The U.S. Supreme Court addressed several contentious issues this term, with the conservative majority prevailing in numerous high-profile cases. Yet, in a notable trend, the court also issued multiple rulings favorable to criminal defendants, including expanding prisoners' rights in civil lawsuits and reinforcing due process protections in capital cases.

Many court watchers focused on the court's controversial 6-3 decisions from the conservative bloc, including those upholding Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors and limiting district courts' ability to issue nationwide injunctions, in a suit against President Donald Trump's order on birthright citizenship.

But the alliances on the court shifted on several cases involving criminal procedure. The court ruled in Esteras v. United States  that judges cannot impose additional prison terms solely as retribution for past offenses when revoking supervised release. Meanwhile, in Hewitt v. United States , the court unanimously ensured broader retroactive application of the First Step Act's sentencing reforms, allowing thousands to potentially benefit from reduced mandatory minimums upon resentencing.

Addressing constitutional rights, the court intervened in two death penalty cases.

Glossip v. Oklahoma resulted in overturning the murder conviction of Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma man whose prosecution had been tainted by what even the state's attorney general acknowledged were serious errors and possible misconduct.

Gutierrez v. Saenz opened the courthouse doors for prisoners seeking DNA testing that could prove their innocence. The ruling, which centered on a Texas death row inmate's challenge to state DNA testing protocol, allows prisoners to at least contest such procedures.

In Barnes v. Felix , the court unanimously struck down a restrictive lower court approach to lawsuits focusing on police use of force, mandating that courts consider the totality of circumstances leading to encounters where officers use deadly force. And in Perttu v. Richards , the justices narrowly expanded prisoners' rights to jury trials in cases where grievances filed with prison administrators intersect with their civil rights claims.

The term also set the stage for future battles, granting review in Hamm v. Smith, a case poised to clarify standards for evaluating intellectual disabilities in death penalty determinations.

Finally, in a closely watched case, Bondi v. VanDerStok , the court upheld the Biden administration's regulation of unserialized firearm kits known as ghost guns, which are largely untraceable. The 7-2 decision reinforced federal authority to require manufacturers to assign unique identification numbers to firearm components, a process called serialization. Legal analysts say the ruling could impact the proliferation of these weapons and is seen as a significant win for gun control advocates.

Legal experts talked to Law360 about the nuances and impacts of the rulings.

Sentencing and Supervised Release

On June 26, in Hewitt v. United States, the Supreme Court narrowly reversed a Fifth Circuit ruling and resolved a circuit split on the retroactive reach of the 2018 First Step Act, a landmark piece of legislation that addressed sentencing disparities in the federal context.

With an opinion written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court held that the act's reduced mandatory minimum penalties for violating Section 924(c) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which criminalizes possessing a firearm while committing other crimes, apply to people whose sentences were imposed before the law was passed but vacated after its enactment.

"For many people facing extreme sentences of 50-plus years, applying the First Step Act can be the difference between dying in prison and having a chance to return home," Emma Andersson, deputy director of the ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project, said in a statement to reporters on the day of the ruling. "This decision ensures that it will mitigate extreme and outdated sentencing laws for more people."

Douglas A. Berman, a professor at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, told Law360 that the ruling will immediately impact only a limited cohort of defendants — about two dozen — but that the pool could grow depending on appeals on other issues that lead to people being resentenced.

For those affected by the ruling, Berman said the impact could be "profound."

Thousands of people were sentenced before the passage of the First Step Act under provisions in Section 924(c) that allowed for stacking mandatory minimum sentences, to be served consecutively, for criminal offenses arising from the same incident. Many of those people could now benefit from more lenient stacking rules under the First Step Act if and when they are given an opportunity to be resentenced by a federal court.

Still, the ruling in Hewitt was technical and focused on statutory text rather than broader interpretation of legal principles, effectively making its scope rather limited, Berman said.

"It really seems to me like a convincing example of a very big impact for a very small set of individuals," he said.

