Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/20-1650_3dq3.pdf
Page Number: 18

Cite as:  597 U. S. ____ (2022) 

13 

Opinion of the Court 

103 (2007).5 

Nor did Congress hide any limitations on district courts’ 
discretion outside of §404(c).  Section 404(b) does not erect 
any  additional  such  limitations.    The  term  “as  if ”  simply 
enacts the First Step Act’s central goal: to make retroactive 
the changes in the Fair Sentencing Act.  That language is
necessary to overcome 1 U. S. C. §109, which creates a pre-
sumption  that  Congress  does  not  repeal  federal  criminal
penalties unless it says so “expressly.”  To defeat the pre-
sumption  established  by  this  statute,  Congress  needed  to 
make  clear  that  the  Fair  Sentencing  Act  applied  retroac-
tively.  Notably, the “as if ” clause requires a district court 
to apply the Fair Sentencing Act as if it applied at the time 
of the commission of the offense, not at the time of the orig-
inal sentencing.  Had Congress intended to constrain dis-
trict courts to consider only the record as it existed at the
time of the original sentencing, Congress would have writ-
ten  the  “as  if ”  clause  to  refer  to  that  sentencing,  not  the 
commission  of  the  offense.    Thus,  the  language  Congress 
enacted in  the First  Step Act specifically requires district
courts to apply the legal changes in the Fair Sentencing Act 
when calculating the Guidelines if they chose to modify a 

—————— 

5 The dissent demands that Congress expressly specify the scope of in-
formation that a district court can consider in a sentencing modification
proceeding.  See post, at 3.  This gets it backward.  The consistent historic 
norm is that a district court can consider any information in crafting a 
new or modified sentence, subject to congressional or constitutional lim-
See  supra,  at  6–11.    Moreover,  the  dissent’s  reliance  on 
its. 
§3582(c)(1)(B),  post,  at  3,  misses  the  point.    Section  3582(c)(1)(B)  is 
simply a gateway provision that refers to whichever statute “expressly 
permit[s]” the sentencing modification.  Ibid.  It does not impose any sub-
stantive or procedural limits on a district court’s discretion; for those de-
tails, it refers to the statute authorizing the sentence modification.  See 
United States v. Triestman, 178 F. 3d 624, 629 (CA2 1999) (“ ‘[S]ubsection 
(c)(1)(B) simply notes the authority to modify a sentence if modification 
is permitted by statute’ ” (quoting S. Rep. No. 98–225 (1984)).