligible for relief under the First Step Act—here, about five years off his otherwise-mandatory minimum sentence (a big difference to anyone, and perhaps especially to older adults like Mark, who is in sixties.)
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
