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Many eyes glossed over when teachers explained the difference between the past and present perfect tenses. But not Justice Jackson's - she applied her grammatical expertise to find that the more lenient standards available under the 2018 First Step Act should apply to defendants who were resentenced after its enactment. In Hewitt v. United States, the petitioners were convicted of bank robbery in 2009 and received sentences including consecutive enhancements of 5 and then 25 years for each count of conviction because they used a firearm. The First Step Act would reduce those sentences as it changed the law, so enhancements were limited to 5 years for each count of conviction and applied "if a sentence for the offense has not been imposed as of such date of enactment."The petitionersir sentences were vacated twice, the second time after the effective date of the First Step Act. So, the case presented the question of what happens when the “offender had been sentenced as of the Act’s enactment, but that sentence was subsequently vacated, such that the offender must face a post-Act resentencing?” The trial court applied the pre-2018 sentencing scheme, resulting in sentences of 130 years or more, 105 of which derived from the gun enhancements. Justice Jackson, writing for a five-member majority found that the Act's use of the present perfect tense meant a sentence “has been imposed for purposes of that provision if, and only if, the sentence is extant—i.e., has not been vacated.” Because the present-perfect describes situations “involv[ing] a specific change of state” that produces a “continuing result,” and a sentence that was vacated does not have a continuing result, a vacated sentence “has not been imposed” for the purposes of the First Step Act's retroactivity analysis. She concluded that other language in the Act and the circumstances surrounding its enactment further support that reading. <input type='hidden' id='passle-remote-hosting-tracking-shortcode' value='102kq13'/><blockquote class="wp-block-quote passle-quote ">Congress employed the present-perfect tense, requiring evaluation of whether “a sentence . . . has . . . been imposed” upon the defendant, rather than the past-perfect tense that would exclude anyone
upon whom a sentence “had” been imposed. The present-perfect tense 
can refer to “an act, state, or condition that is now completed” or “a 
past action that comes up to and touches the present” and thus conveys
that the event in question continues to be true or valid.</blockquote><div class="passle-featured-image passle-featured-image-position-bottom"><img src="https://images.passle.net/fit-in/400x400/filters:crop(0,44,2121,1187)/Passle/5f6edd8e8cb62a0bec3e5fd2/SearchServiceImages/2025-06-26-21-50-56-029-685dc0c02f10a0d8a0f81f31.jpg" alt="Featured Image" /></div>

Why Tenses Matter in Sentencing Reform

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