The conservative-leaning Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch joined their liberal colleagues in the ruling, concurring in part with the opinion by Justice Jackson, who is the only member of the court to have served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Berman said the Hewitt ruling signaled, in particular, Justice Gorsuch's continued interest in shoring up the rights of criminal defendants in unsettled areas of criminal law, particularly in the context of sentencing.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in Pulsifer v. United States that a criminal defendant facing a mandatory minimum sentence is eligible for safety-valve relief under the First Step Act only if the defendant satisfies each of three conditions contained in one of the law's provisions. Justice Gorsuch dissented, arguing that satisfying any of those conditions was sufficient.

In a lengthy dissenting opinion joined by Justices Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Gorsuch said that when there is a question about how to interpret the First Step Act, "the only permissible answer is one that favors liberty."

"I just think Justice Gorsuch, more often than some of the other conservative justices, sees these criminal cases as, you know, the big bully state against the little criminal defendant — and that it's important for interpretations to be sensitive to that reality," Berman said.

The June 20 ruling in Esteras v. United States could potentially affect hundreds of thousands of criminal defendants, though only in minor ways, legal experts say.

In a 7-2 decision vacating a lower court ruling upheld by the Sixth Circuit, the Supreme Court decided that when federal judges consider revoking a defendant's supervised release — meaning when individuals violate conditions placed on them after being released from prison — they cannot consider punishing defendants further for the original crime.

When sentencing someone for a crime, a judge can consider factors like retribution, which involves punishing someone proportionately to their crime. The purpose of supervised release, on the other hand, is rehabilitation.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett clarified that when judges revoke supervised release, the law excludes retribution for the original offense as a factor judges can consider. Judges must instead base their decisions on deterring future violations, preventing further harm, and helping defendants to rehabilitate.

Fines, probation and imprisonment are a court's primary tools for ensuring that a criminal defendant receives just desserts for the original offense. Supervised release, by contrast, "'is not a punishment in lieu of incarceration,'" Justice Barrett wrote, quoting a previous ruling by the court.

According to U.S. Sentencing Commission data, there are about 110,000 people on federal supervised release at any given time. Between 15,000 and 20,000 of them have their supervised release revoked every year.

Jacob Schuman, a professor at Temple University's Beasley School of Law, said that despite those numbers, the ruling won't have a deep practical effect.

"I don't think it's going to have a very big impact, because I don't think it's very common for judges to revoke supervised release as retribution for the defendant's original offense," Schuman said. "The court said they're not allowed to do that. But I don't think very many of them were doing that anyway."

Capital Conviction Overturned Over Prosecutorial Misconduct

In one of the term's most dramatic rulings, the court by a 5-3 vote threw out Glossip's murder conviction, in a case focusing on state prosecutors' decision not to correct their key witness' known false testimony at Glossip's capital trial.

In 1997, Oklahoma City motel owner Barry Van Treese was beaten to death. The state alleged that Glossip, the motel's manager, orchestrated the murder by persuading a maintenance worker, Justin Sneed, to carry out the killing. Sneed confessed and struck a plea deal with prosecutors to avoid the death penalty by testifying against Glossip.

Glossip was convicted and sentenced to death. His conviction was based almost entirely on Sneed's testimony.

In the majority opinion issued Feb. 25, Justice Sotomayor said that prosecutors violated Glossip's due process rights under the 1959 ruling in Napue v. Illinois by allowing Sneed's false testimony to stand and withholding key evidence that would have allowed Glossip's attorney to challenge Sneed's credibility in front of the jury.

"The prosecution violated its constitutional obligation to correct false testimony," Justice Sotomayor said. Had the prosecution corrected Sneed on the stand, his credibility plainly would have suffered. That correction would have revealed to the jury not just that Sneed was untrustworthy … but also that Sneed was willing to lie to them under oath."

Specifically, Sneed falsely testified that he was not taking psychiatric medication, when in fact he was taking lithium to treat bipolar disorder, a condition that could cause a person to turn violent when combined with drug use. Sneed regularly consumed marijuana and methamphetamine.

It was later revealed that the prosecution was aware of Sneed's false statements and did not correct them at trial. Glossip challenged his conviction in federal court, arguing that the state's failure to correct this false testimony violated his right to due process.

