A freed man faces life back in prison after a Supreme Court ruling on the First Step Act

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two years after his release from prison, Patrick Dewayne Smith spends Sundays with his family in a modest brick church with a white steeple in rural Tennessee. He works two jobs. He goes to ball games to cheer for nieces and nephews he had never met. After serving 13 years for a nonviolent drug conviction, he is trying to rebuild his life.

Now Smith could be sent back to prison for the rest of it.

A federal judge released him in 2024 under rules adopted after Congress passed the First Step Act, a landmark criminal justice law during President Donald Trump’s first term. But the Supreme Court ruled in May that people sentenced under older, harsher laws cannot rely on the disparity between their sentences and current penalties to seek early compassionate release.

“Every time I get a call, I’m hoping it’s some good news. Or, you know, at least not no bad news,” said Smith, a tall, soft-spoken 47-year-old whose beard is now flecked with gray.

Smith is among about a dozen people nationwide who could be returned to prison because of the ruling, according to FAMM, a sentencing reform group formerly Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Without clemency from the White House, the group says, second chances could disappear for those people.

The First Step Act opened a path to freedom

The First Step Act was the most significant rewrite of federal sentencing laws in a generation. Among other changes, it reduced some lengthy mandatory minimum sentences, particularly for nonviolent drug crimes. Trump said the law would “make our communities safer and give former inmates a second chance at life after they have served their time.”

The law was championed by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser who had a personal connection to the issue: Kushner’s his father had spent time in federal prison when Kushner was younger.

Thousands of people have been released from prison in the years since the law was passed, but some recent Supreme Court rulings have made it harder for other people already serving long sentences to argue for their release. For Smith and others like him, competing interpretations have created a high-stakes legal limbo.

“They’re doing everything that they should be doing. They’re reestablishing relationships with families. They’re volunteering in their communities. They’re working,” said Shanna Rifkin, FAMM’s general counsel. “Having them reincarcerated is so unjust given that they have demonstrated their rehabilitation.”

Without a grant of clemency from the White House, Rifkin says their second chance could be snatched away.

Trump remains proud of signing the First Step Act, and the administration is actively reviewing developments, said a White House official speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorize to speak publicly on the issue.

Supreme Court ruling narrows options for people serving long sentences

In 2023, the U.S. Sentencing Commission adopted new rules for people serving unusually long sentences. Judges could sometimes consider changes to the law when deciding whether to grant compassionate release to inmates who had served at least 10 years.

Not everyone agreed.

The Department of Justice argued the new rules went beyond what the First Step Act allowed. Judges nevertheless agreed to free dozens of people across the country after considering legal changes and other factors, FAMM found.

The dispute eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 6-3 decision in May. It found that sentencing disparities from decades past are not “extraordinary and compelling” reasons to grant compassionate release.

“It is hard to see how Congress’s deliberate decision not to extend newly reduced penalties to those already sentenced could be a convincing reason that ‘warrant(s)’ a reduction,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the conservative majority.

The decision was one of two during the last Supreme Court term that narrowed the options for people serving long sentences, said Daniel Harawa, a law professor at New York University. “I worry a lot about what this means for federal criminal justice reform,” he said.

For Smith and about a dozen other people around the country, it could mean they have to finish serving a sentence that would not be handed down today.

Prior convictions meant a life sentence

Smith grew up in a small town in rural northern Alabama and became addicted to drugs as a teenager, his lawyers said in court documents. At 17 he was arrested for twice selling crack cocaine to an informant. A pair of marijuana convictions followed a few years later. He served about three years in prison. After his release he worked as a construction worker and a janitor.

In 2010, he got involved with a drug ring selling crack cocaine and marijuana on the Tennessee-Alabama line, prosecutors said. Caught on phone calls recorded by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, he was convicted of drug conspiracy and money laundering after he pulled out of a plea deal that called for 12 years to 14 years in prison in exchange for his cooperation.

His lawyers called his involvement “unremarkable,” but the federal conviction combined with his prior record triggered a life sentence.

The judge questioned whether the punishment fit the crime, but said the laws tied her hands. It was the longest sentence linked to the 20-person case, exceeding even the ringleader’s.

Smith said he resolved to keep his head down behind bars, working prison jobs and avoiding infractions.

“What kept me sane was that faith, that belief in God,” he said.

He missed little things, like sleeping in a full-sized bed and taking a bath after a long day. He missed big things, too: His mother died during his first year in prison and he couldn’t ask his family to shoulder the $1,000 it would cost for him to travel home for the funeral.

After 13 years, Smith got his second chance

After the Sentencing Commission adopted its new compassionate release rules following the First Step Act, Smith asked a judge for a reduction to time served. It took nearly a year, but the court agreed he should go free.

He returned to Alabama and moved in with his sister and her daughter.

Last month, prosecutors filed court documents challenging his release and they pointed to the Supreme Court decision. They argued he would be subject to a mandatory-minimum sentence of 25 years, even under current laws, and called the judge’s decision to release him “difficult to justify.”

A Justice Department official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing case said Rutherford’s case means his release is no longer valid, and the department cannot agree to a sentence below what the law requires.

The prospect of a return to prison is a bitter pill for his father, James Smith, a mainstay at the Willow Grove Missionary Baptist Church.

“When you got rapists and murderers and you get this guy on a nonviolent case and you want him for life,” he said, “it doesn’t sit well with me.”

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Associated Press video journalist Kristin M. Hall in Nashville, Tenn., contributed to this report.