Booker, Durbin Submit Amicus Brief to Supreme Court in Maxwell v. Dinis

WASHINGTON, D.C.- U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, and U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, submitted an amicus brief in the Supreme Court's forthcoming case, Maxwell v. Dinis, which will determine whether federal prisoners can use habeas corpus to enforce the earned time credit provisions established by the First Step Act.

"In December 2018, a bipartisan majority of both chambers of Congress passed, and President Donald J. Trump signed into law, the First Step Act of 2018. The Act is a historic and bipartisan piece of legislation, ushering in momentous correctional, sentencing, and criminal justice reforms," began the senators.

"The Fifth Circuit's judgment in this case threatens to undermine Congress's groundbreaking approach to prison reform… Nothing in the statutory text, congressional intent, or this Court's precedent supports that result," continued the senators.

The senators argued that Congress designed and enacted the First Step Act to expand access to prerelease custody and intended for the First Step Act's incentive system to be enforceable and renewable.

"The Fifth Circuit's judgment should be reversed," concluded the senators.

For a PDF of the senators' senators' amicus brief to the Supreme Court, click here.

Championed by Booker, Durbin, and U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Mike Lee (R-UT), the First Step Act was signed into law in 2018 and serves as a beacon for "smart on crime" policies.

The law made the Fair Sentencing Act's reforms retroactive, and:

• Required the Department of Justice to develop a risk and needs assessment system to evaluate the recidivism risk of all prisoners, place them in programs and activities to reduce risk, and permit early transition into prerelease custody based on earned time credits;

• Reduced mandatory minimum sentences for some drug trafficking offenses;

• Expanded the safety valve to allow judges to sentence low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with minor criminal histories to less than the required mandatory minimums; and

• Authorized incarcerated individuals to file compassionate release motions in federal court.

These reforms have been tremendously successful. As noted in a January 2024 hearing, of the 44,671 incarcerated adults then released under First Step Act reforms, only 9.7 percent had been arrested for new crimes. By comparison, the overall Bureau of Prisons recidivism rate stood at around 45 percent. To date, there have been 4,166 retroactive sentence reductions and 4,995 compassionate release motions granted.