The Supreme Court on Monday morning added one new case to its argument docket for the 2026-27 term, granting another case involving the First Step Act, a 2018 criminal justice law intended to improve federal prison conditions and reduce long federal prison sentences. In an unsigned opinion, the justices also sent the case of a Florida death-row inmate back to the lower courts for another look. The announcements came as part of a list of orders from the justices’ May 28 conference.
The court granted a petition for review filed by William Maxwell, who was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for his role in a plan to take over a Texas mortgage company and loot it of its assets. In 2022, Maxwell filed an application for federal habeas relief under a provision that allows inmates to challenge the imposition of their sentences or conditions of confinement, seeking a transfer to a halfway house or home confinement.
The district court dismissed his application, holding that Maxwell had not fully pursued the administrative remedies available to him under the First Step Act. Maxwell then went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which held that he should have brought a federal civil rights lawsuit instead.
Maxwell – initially representing himself, but now represented by Masha Hansford, a former assistant to the U.S. solicitor general now in private practice – then asked the Supreme Court to take his case, which it agreed to do on Monday. The justices indicated that they will decide whether an inmate’s claim regarding the application of time credits, seeking accelerated transfer to a halfway house or home confinement under the First Step Act, can be brought as a petition for habeas relief under the federal law at issue in Maxwell’s case.
Additionally on Monday, the Supreme Court sent the case of Gary Whitton, who was sentenced to death in Florida for the murder and robbery of James Maulden, back to the lower courts for them to reconsider it. The prosecutors’ evidence against Whitton at his trial included testimony from Jake Ozio, a high school student who had been arrested while on spring break in Florida and who served as a jailhouse informant. Ozio testified at Whitton’s trial that he had no criminal history before his Florida arrest – testimony that turned out to be false.
Whitton sought federal post-conviction relief, arguing that prosecutors had known Ozio’s testimony was false and that it likely affected the jury’s verdict. The lower courts rejected that argument. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit noted that the Florida Supreme Court had deemed the evidence against Whitton “overwhelming.”
In addressing whether the Florida Supreme Court’s decision was reasonable – the standard for federal post-conviction relief – the court of appeals, the Supreme Court’s unsigned opinion stressed on Monday, considered DNA evidence that was not provided to the jury. Because that evidence “was not presented to the jury (indeed, did not exist at the time of the trial), that evidence could not have influenced the jury’s verdict. It therefore sheds no light on whether (or to what extent) Ozio’s testimony influenced that verdict.”
The court made clear that it was not deciding whether the Florida Supreme Court’s decision, standing alone, was in fact reasonable. Instead, the justices sent the case back to the 11th Circuit for it to take another look.
Justice Clarence Thomas dissented. He argued that the additional evidence “was notable but certainly not dispositive” to the lower court’s ruling. More broadly, he contended, the court should not “intervene based on ‘technicalit[ies]’ that do not ‘really affect[t]’ the outcome of a case.” But in any event, Thomas suggested, the court’s ruling ultimately “will have no real-world effect” because the court of appeals can deny relief when the case returns to it.
And in a part of his dissent that Justice Samuel Alito, who signed on to the rest of the opinion, did not join, Thomas compared the court’s decision to step in here with its failure to do so in other cases that he regarded as more deserving. He cited, for example, the justices’ refusal “to vindicate the rights of families to pursue education for their children on color-blind terms,” the court’s unwillingness to revisit a longstanding bar on lawsuits by military personnel for injuries suffered as part of their military service, and its rejection of a challenge to Indiana University’s “bias-response team,” “which fields anonymous complaints about student speech and considers whether to refer the accused to campus offices or the police.”
The court also turned down a request from Florida to file an original action – that is, a new case in which the Supreme Court would serve as a court of first review – against California, challenging the constitutionality of a California corporate tax rule. Last week Thomas, joined by Alito, dissented from the court’s rejection of Florida’s request to file an original action against California and Washington, alleging that those states have not complied with federal safety regulations governing commercial driver’s licenses and, specifically, have allowed undocumented immigrants “without proper training or the ability to read road signs” to obtain such licenses. On Monday, Thomas and Alito indicated that they dissented from the court’s disposition of Florida’s latest request as well.
Finally, the court asked the federal government for its views in a securities law case brought by investors who had purchased stock in Robinhood Markets, a financial-services company, through its initial public offering in 2021. At issue in the case is whether and when a company violates its obligations under federal securities laws by failing to disclose interim financial data. There is no deadline for the U.S. solicitor general to file his brief providing the government’s views.
