SCOTUS ruled that "and" means "or." It's pretty wild.
The Supreme Court case is Pulsifer and it demonstrates that today's Court is one of the most prosecution friendly in a long long time. I'm sure Scalia would have ruled for the defendant here and I bet he would have carried a majority. Instead, Justice Kagan takes the government's position that and means or, which is pretty devastating to thousands of prisoners who would have received relief under the First Step Act.
Justice Gorsuch, who is trying to take over the Scalia mantle as willing to rule for a criminal defendant if that's what the text says, wrote an incredible dissent. It's worth a read.
Justice Elena Kagan’s opinion for a sharply divided court in Pulsifer v. United States resolves an ambiguity in the provisions added to federal sentencing law in the First Step Act of 2018, coming down firmly on the side of the government. The problem involves how to read a “safety valve” in federal criminal sentencing laws, which allows defendants to avoid the often lengthy mandatory minimum sentences scattered throughout the federal criminal code. The safety valve requires the defendant to satisfy a laundry list of each of five separate rules.This case involves the first of those rules, which assesses the defendant’s criminal history. Generally speaking, the point of the provision is that defendants with a serious criminal history are not eligible for the safety valve, and thus must serve the normal mandatory minimum sentence. Before the First Step Act, the criminal history provision excluded all defendants with more than one criminal history point; the First Step Act relaxed that provision, adopting the view that it made the safety valve unreasonably narrow. What the 2018 law substituted was a rule that involves three separate tests, which Kagan describes as testing for “more than 4 criminal history points,” a “3-point offense,” and a “2-point violent offense.” Treating those three tests as A, B, and C, Kagan quotes the statute’s limitation of the safety valve to a defendant who “does not have” A, B, “and” C.
The dispute in the case turns on the meaning of the “and” between subparagraphs B and C. For its part, Kagan explains, “the Government contends that the phrase … creates a checklist with three distinct conditions. [Thus], a person fails to meet the requirement … if he has any one of the three.” In contrast, the defendant contends that the phrase ‘does not have A, B, and C’ sets out a single, amalgamated condition for relief, [which] a defendant … fails … only when he has all three of A, B, and C.” Kagan ultimately agrees with the government’s harsher view: Defendants lose the safety valve if they have A, they lose if they have B, and they lose if they have C.