October 4, 2012 - United States Supreme Court Winning Argument Leads to Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Resentencing

October 4, 2012, Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals orders resentencing for Mr. Kent's client T. B. based on Mr. Kent's argument that the Fairness in Sentencing Act of 2010 (the law which reduced crack cocaine penalties), applied retroactively, at least to defendants who had not yet been sentenced at the time of the law's enactment, even if their offenses occurred prior to the new law.  It is expected that this appellate victory will result in T. B.'s sentence being cut in half, from ten to five years.  At the time Mr. Kent first raised this argument in the district court, every Circuit Court of appeals that had ruled on the question as well as the organization Families Against Minimum Mandatory Sentencing had taken the position that the new law would not apply to such defendants.  Ultimately the United States Supreme Court decided what became a split in the circuits, approving the legal argument that Mr. Kent had made two years earlier (Mr. Kent had nothing to do with the Supreme Court case, rather the arguments he made in T. B.'s case anticipated what came to be the winning argument at the Supreme Court).