For a five-year period in the 1990s, Shaheem Johnson was part of a multi-state drug ring that led to multiple deaths. In one incident, a man was shot and killed by members of the ring after allegedly stealing $100,000 and sexually assaulting Johnson’s girlfriend. In another incident, Johnson and other ring members learned that a man planned to rob and murder Johnson and his brother, so they hired someone to kill that man, too.
Johnson and other members of the drug ring were arrested in 1997, when he was about 25 years old. Only Johnson exercised his right to a jury trial. In 1998, a federal jury in Virginia convicted him on several charges including engaging in a “continuing criminal enterprise” and aiding and abetting a murder “in aid of racketeering.” At that time, both of those offenses had mandatory minimum sentences of life imprisonment.
The district court sentenced Johnson to two terms of life in prison on those counts, plus another 790 months of imprisonment with no possibility of parole for the remaining counts. The person who actually committed the murder that Johnson was convicted of aiding and abetting took a plea, testified against Johnson, and received a five-year sentence.
In 2021, after serving decades in prison, Johnson filed a motion for compassionate release under the First Step Act, a landmark bipartisan criminal justice reform law enacted in 2018. The law allows judges to shorten a prison term if “extraordinary and compelling reasons” warrant such relief, and the reduction is “consistent with applicable policy statements issued by the Sentencing Commission.”
Traditionally, grants of compassionate release have been based on a defendant’s personal circumstances like a serious medical condition or advanced age. But in 2023, the Sentencing Commission announced that an unusually long prison sentence may, in some instances, qualify as an extraordinary and compelling reason that justifies a prison term reduction. Judges have cited unusually long sentences and mandatory minimums as a reason to grant compassionate release on a few dozen occasions in recent years.
In August 2023, a federal district judge determined that Johnson’s case satisfied the two requirements in the compassionate release statute. The court highlighted factors like Johnson’s “exceptional” rehabilitation efforts, the “unwarranted sentencing disparity” between Johnson and the person who actually committed the murder, and letters from both the sentencing judge and the jury foreman saying they would not have imposed a sentence of life without parole if it weren’t mandatory at that time. The court reduced Johnson’s sentence to 35 years in prison—with credit for time served, and minus any time off for good behavior—to be followed by ten years of supervised release. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the sentence reduction last summer, finding that the district court was “well within” its discretion to conclude that the “vast disparities” in prison sentences between the co-conspirators justified relief. Since that disparity was sufficient, the appeals court expressly declined to address any other factors.
Johnson, now around 55 years old, was scheduled to be released on July 19, 2028. And he already started making plans for what he would do as a free man: He would get a job at an electrical company, having passed West Virginia’s electrician license exam while behind bars; he would publish a book to deter others from crime; and he would ask his longtime partner and the mother of his daughter to marry him.
But on Monday, the Supreme Court vacated the Fourth Circuit’s decision. United States v. Johnson, a one-paragraph, unreasoned order issued over the dissent of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, remands Johnson’s case back to the Fourth Circuit for “further consideration” in light of Fernandez v. United States and Rutherford v. United States, two cases the Court decided late last month.
Legally speaking, this makes little sense: Fernandez and Rutherford both ask and answer different questions than the one at issue in Johnson’s case, so the Court’s decisions shouldn’t actually have any bearing on whether Johnson can leave prison. Practically speaking, it makes all the sense in the world: The Supreme Court will find any excuse to keep people in prison, and if they can’t find one, they’ll make one up.
In Fernandez, a district court judge granted a motion for compassionate release in large part because they had “questions about the adequacy of proofs and representation” and “doubt that the jury’s verdict was correct.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote, in a majority opinion joined by all Republican justices, that “the supposed invalidity of a conviction is not among the ‘extraordinary and compelling reasons’ that justify compassionate release.” (Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan concurred only in the judgment of Fernandez, agreeing with the majority that there was “a problem” with the district court’s grant of relief, but criticizing the Court’s new rule as an “atextual limitation” that “improperly narrows” the compassionate relief statute and “risks shutting out meritorious claims.”)
In Rutherford, a district court judge denied a motion for compassionate release, unconvinced by the defendant’s argument that, were he sentenced for the same crimes today, his sentence would have been at least 18 years shorter than the one he received. Justice Amy Coney Barrett again wrote for all six Republicans that a disparity “created by Congress’s nonretroactive change” to a sentencing law “cannot serve” as an extraordinary and compelling reason, either. To the extent the Sentencing Commission’s 2023 statement “counsels otherwise,” Barrett said, “the Commission’s policy statement is invalid.” This time, all three liberals dissented, lambasting the Court for conjuring up another categorical limitation with no support in text or history, and usurping the role that Congress expressly assigned to the Sentencing Commission.
The Fourth Circuit explicitly affirmed the grant of compassionate release to Johnson for one reason alone: “the vast disparities that exist” between his sentence and that of co-conspirators. Neither Fernandez nor Rutherford involve sentencing disparities between co-conspirators, so neither provides any directly on point law for the Fourth Circuit’s “further consideration.” Both cases, however, circumscribe district judges’ ability to grant compassionate release by imposing restrictions where Congress did not. In Fernandez and Rutherford, the Republican justices adopted stingy interpretations of broad statutory language, and broad interpretations of their own limited authority. The Court’s invocation of these inapt cases in United States v. Johnson suggests that any grant of compassionate release may be vulnerable to the Court’s punitive impulses.
When Johnson’s case goes back to the Fourth Circuit, the appeals court could very well reach the same result as it did before. But proceedings take time. And the Supreme Court’s order will likely force Johnson to stay in prison past the new release date granted by the district court, continuing to serve a sentence that several judges already agreed was unjust. Johnson has been incarcerated for 30 years, and went from thinking he would die in prison to preparing for life as a free man. Because of the Supreme Court, Johnson’s life will have to wait.