The case reached the Supreme Court after the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Glossip's conviction, concluding the falsehood was not significant enough to have affected the jury's decision. The justices halted Glossip's execution in May 2023 after Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond publicly admitted that Glossip's criminal prosecution was marred by constitutional errors and possible prosecutorial misconduct.

Bennett L. Gershman, a professor at Pace University's Elisabeth Haub School of Law, described Glossip's case as a rare instance of the Supreme Court examining prosecutorial misconduct, a subject he says the court often avoids.

Gershman called the failure to disclose information to defense attorneys "the most serious, most pernicious form of misconduct" that prosecutors can commit — and perhaps the most pervasive.

"The prosecutor knows that if they disclose exculpatory information to the defense, the defense is going to use it and maybe make the prosecutors lose the case," Gershman said. "Prosecutors don't want to lose."

Right to Jury Trials in Prisoner Lawsuits

In a split 5-4 decision in Perttu v. Richards, the Supreme Court expanded prisoners' access to jury trials in civil rights cases stemming from their confinement.

The dispute centered on the Prison Litigation Reform Act, or PRLA, which generally requires incarcerated people to use all available grievance procedures provided by the prison before filing suit — a requirement known as exhaustion.

On June 18, the court found that when factual questions about whether those remedies were truly available are closely tied to the merits of the underlying civil rights claims, those questions must be decided by a jury, rather than a judge.

"Parties are entitled to a jury trial on PLRA exhaustion when that issue is intertwined with the merits of a claim protected by the Seventh Amendment," Justice Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, joined by the court's three liberal justices and Justice Gorsuch.

The ruling affirmed a decision by the Sixth Circuit holding that Michigan prisoner Kyle Richards and two co-plaintiffs who sued a prison official on allegations of sexual abuse and retaliation had a right to a jury to decide exhaustion matters.

In the opinion, Justice Roberts said it is "usual practice" for factual disputes regarding legal claims to be heard by juries, "even if that means a judge must let a jury decide questions he could ordinarily resolve on his own."

Acknowledging that the text of the PRLA, which was adopted in 1996, doesn't specify whether judges or juries should decide exhaustion issues, the chief justice said that such "silence" supported the view that it was up to juries to do so.

"Nothing in the PLRA prevents holding a jury trial here," Justice Roberts wrote.

Justice Roberts cited the 1959 Supreme Court decision in Beacon Theatres Inc. v. Westover , a case involving an antitrust dispute between two movie theater companies, to show that, for decades, when issues ordinarily decided by judges and issues ordinarily decided by juries are factually intertwined, the court has preserved plaintiffs' right to a jury.

Scott Ballenger, the director of the Appellate Litigation Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law and one of Richards' counsel, told Law360 that the court "has never been quite clear" whether that approach is mandated by the Seventh Amendment, which guarantees the right to a jury trial in federal civil cases.

Ballenger said that in Perttu v. Richards, the court avoided reaching a conclusion about the Seventh Amendment, opting instead to understand the PLRA as incorporating the Beacon Theatres rule.

"It is not clear whether this is a PLRA-specific interpretive approach, or instead an indication that the court intends more generally to avoid difficult Seventh Amendment questions going forward by interpreting statutes to grant jury trial rights whenever the constitutional question would be doubtful," Ballenger said in an email.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Barrett chastised the majority for what she saw as a distortion of the Beacon Theatres precedent and a departure from how Richards' case had been litigated and decided up to that point — criticism that Ballenger said was fair.

"I also want to note that there is a serious historical question about whether the Seventh Amendment might require a jury trial on all exhaustion of remedies issues, whether or not they are intertwined with the merits of the case," Ballenger said.

Post-Conviction DNA Testing

The Supreme Court opened the door for prisoners to challenge unfair DNA testing procedures — a potentially life-saving shift for those claiming innocence. In Gutierrez v. Saenz, the court ruled in favor of a Texas death row prisoner seeking access to DNA evidence that could potentially prove his innocence.

In a 6-3 opinion authored by Justice Sotomayor and issued June 26, the court held that Ruben Gutierrez has standing to challenge Texas' postconviction DNA testing procedures under the due process clause.

