The U.S. Supreme Court ruled for a drug trafficker in his bid for a lesser sentence. In a unanimous ruling Friday, the justices said a ban on concurrent sentences in one section of the federal criminal code for drug-related gun crimes doesn’t govern a sentence for a conviction under another section of the law, reports Bloomberg Law. Efrain Lora was found guilty in 2016 of aiding and abetting the use of a firearm that killed a rival drug dealer while trafficking drugs in New York City and conspiring to distribute cocaine.
Lora was sentenced to five years in prison for the firearm offense, which the trial court said had to run consecutively by statute with the 25-year sentence for the conspiracy charge. Lora argued that the trial court wrongly applied the ban on concurrent sentences under one section of the law to his conviction under the other section. The federal government contended that the second section was to be invoked if it involved a murder. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the opinion.