Carpenter v. United States

In December 2023, the ACLU filed an amicus brief in Carpenter v. United States, in support of Timothy Carpenter’s cert petition seeking Supreme Court review of an important question of federal sentencing law. The ACLU previously represented Mr. Carpenter in an earlier phase of his case, resulting in a landmark Fourth Amendment ruling requiring a warrant for police access to people’s cell phone location history. The ruling on that issue did not end Mr. Carpenter’s criminal case, and after further proceedings in the lower courts, he sought Supreme Court review of a question concerning applicability of major sentencing reductions enacted by Congress in 2018.
In the First Step Act of 2018, Congress made major reductions to mandatory minimum sentences for certain federal firearms and controlled substance convictions. The question raised by Mr. Carpenter’s case is whether someone who was initially sentenced under the draconian mandatory minimums prior to the First Step Act, but whose sentence is vacated and remanded for resentencing after the effective date of the Act, can benefit from its major reductions in applicable mandatory minimums. Resolution of this question is important given the huge reductions in sentences available to defendants if the First Step Act applies. Mr. Carpenter, for example, would have had 80 years taken off of his sentence (dropping from 116 to approximately 36 years) if the First Step Act were applied to him at resentencing.