Does “and” really mean “and”? Not always, the Supreme Court rules.

This is a very misleading article. A lot of other comments are already touching on the nuance of the argument here, but I just want to break it down the way I understand it.

(Before that, though, I just want to point out that this is a 6-3 decision, but it’s not the usual 6-3, since Kagan and Gorsuch flipped sides. I think that’s telling enough that this isn’t simply a party-lines interpretation.)

It’s not that SCOTUS argued that “and” means “or”, it’s that when you have a statement “a person is eligible if not (a), (b), and (c)”, there is ambiguity in the order of operations between “not” and “and”. The statement could either mean

(1) E = !(A and B and C)

or

(2) E = (!A) and (!B) and (!C)

Demorgan’s law says we can rewrite (1) and (2) as

(1) !E = A and B and C

(2) !E = A or B or C

The court went with interpretation (2), not because one is more “correct” than the other. It seems like (2) was chosen because of the two “statutory difficulties” listed in the syllabus of Pulsifer v. United States.

(1) Pulsifer's reading would render Subparagraph A superfluous because a defendant who has a three-point offense under Subpara-graph B and a two-point offense under Subparagraph C will always have more than four criminal-history points under Subparagraph A. That reading leaves Subparagraph A with no work to do: removing it from the statute would make the exact same people eligible (and inel-igible) for relief. That kind of superfluity, in and of itself, refutes Pul-sifer's reading. When a statutory construction "render[s] an entire subparagraph meaningless," this Court has noted, the canon against surplusage applies with special force. National Assn. of Mfrs. v. Department of Defense, 583 U.S. 109, 128. That is particularly true when, as here, the subparagraph is so evidently designed to serve a concrete function. Pp. 15-20.

(2) Pulsifer's reading would also create a second problem related to Paragraph (f)(1)'s gatekeeping function. The Guidelines presume that defendants with worse criminal records exhibiting recidivism, lengthy sentences, and violence deserve greater punishment. Under the Government's reading, Paragraph (f)(1) sorts defendants accordingly. When the defendant has committed multiple non-minor of-fenses, he cannot get relief (Subparagraph A). And so too when he has committed even a single serious offense punished with a lengthy prison sentence (Subparagraph B) or one involving violence (Subpara-graph C). Pulsifer's reading, by contrast, would allow safety-valve relief to defendants with more serious records while barring relief to defendants with less serious ones. A defendant with a three-point offense and a two-point violent offense would be denied relief. But a defendant with multiple three-point violent offenses could get relief simply because he happens not to have a two-point violent offense.

Contrary to Pulsifer's view, that anomalous result cannot be ignored on the ground that a sentencing judge retains discretion to impose a lengthy sentence. If Congress thought it could always rely on sentencing discretion, it would not have created a criminal-history requirement in the first instance. Instead, it specified a requirement that allows such discretion to operate only if a defendant's record does not reach a certain level of seriousness. Pulsifer's construction of Paragraph (f)(1) makes a hash of that gatekeeping function. Pp. 20-23.

In summary, this is a ruling that could have gone either way, and the side the court chose isn’t totally ridiculous.

It is the side of giving fewer people just the eligibility for relief, which is pretty shitty. But if the court was stooping to an argument as bad as the headline made it out to be, IMO we’d have MUCH bigger problems.