Hewitt v. United States
The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that defendants whose sentences were vacated — thrown out by a court — after the First Step Act passed can benefit from the Act's reduced mandatory minimums when they are resentenced, reversing the Fifth Circuit.
The decision resolves a split among federal appeals courts and means some federal prisoners serving time for multiple firearm counts, whose old sentences were invalidated on appeal, will be resentenced under rules Congress adopted in 2018 to end the practice of stacking decades-long prison terms.
How it got here: The district court resentenced the defendants under the old stacking rules; the Fifth Circuit affirmed even though both the defendants and the government agreed the First Step Act should apply; the Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve a circuit split.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Three men were convicted in 2009 of bank robbery and related offenses, including multiple counts of possessing firearms during violent crimes. Under the sentencing rules then in force, they each received sentences exceeding 325 years because courts were required to "stack" 25-year mandatory minimums for each firearm count beyond the first. A 2019 Supreme Court ruling invalidated part of their firearm convictions, and a federal court vacated their sentences entirely, requiring new sentencing hearings at which the defendants sought the benefit of Congress's 2018 First Step Act reforms.
The question before the Court
When someone was sentenced for certain federal firearm crimes before Congress passed the First Step Act in 2018, but that sentence was later thrown out by a court, does the Act's more lenient sentencing rule apply at the new sentencing hearing?
The Court's answer
Yes — when a federal defendant's prior sentence has been vacated (thrown out) by a court, the First Step Act's more lenient mandatory minimums apply at resentencing, even if the original sentence was imposed before the Act was passed in 2018.
The Court focused on the Act's key phrase — that it applies when "a sentence has not been imposed" as of the Act's enactment date — and emphasized Congress's choice of the present-perfect tense. That grammatical form connects a past event to the present: it asks whether something continues to be true now, not merely whether it happened at some historical moment. Because a vacated sentence no longer has any legal effect, the Court concluded it is as though that sentence was never imposed at all. Background legal principles confirm this: courts treat vacated orders as void from the start, meaning they have no ongoing legal force, and the First Step Act reflects that understanding.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Federal prisoners convicted of multiple firearm-related counts whose sentences have been thrown out on appeal can now receive the First Step Act's lower mandatory minimums when resentenced. For the defendants in this case — and others in similar situations — this could reduce sentences of 130 or more years to a fraction of that length, reflecting the sentencing rules Congress put in place to stop the practice of automatically stacking 25-year terms.
What changes now
The Fifth Circuit's ruling is reversed and the case is sent back for further proceedings. The three defendants will now be resentenced under the First Step Act's more lenient rules — meaning 5-year rather than 25-year mandatory minimums for each additional firearm count beyond their first. Their eventual sentences could be dramatically shorter than the 130 or more years each had received. Other federal defendants in similar circumstances — whose §924(c) sentences were vacated on appeal — may also benefit from this ruling.
What this does not decide
The ruling does not help defendants whose pre-Act §924(c) sentences remain valid and in force — it applies only to those whose sentences were actually vacated. The Court also did not resolve whether the type of legal error that caused the vacatur, or its timing, affects eligibility, leaving those questions for future cases.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Jackson
Writing only for three justices in Parts IV and V, Justice Jackson argued that the First Step Act's legislative history and context further reinforce the majority's textual holding. Bipartisan critics, federal sentencing judges across the country, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission had long condemned the practice of stacking 25-year mandatory minimums on first-time offenders, and Congress clearly intended §403(b) to move past that regime. These sections also argue the majority's interpretation is more administrable: sentencing courts can uniformly apply the Act to all first-time §924(c) offenders who appear before them, without researching a defendant's prior sentencing history.
Dissent — Justice Alito
Justice Alito argues that 'has been imposed' refers to the straightforward historical fact that a judge once pronounced a sentence — not to whether that sentence remains legally valid today. Because all three defendants were sentenced years before the First Step Act was enacted, they plainly do not qualify for its benefits under the Act's plain text. Alito also rejects the majority's 'vacatur principle' as invented, arguing that the Court's own cited precedents — including Lewis v. United States and Bravo-Fernandez v. United States — actually treat the historical fact of a vacated order as legally significant, directly undercutting the majority's rule.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The First Step Act (2018) lowered mandatory minimums for first-time offenders convicted of using a firearm during a crime and made this change partially retroactive. The retroactivity provision — §403(b) — applies to qualifying defendants upon whom 'a sentence has not been imposed' as of December 21, 2018, the Act's enactment date. The dispute was whether that phrase excludes defendants who were sentenced before the Act but whose sentences were later vacated (thrown out) by a court.
- The Court began with the phrase's grammar. Congress wrote 'has not been imposed' in the present-perfect tense, not 'had not been imposed' in the past-perfect tense. Present-perfect tense connects a past event to the present — it asks whether something continues to be true now, not simply whether it occurred as a historical fact at some point in the past. Past-perfect tense, by contrast, would refer only to a completed historical event with no implied connection to the present.
- Applying that grammatical reading, a sentence that was later vacated no longer 'has been imposed' in any present-relevant sense. The Court illustrated this with an analogy: an Olympic committee rule saying a gold medal 'has been awarded' to an athlete would not entitle a stripped athlete to still claim the title, because the award no longer continues to be valid. By the same logic, a vacated sentence is not one that continues to have been 'imposed.'
- Background legal principles about vacatur — the legal undoing of a court order — confirm this reading. Courts treat vacated orders as void from the start (the legal term is 'void ab initio'), meaning they have no ongoing legal force. Just as a person whose felony conviction is vacated is no longer legally a convicted felon, a person whose sentence is vacated is no longer legally a sentenced defendant. The Court found that §403(b) reflects this well-established principle.
- The Court rejected the dissent's argument that 'imposed' refers simply to the historical fact that a judge once pronounced a sentence, regardless of whether it still stands. That reading would call for the past-perfect tense, which Congress did not use. The Court reinforced this by noting that adjacent provisions of the same statute use past-tense verbs, making the deliberate choice of present-perfect tense in §403(b) all the more significant.