105-Year Prison Term Denied Second Look at Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court just denied a six-time bank robber a second chance of review of his 105-year sentence.

The high court’s 1993 decision in Thomas Lee Deal’s case, an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, was undone by the First Step Act, the bipartisan criminal justice reform law signed by President Donald Trump in December.

Still, the First Step Act doesn’t apply retroactively to Deal’s claim that his triple-digit sentence consisted of multiple gun convictions inappropriately stacked on top of one another. Nonetheless, Deal pointed to that new law in the hopes that the high court would upend his ...