Prosecutors are moving to send Patrick Dewayne Smith back to prison after the Supreme Court ruled old sentencing gaps cannot justify compassionate release.
Federal prosecutors filed court documents challenging Smith’s 2024 release. They argued he would still face a 25-year mandatory minimum even under current laws, a prison floor set by Congress that a judge cannot go below.
Smith, 47, served 13 years of a life sentence on a federal drug case before a judge let him go. The Associated Press reported that the Supreme Court later held that a gap between an old sentence and today’s penalties is not an “extraordinary and compelling” reason for compassionate release, the rare path inmates use to seek an early out. FAMM, a sentencing-reform group, said he is among about a dozen people nationwide who could be returned to prison.
Two years after his release, Smith works two jobs and spends Sundays with family in a modest brick church with a white steeple in rural Tennessee. He went back to Alabama and moved in with his sister and her daughter.
He also goes to ball games to cheer for nieces and nephews he had never met. The court fight has followed him home.
Smith said:
"Every time I get a call, I’m hoping it’s some good news. Or, you know, at least not no bad news,"
Smith grew up in a small town in rural northern Alabama. His lawyers said in court papers that he became addicted to drugs as a teenager.
At 17 he was arrested for twice selling crack cocaine to an informant. A pair of marijuana convictions followed a few years later, and he served about three years in prison.
After that earlier release he worked as a construction worker and a janitor. The next case is the one that produced a life term.
Prosecutors said that in 2010 he got involved with a drug ring selling crack cocaine and marijuana on the Tennessee-Alabama line. He was caught on phone calls recorded by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
His lawyers called that involvement "unremarkable." He then pulled out of a plea deal that called for 12 to 14 years in prison in exchange for his cooperation.
He was convicted of drug conspiracy and money laundering. The federal conviction, stacked on his prior record, triggered a life sentence, the longest linked to a 20-person case and longer than the ringleader’s. Heavy follow-on effects still attach to federal drug convictions, as in a recent gun-rights dispute.
The original sentencing judge questioned whether the punishment fit the crime. She said the laws tied her hands.
Smith’s mother died during his first year in prison. He said he could not ask family to shoulder the $1,000 it would cost for him to travel home for the funeral.
He said he kept his head down, worked prison jobs, and avoided infractions. He also said faith is what kept him sane.
Congress passed the First Step Act during President Donald Trump’s first term. Among other changes, it reduced some lengthy mandatory minimum sentences, particularly for nonviolent drug crimes.
President Donald Trump said the law would
"make our communities safer and give former inmates a second chance at life after they have served their time."
Jared Kushner, then Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, championed the bill. Kushner’s 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 passed. That is the statute working on the terms Congress wrote.
In 2023, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the federal body that writes sentencing guidelines, adopted new rules for people serving unusually long sentences. Judges could sometimes consider changes to the law when deciding compassionate release for inmates who had served at least 10 years.
The Department of Justice argued those rules went beyond what the First Step Act allowed. FAMM found that judges nevertheless agreed to free dozens of people across the country after considering legal changes and other factors.
Smith asked a judge for a reduction to time served. It took nearly a year, but the court agreed he should go free in 2024 under rules adopted after the First Step Act.
In May the Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision. It found that sentencing disparities from decades past are not “extraordinary and compelling” reasons to grant compassionate release.
People sentenced under older, harsher laws cannot rely on the gap between their sentences and current penalties to seek that early out. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority:
"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,"
That is the Court putting Congress’s choice back in charge, as it has in other high-court fights. Judges do not get to treat a penalty cut as retroactive when lawmakers left it prospective.
Daniel Harawa, a law professor at New York University, said the decision was one of two during the last Supreme Court term that narrowed the options for people serving long sentences. He said he worries about what it means for federal criminal justice reform.
Last month prosecutors filed court documents challenging Smith’s release and pointed to that Supreme Court decision. They called the judge’s decision to release him "difficult to justify."
They did not rest on old-versus-new disparity alone. They argued Smith would be subject to a 25-year mandatory minimum even under current laws.
A Justice Department official, speaking about an ongoing case, said Rutherford’s case means his release is no longer valid. The department cannot agree to a sentence below what the law requires, the official said.
The justices have ended other appeals with the same finality. The legal question is not whether a life term feels heavy. It is whether a judge may use a later policy change to undo a sentence Congress left standing.
Shanna Rifkin, FAMM’s general counsel, described people freed under those later rules as rebuilding ordinary lives. She said:
"They’re doing everything that they should be doing. They’re reestablishing relationships with families. They’re volunteering in their communities. They’re working,"
Rifkin said that without a grant of clemency from the White House, their second chance could be snatched away. Clemency is a president’s grant of mercy. It is the lawful off-ramp if the executive branch decides a sentence should not be carried out in full.
A White House official said Trump remains proud of signing the First Step Act. The official said the administration is actively reviewing developments.
James Smith, Patrick’s father and a mainstay at Willow Grove Missionary Baptist Church, said a life term on a nonviolent case does not sit well with him. He contrasted that outcome with people convicted of rape and murder.
That plea belongs in the clemency file or in a bill Congress is willing to make retroactive. It does not convert a Sentencing Commission rule into a second sentencing hearing, a lesson already familiar from a long procedural court fight.
Smith is a tall, soft-spoken 47-year-old whose beard is now flecked with gray. He has work, church, and family on this side of the prison wall, and a prosecutor’s filing on the other.
Second chances after time served are written into the law Trump signed. Pretending Congress made old cases new is not.
