On March 15, the United States Supreme Court severely limited the reach and impact of the 2018 First Step Act, which has been widely praised as the most significant criminal justice reform in decades. It did so in a decision so mind bogglingly technical and complex that it gives life to Charles Dickens’s portrait of law as a fog of obscurity in his mid-19th century novel “Bleak House.”

The court’s decision in Pulsifer v. United States concerned a very consequential question: Who may be eligible to have their prison sentences reduced in length under the First Step Act. Pulsifer, who according to the New York Times “had been accused of twice selling methamphetamine to a confidential informant in southwest Iowa, pled guilty to a single count of distributing at least 50 grams of methamphetamine. He had a prior drug conviction from 2013 in the state for possessing a controlled substance with intent to distribute.”

His case created an unusual alignment of justices, with Justice Elena Kagan joining five of her conservative colleagues in the majority and Justice Neil Gorsuch writing a dissent joined by liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown-Jackson.

Kagan’s opinion puts a troubling stumbling block in the way of achieving the First Step Act’s goal of reducing draconian sentences for non-violent drug offenses — and ends the hope of thousands of prisoners for early release. It pivoted on the question of whether a word in one section of the First Step Act really means what it says or if it means something else.

The word in question is “and.”

That applicable section of the act, the so-called “safety-valve” provision, offers, as Kagan explained, “some defendants convicted of drug offenses an escape from otherwise applicable mandatory minimums.” It allows judges to exercise discretion in determining appropriate sentences.

The New York Times report on the Pulsifer case says that “The law lists three types of criminal history among its criteria for eligibility. The........

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