The Upside-Down Treatment of Religious Exceptions Cases in the Supreme Court

MICHAEL C. DORF

Cornell law professor Michael C. Dorf comments on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week to reject an emergency application from the State of Alabama to lift a stay on the execution of Willie B. Smith III. Professor Dorf observes the Court’s unusual alignment of votes in the decision and argues that, particularly as reflected by the recent COVID-19 decisions, the liberal and conservative Justices have essentially swapped places from the seminal 1990 case Employment Division v. Smith, which established that the First Amendment does not guarantee a right to exceptions from neutral laws of general applicability.

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United States v. Salazar

Docket: 19-3217

Opinion Date: February 16, 2021

Judge: Moritz

Areas of Law: Constitutional Law, Criminal Law

In 2010, defendant Shaun Salazar pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm in violation of 18 U.S.C. section 922(g)(1). Section 922(g)(1), by way of 18 U.S.C. 924(a)(2), carried a statutory maximum of 120 months in prison. In 2011, district court sentenced Salazar to 115 months in prison and three years of supervised release. Salazar completed his prison term and began serving his term of supervised release in May 2019. Soon after, a probation officer filed a petition to revoke Salazar’s supervised release, alleging that Salazar violated two conditions of his supervised release by committing battery against his brother and associating with a felon, his girlfriend. Salazar appealed the district court’s order revoking his term of supervised release and sentencing him to ten months’ imprisonment, arguing his ten-month prison sentence was illegal because, when combined with his prior 115-month prison term, it exceeded the 120-month statutory maximum for his crime of conviction. The Tenth Circuit previously rejected this argument in United States v. Robinson, holding “that [18 U.S.C. section] 3583 authorizes the revocation of supervised release even where the resulting incarceration, when combined with the period of time the defendant has already served for his [or her] substantive offense, will exceed the maximum incarceration permissible under the substantive statute.” Because it remained bound by Robinson, the Court affirmed.