Gutierrez, who was repeatedly denied DNA testing under a Texas law known as Article 64, argued in federal court that the state's procedures are fundamentally unfair. He alleged that the law imposes an impossible burden by requiring prisoners to prove they would not have been convicted without the evidence they seek to test — despite not being allowed to know what that evidence contains unless testing is granted.

While the Supreme Court ruling does not guarantee that the testing will ultimately be granted to Gutierrez, it allows him to argue in federal court that the state's refusal to test key evidence from a 1998 murder case violates his constitutional rights.

The ruling underscores that even those facing execution must have a meaningful opportunity to contest state procedures that may obstruct access to potentially exculpatory DNA evidence.

"A judgment in Gutierrez's favor would redress his alleged injury by removing the allegedly unconstitutional barrier that stands between him and the DNA testing he seeks," Justice Sotomayor said in the opinion.

Justices Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.

In the dissenting opinion, a frustrated Justice Alito said the ruling's only practical effect was to "aid and abet Gutierrez's efforts to run out the clock on the execution of his sentence."

Vanessa Potkins, the director of special litigation at the Innocence Project, told Law360 that while it could take months for a prisoner to be granted DNA testing under state procedures, the litigation opposing such testing tends to go on for years.

All 50 states have laws that provide a path to accessing DNA testing after conviction. Some of those statutes are overly restrictive, she said.

"Innocent people in prison and even facing execution have been unable to access the scientific evidence that could prove their wrongful conviction," Potkins said. "It's encouraging to see that, at least when it comes to these cases involving questions of innocence and of DNA testing, the Supreme Court has stepped in."

She added, "They should continue to do so, especially when there's evidence of innocence and the stakes are literally life and death."

Police Use of Force

The court unanimously ruled on May 15 in Barnes v. Felix that courts must assess the "totality of the circumstances" when determining whether a police officer's use of force was reasonable, and cannot limit the inquiry to the precise moment deadly force was used.

The justices rejected the Fifth Circuit's rigid "moment-of-threat" rule that required courts to only look at the moment — a few seconds — in which an officer used deadly force in determining whether such use of force was justified under the Fourth Amendment.

"To assess whether an officer acted reasonably in using force, a court must consider all the relevant circumstances, including facts and events leading up to the climactic moment," Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the majority opinion.

Ashtian Barnes was fatally shot during a traffic stop in 2016 after Officer Roberto Felix jumped onto Barnes' moving car and fired two shots, later claiming he did so in self-defense.

Law enforcement officers are generally shielded by qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects officers from civil liability unless it can be proven that they violated clearly established constitutional rights. Felix invoked the doctrine as part of his defense.

In the opinion, Justice Kagan made clear that the court was not deciding whether an officer's own role in creating a dangerous situation during a stop must be considered when assessing the reasonableness of deadly force.

Sharon R. Fairley, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, described the decision in Barnes v. Felix as a consequential ruling that could help plaintiffs overcome the qualified immunity hurdle.

She noted, however, that while the court rejected the Fifth Circuit's rule, it declined to define how far back courts may look when evaluating use of force, leaving lower courts with broad discretion in considering the circumstances surrounding violent police encounters.

"They haven't really given the lower courts any real specific direction on that," Fairley said. "That, I think, still gives reviewing courts the opportunity to sort of still take a narrow view of what those circumstances might be."

Intellectual Disability in Capital Cases

During the term, the Supreme Court took two notable actions in Hamm v. Smith, a case involving Alabama death row inmate Joseph Clifton Smith, who argues that his intellectual disability makes him ineligible for execution under the court's 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia .

In an unsigned ruling Nov. 4, the court vacated an Eleventh Circuit's ruling that affirmed a lower court decision to vacate Smith's death sentence. In the brief order, the justices said it was unclear what approach the federal appeals court took in affirming that Smith is intellectually disabled. In that ruling, the court sent the case back to the lower courts for further review.

On June 6, the court decided to fully review the case in the next term, which begins in October. The outcome of the case could refine standards for protecting individuals with intellectual disabilities from the death penalty.

