Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is gaining a reputation for penning nonsensical solo dissents in what should otherwise be unanimous Supreme Court decisions. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that her colleagues are no longer shy about putting such incoherence in its place.
The latest incident came on Thursday in the Supreme Court’s Fernandez v. United States decision, in which the 8-1 majority held that “the supposed invalidity” of a prisoner’s conviction “is not among the ‘extraordinary and compelling reasons’ that justify compassionate release.” (Compassionate release is a process by which convicted individuals may seek a reduced sentence or early release due to “extraordinary and compelling reasons” like age and medical condition.)
The high court rejected convicted prisoner Joe Fernandez’s motion for compassionate release, in which he argued that “extraordinary and compelling reasons — above all, that he was innocent — warranted a sentencing reduction.” The majority opinion authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett was joined by the court’s conservative justices, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a separate opinion (which Justice Elena Kagan joined) concurring in the judgement.
Throughout her solo dissent, Jackson, while pretending to be a textualist, claimed “nothing about the text or history of the compassionate-release provision suggests that Congress meant for this discretionary second-look opportunity to be cabined in the way the majority suggests.” She further accused the majority of employing an “atextual and unsupported limitation on a district court’s sentencing discretion,” which she characterized as “an unnecessary rewriting of the statute Congress wrote and an unwarranted revision of the compassionate-release scheme Congress intended to establish.”
Writing on behalf of her conservative colleagues, Barrett wasted little time in torching the Biden appointee’s illogical tirade.
In one footnote, Barrett noted how Jackson “perplexingly” accused the majority of “failing to define ‘what it means for a prisoner to “collaterally attac[k] the validity of his conviction”‘ … and characterizes this limit as unworkable.” Calling out her junior colleague’s apparent illiteracy, the Trump appointee underscored how the majority did, in fact, explain its “holding in detail,” and how “its application is straightforward.”
“There is an obvious distinction between a prisoner who asserts that he should not have been convicted in the first place and one who asserts that his present circumstances warrant an exercise of compassion,” Barrett wrote. “Indeed, we routinely require courts to draw much finer distinctions than this.”
Barrett went on to detail how Jackson “betray[s] the weakness of [her] criticism” by relying on “a source that offers no support.” “[T]his source,” Barrett wrote, “describes the difficulty of determining when relief other than a release from custody (for example, a damages award) would ‘necessarily imply the invalidity of [the plaintiff’s] conviction’ within the meaning of [the Supreme Court’s 1994] Heck v. Humphrey [decision].”
But “[t]hat issue has no bearing on today’s case,” Barrett wrote.
The Trump appointee chastised Jackson in a separate footnote over the latter’s dismissal of Supreme Court precedents the majority cited in its opinion. She explained how the Biden appointee seemingly misunderstood how those decisions handled “the relevant statutes” and how the court “undertake[s] the same inquiry” in the Fernandez case.
Thursday’s decision is hardly the only instance in which Barrett has excoriated Jackson’s lackluster argumentation. In the court’s 2025 Trump v. CASA ruling on nationwide injunctions, the former slammed part of the latter’s solo dissent for being “at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”
