The Supreme Court's twin 6-3 rulings in Rutherford and Fernandez shut two of the most commonly used pathways to federal compassionate release, reshaping defense strategy nationwide.
The Supreme Court issued two 6-3 rulings on May 28, 2026, categorically excluding nonretroactive sentencing reforms and actual-innocence claims as bases for compassionate release under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A) [1]. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote both majority opinions, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh [2]. The decisions resolve a circuit split that had produced inconsistent outcomes for federal prisoners across the country [1].
The two cases, *Rutherford v. United States* and *Fernandez v. United States*, arose from the district courts and reached the Court on the question of what constitutes "extraordinary and compelling reasons" sufficient to warrant a sentence reduction [3]. In *Rutherford*, the majority held that Congress's failure to make First Step Act sentencing provisions retroactive reflects a deliberate legislative choice, and courts may not circumvent that choice through compassionate release motions [2]. In *Fernandez*, the Court held that actual-innocence challenges are governed exclusively by habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2255, and that routing such claims through compassionate release would effectively nullify the procedural requirements and gatekeeping rules that govern habeas petitions [1]. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan concurred in the judgment in both cases but declined to join the majority's broader reasoning [2]. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented alone in both, arguing the majority's categorical approach conflicts with the text's grant of discretion to district courts [3].
The practical consequences are immediate and wide-ranging. Compassionate release motions citing nonretroactive First Step Act changes, or asserting that the defendant did not commit the underlying offense, are now categorically foreclosed [2]. Defense practitioners who have built sentence-reduction strategies around those two theories must reorient their approach toward qualifying medical, age-related, or family-circumstance grounds, which the decisions leave intact [1]. The rulings affect thousands of pending motions in federal district courts nationwide [2].
What comes next will unfold on two fronts. In the short term, district courts must apply the new categorical bars to pending motions, and some cases raising both foreclosed and surviving grounds will require partial briefing and renewed hearings [3]. On the legislative front, the decisions may intensify advocacy for statutory amendments that would explicitly authorize courts to consider nonretroactive sentencing changes, a step the majority acknowledged only Congress can take [1].