Pulsifer v. United States
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that drug defendants must individually satisfy each of the three criminal-history requirements in the federal 'safety valve' law to escape mandatory minimum prison sentences — failing even one of the three tests disqualifies them.
The decision narrows eligibility for individualized sentencing under the First Step Act of 2018, meaning thousands more federal drug defendants will remain subject to mandatory minimums than they would have under the reading adopted by several lower courts.
How it got here: Pulsifer pleaded guilty in federal district court, which ruled him ineligible for safety-valve relief; the Eighth Circuit affirmed; the Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve a circuit split.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Mark Pulsifer pleaded guilty in 2020 to distributing at least 50 grams of methamphetamine and faced a 15-year mandatory minimum prison sentence. He sought relief under the federal "safety valve," which allows judges to sentence below the mandatory minimum if five criteria are met. One criterion requires that the defendant not have more than four criminal-history points, not have a prior three-point offense, and not have a prior two-point violent offense. Pulsifer had two prior three-point offenses but no two-point violent offense, and argued he should qualify because he lacked the full combination of all three disqualifying traits.
The question before the Court
Under the federal "safety valve" that lets judges ignore mandatory minimum drug sentences, does a defendant need to fail all three criminal-history tests to be disqualified — or does failing just one test make him ineligible?
The Court's answer
No — a drug defendant must individually satisfy each of the three criminal-history conditions in the safety valve provision to become eligible for a sentence below a mandatory minimum. If he fails even one condition — having too many criminal-history points, having a prior serious three-point offense, or having a prior two-point violent offense — he is disqualified. It is not enough to simply avoid having all three in combination.
The Court reached this conclusion primarily through two textual arguments. First, Pulsifer's reading would render Subparagraph A completely meaningless: because 3 points plus 2 points always equals more than 4, any defendant who fails tests B and C necessarily also fails A, leaving A with nothing to do. Second, Pulsifer's reading would let defendants with more serious criminal records qualify while blocking those with less serious ones — inverting the provision's purpose of keeping the most serious prior offenders subject to mandatory minimums.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Federal drug defendants with any of three specified criminal-history markers — too many prior convictions, a single serious prior sentence, or a prior violent offense — will be locked out of the safety valve and must serve their mandatory minimum. Courts in circuits that had read the law more generously must now apply the stricter standard, and defense lawyers can no longer argue that a client qualifies simply because he lacks one of the three disqualifying traits.
What changes now
The ruling is final. Pulsifer's mandatory minimum sentence stands, and he is ineligible for safety-valve relief. Going forward, federal drug defendants in every circuit must satisfy all three criminal-history conditions in Paragraph (f)(1) individually to qualify. Courts in the Fourth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits, which had read the law more favorably to defendants, must now apply the stricter standard. The underlying sentencing proceedings in individual cases will continue under this interpretation.
What this does not decide
The Court left open in a footnote whether a violent offense carrying more than two criminal-history points could also satisfy Subparagraph C's "2-point violent offense" requirement — Pulsifer did not raise that argument. The Court also explicitly declined to address the Government's separate claim that lenity does not apply to this provision because it is not a traditional "penal law."
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Gorsuch
Justice Gorsuch argued that the most natural reading of 'does not have A, B, and C' means a defendant is ineligible only when he possesses all three traits together — a reading the Government itself had initially conceded in lower-court proceedings. He criticized the majority's 'implicit distribution theory' as requiring courts to delete and reinsert statutory language Congress never wrote, and faulted the majority for dismissing Congress's consistent use of 'or' elsewhere in the same statute whenever it wanted a single trait to be disqualifying. He would have found the statute unambiguous in Pulsifer's favor or, if any doubt remained, applied the rule of lenity to resolve it in favor of the defendant.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first asked whether grammar alone resolved the dispute. The phrase 'does not have A, B, and C' is genuinely ambiguous: it can mean the defendant must not have the combination of all three traits (Pulsifer's reading) or must not have any one of them individually (the Government's reading). Because both are grammatically permissible, the Court turned instead to the content and context of the subparagraphs themselves.
- Under Pulsifer's reading, Subparagraph A — requiring fewer than four criminal-history points — would be completely superfluous. By simple arithmetic, any defendant who has a 3-point offense (Subparagraph B) and a 2-point violent offense (Subparagraph C) will always have at least five criminal-history points, necessarily exceeding Subparagraph A's limit. Removing Subparagraph A entirely would not change who qualifies for relief.
- The canon against surplusage — a longstanding principle of statutory interpretation holding that courts should not read a law to make any part of it meaningless — applied with special force here because Pulsifer's reading would nullify an entire subparagraph, not just a stray word. Pulsifer's attempt to save Subparagraph A by arguing that some very old or otherwise excluded convictions could qualify as '3-point' or '2-point' offenses even when they add zero points to a defendant's score failed: under the Sentencing Guidelines, an offense only counts as a 3-point or 2-point offense when it actually adds those points to the defendant's total.
- Pulsifer's reading also undermined the gatekeeping function of Paragraph (f)(1). Under the Government's reading, defendants with multiple prior convictions, a single serious long-sentence offense, or any prior violent offense are each independently disqualified — matching the Sentencing Guidelines' consistent judgment that recidivism, lengthy sentences, and violence all warrant harsher treatment. Under Pulsifer's reading, a defendant with many prior violent three-point offenses could qualify for safety-valve relief simply because none happened to be a two-point violent offense — a worse offender getting more favorable treatment than a less serious one.
- Pulsifer's legislative-purpose argument — that Congress meant the First Step Act to expand safety-valve relief as broadly as possible — did not change the analysis. Both interpretations expand relief compared to the prior law, and the Court declined to pick the reading that expands relief more, noting that laws do not pursue their purposes at all costs and that Congress chose to limit, not eliminate, mandatory minimums.
- The rule of lenity — which requires courts to resolve genuine ambiguity in criminal statutes in favor of the defendant — did not apply because, after examining the statute's text in context, only one reading was plausible. Two grammatically possible readings does not equal genuine ambiguity when one reading creates glaring surplusage and inverts the statute's design.