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Supreme Court Denies ‘Thousands’ Of Inmates Opportunity For Shorter Sentences

Charlie Kirk Staff

03/16/2024

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Supreme Court Denies ‘Thousands’ Of Inmates Opportunity For Shorter Sentences

The Supreme Court has made a massive decision as it pertains to prisoners asking for shorter sentences.

While the cities in the nation have been taking a soft-on-crime, pro-criminal approach, the Supreme Court, which has a 6 – 3 conservative edge, has not.

In its decision the court, in not the ideological split someone might expect, decided against granting a shirt sentence via the First Step Act to convicted methamphetamine dealer Mark Pulsifer, NBC News reported.

The issue was whether Pulsifer was subject to a mandatory 15-year sentence or a “safety valve” provision that laid out circumstances in which a lower sentence could be imposed on nonviolent, low-level drug dealers.

In an opinion by liberal Justice Elena Kagan, the court said Pulsifer had not met the necessary requirements. She was joined in the majority by five of the court’s six conservatives.

The court said that the defendant did not meet all of the requirements needed to receive a sentence lower than the minimum, as the defendant contended that he could meet some of them and still receive the shorter sentence.

Congress “did not extend safety-valve relief to all defendants, but only to some,” Justice Elena Kagan, who authored the decision, wrote.

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch joined a dissent by liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“Adopting the government’s preferred interpretation guarantees that thousands more people in the federal justice system will be denied a chance — just a chance — at an individualized sentence. For them, the First Step Act offers no hope,” the dissent said.

In a landmark decision pertaining to religious liberty and the propriety of employers accommodating employees’ choices for religion at work, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in support of a Pennsylvania postal worker.

Pennsylvanian Christian mailman Gerald Groff asked the court to rule on whether the USPS could force him to deliver packages from Amazon on Sundays, which he observes as the Sabbath. His attorney, Aaron Streett, argues that the court ought to reexamine a ruling from fifty years prior that established a benchmark for determining when employers must accommodate the religious practices of their employees.

The Supreme Court, in a 9-0 ruling, overruled a 1977 decision that required employers to “reasonably accommodate” a worker’s religious practices, provided that doing so does not place an “undue hardship” on the business.

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Charlie Kirk is the Founder and President of Turning Point USA, a national student movement dedicated to empowering young people to promote the principles of free markets and limited government.

Charlie is also the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show” podcast, which regularly ranks among the top-10 news shows on Apple podcast news charts, and is the host of the nationally syndicated daily radio show on the Salem Radio Network live from 12 - 3 PM ET.
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