Smith, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of Durk Van Dam, has obtained five full-scale IQ scores, ranging from 72 to 78. Like most states, Alabama requires that offenders prove an IQ of 70 or less to be exempted from the death penalty under the Atkins ruling. But the state also considers a defendant's adaptive skills.

After holding an evidentiary hearing, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama found in August 2021 that executing Smith would violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, considering that his IQ score could be as low as 69 when factoring in the standard error of measurement for his lowest score.

In reaching its conclusion, the court said it was looking beyond the IQ scores to also consider Smith's adaptive deficits — limitations in a person's ability to function independently and meet social demands, from personal care to empathy, to problem-solving —and whether those deficits appeared during his childhood.

The Eleventh Circuit agreed with the district court's reasoning, but the Alabama Department of Corrections asked the justices to intervene. In its Nov. 4 decision, the Supreme Court found the lower court's reasoning unclear and ordered further review.

Ten days later, on remand, the Eleventh Circuit responded to the court that it had used a "holistic approach" to determine Smith's intellectual disability and said that the lower was correct in finding that he suffered from "significantly subaverage intellectual function," had substantial deficits in adaptive behavior, and that he manifested those issues before he turned 18.

"We unambiguously reject any suggestion that a court may ever conclude that a capital defendant suffers from significantly subaverage intellectual functioning based solely on the fact that the lower end of the standard-error range for his lowest of multiple IQ scores is 69," the Eleventh Circuit wrote.

Alabama petitioned the justices again on Feb. 12. The high court agreed to hear the case, but limited its inquiry to "whether and how courts may consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores in assessing an Atkins claim."

Robin M. Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said that it was clear from the number of times the case was reconferenced by the Supreme Court — 30 — that something in it had caught the justices' attention. She warned that the court could go further than it announced it would do, possibly revisiting the very premise of Atkins.

"Ostensibly the court will limit its inquiry to how lower courts should address a defendant's multiple IQ scores when evaluating whether he has an intellectual disability," Maher said. "But I think the worry is that this cert grant signals a desire to revisit the court's earlier decision to exempt people with intellectual disability from the death penalty."

She added, "That would be a surprising and unsettling result because the decision is well-settled law, repeatedly confirmed by the Court over the past 20 years and robustly supported by the medical and scientific communities."

Ghost Guns Regulation

Bondi v. VanDerStok centered on whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives exceeded its authority when it interpreted the definition "firearm" under the Gun Control Act of 1968 to include partially complete gun parts.

Plaintiffs that included individual gun owners and manufacturers argued that the ATF's rule unlawfully expanded the statutory definition of a firearm, and the Fifth Circuit agreed. But in the ruling that came down March 26, the Supreme Court held that the agency's rule "is not facially inconsistent" with federal law.

In 2021, the ATF adopted a new rule designed to combat the proliferation of ghost guns, particularly in response to modern technologies, like 3D printing, allowing for the production of parts that consumers can assemble together into weapons.

The ATF interpreted the GCA to cover components like frames and receivers — even if unfinished — if they could be readily assembled into a functional firearm.

"The GCA embraces, and thus permits ATF to regulate, some weapon parts kits and unfinished frames or receivers, including those we have discussed," Justice Gorsuch said in the majority opinion.

Matthew Cavedon of libertarian Cato Institute described the case as a legal and philosophical debate about "when components become a whole" in the context of gun manufacturing, particularly in light of 3D printing.

Cavedon said the ATF's rule defined regulated "frames and receivers" to include not just completed parts, but also components that are "clearly identifiable as a weapons kit" or "can be readily assembled" into a functioning weapon. He noted that plaintiffs brought a facial challenge to the rule—arguing the rule was invalid in all cases—but this broad challenge backfired.

"The decision to bring a facial challenge is what really doomed this lawsuit at the Supreme Court," Cavedon told Law360.

Cavedon said that although the case did not present a Second Amendment question, the court could look at the serialization of gun parts within the historical framework it adopted in its 2022 landmark ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen and used again last year in United States v. Rahimi for determining whether laws restricting gun rights are constitutional.

"There is, I think, a very live question as to whether regulating the sales of kits or requiring serial numbers would comply with the Supreme Court's history and tradition test," he said.

--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.