This session provides an overview of PATTERN and Earned Time Credits, explains how you can utilize these tools to benefit your client, and discusses how to proceed if the BOP fails to provide the time credits your client has earned. One of the prison reform provisions of the First Step Act, the Earned Time Credit program allows eligible individuals to be released early from prison or transferred to prerelease custody based on those credits. Along with BOP's risk assessment tool, PATTERN, Earned Time Credits can be an effective way to significantly decrease your client's sentence.

Brief of Amici Curiae American Civil Liberties Union, American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, Cato Institute, Due Process Institute, FAMM, and National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Support of Petitioners.

Panel from the 2020 Presidential Summit and Sentencing Symposium, co-hosted with the Georgetown University Law Center American Criminal Law Review

This webinar is a rapid-fire overview of the compassionate release legal framework, the process, best practices, and the latest legal developments. Practitioners in the field and long-time experts discuss grounds for compassionate release including COVID-19 and other sentencing developments; the compassionate release exhaustion requirement; getting and analyzing clients’ medical records; how to strategize when filing motions outside of your home district; helping create a reentry plan; and dealing with detainers.

A key pillar of the First Step Act, a bipartisan federal criminal reform bill signed into law in December 2018, was the creation of a risk and needs assessment tool for federal prisoners.  In July 2019, the Department of Justice first published this tool, the Prisoner Assessment Tool Targeting Estimated Risk and Needs (“PATTERN”) and began using it to place prisoners in recidivism reduction programming and award certain benefits. This webinar discusses the origins of PATTERN as well as the many questions that remain about its design and implementation, including during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Because the full implications of First Step Act measures may not be immediately apparent, NACDL hosted a live webinar on January 29, 2019. Sentencing expert Amy Baron-Evans discusses the ins and outs of the new law, with emphasis on potentially overlooked aspects of the most significant provisions. Amy is the Sentencing Resource Counsel for the Federal Public and Community Defenders, and the go-to lawyer among federal defenders for difficult sentencing questions.

Long underused and unfairly applied by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, federal compassionate release is seeing a revival under the First Step Act. That law not only corrected many of the flaws in the way the BOP handled compassionate release requests, but allows prisoners direct access to the courts. The new law clarifies the broad range of circumstances related to age, illness, and family circumstances that might trigger eligibility for relief and further opens up exciting new opportunities to seek reconsideration of sentences that are no longer appropriate for a variety of other reasons.

The First Step Act revised the federal compassionate release statute, 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A).

The First Step Act was signed into law on Dec. 21, 2018. NACDL and its members have long pressed to fix the unjustly severe federal sentencing regime, advocating for much more sweeping changes than are included in the First Step Act. Although the law does not go nearly as far as NACDL would like, it will benefit many prisoners and has important implications for practitioners. In these members-only webinars, leading experts examine the intricacies of the First Step Act.

The First Step Act requires the Department of Justice to develop a risk and needs assessment tool to be used by Bureau of Prisons (“BOP”) to assess the recidivism risk of all federal prisoners. Inmates will be classified as minimum, low, medium or high risk, and will be placed in recidivism reduction programs based on identified needs.

The First Step Act (P.L. 115-391 756) was signed into law on December 21, 2018. The Act is a federal criminal justice reform bill that changes many harsh federal sentencing laws.  The Act also expands compassionate release for qualifying federal inmates and offers current federal inmates rehabilitative programming and the possibility for early release from prison.

The First Step Act makes important changes to several federal drug and gun statutes. The Act reduces mandatory minimum enhancements for some drug defendants and also changes the definition of these enhancements.  It also modifies the existing federal safety valve, broadening its application to more drug defendants; changes the “stacking” penalty under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c); and retroactively applies the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.

When the BOP Unlawfully Executes a Client’s Sentence Under the First Step Act

Federal defenders Stephen Sady and Elizabeth Daily offer pointers on enforcing the First Step Act time credits through administrative law and habeas corpus. They provide practitioners with practical ways to begin negotiating, then litigating when necessary, against the BOP’s failure to fully implement the First Step Act’s provisions.

The United States Sentencing Commission updated U.S.S.G. § 1B1.13, the policy statement that governs federal reduction-in-sentence motions filed pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A). The legal hook for a reduction-in-sentence motion is identifying one or more “extraordinary and compelling” reasons that warrant relief. The authors provide tips for litigating § 3582(c)(1)(A) motions – both the extraordinary and compelling prong and the § 3553(a) prong.