Some people convicted of gun crimes can spend less time in prison, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 16.
Sentences for certain gun crimes can run concurrently, the nation’s top court said in a unanimous decision, siding with the convict.
“Congress could certainly have designed the penalty scheme at issue here differently. But Congress did not do any of these things. And we must implement the design Congress chose,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Biden appointee, wrote in the ruling (pdf).
The case involves two subsections of 18 U.S.C. 924. Subsection (c) outlines offenses and penalties, and states that “no term of imprisonment imposed on a person under this subsection shall run concurrently with any other term of imprisonment imposed on the person.” Subsection (j), which was added more recently, outlines other offenses and corresponding penalties. It does not include language about forbidding concurrent sentences….