Today, in Pulsifer v. United States, 601 U.S. ___ (2024), the Supreme Court resolved the Circuit split on safety valve, with the majority holding that a defendant facing a mandatory minimum sentence is eligible for safety-valve relief under 18 U. S. C. §3553(f)(1) only if he satisfies each of the provision’s three conditions—or said more specifically, only if he does not have more than four criminal-history points, does not have a prior three-point offense, and does not have a prior two-point violent offense.
Rather than begin with the majority opinion, I am going to start with part of Justice Gorsuch's dissent:
This dispute concerns who is eligible for individualized sentencing and who remains subject to mandatory minimums after the First Step Act. Before the Act, a defendant seeking to avoid a mandatory minimum had to satisfy five stringent statutory tests. After the Act, all those tests remain, only the first is now less demanding. As revised, it provides that a defendant may be eligible for individualized sentencing if he “does not have” three traits: (A) more than 4 criminal history points, (B) a 3-point offense, and (C) a 2- point violent offense. In lower court proceedings, the government admitted that this new test is “most natural[ly]” read to mean what it says: A defendant may be eligible for individualized sentencing unless he possesses all three listed traits—A, B, and C. Despite its admission, however, the government urges us to adopt a different construction. It asks us to read the First Step Act as promising a defendant a chance at individualized sentencing only when he does not have any of the three listed traits— A, B, or C.If this difference seems a small one, it is anything but. Adopting the government’s preferred interpretation guarantees that thousands more people in the federal criminal justice system will be denied a chance—just a chance—at an individualized sentence. For them, the First Step Act offers no hope. Nor, it seems, is there any rule of statutory interpretation the government won’t set aside to reach that result. Ordinary meaning is its first victim. Contextual clues follow. Our traditional practice of construing penal laws strictly falls by the wayside too. Replacing all that are policy concerns we have no business considering. Respectfully, I would not indulge any of these moves.
Justice Gorsuch's analysis, however, did not carry the day. Instead, Justice Kagan found a majority to hold for the government's view:
In sum, Paragraph (f )(1)’s criminal-history requirement sets out an eligibility checklist. A defendant is eligible for safety-valve relief only if he satisfies each of the paragraph’s three conditions. He cannot have more than four criminal-history points. He cannot have a prior three-point offense. And he cannot have a prior two-point violent offense. Because Pulsifer has two prior three-point offenses totaling six points, he is not eligible. It makes no difference that he does not also have a prior two-point violent offense.
