United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit

Chicago, Illinois 60604

Submitted March 10, 2022*

Decided March 10, 2022 

By the Court:

No. 21-2202 

WILLIAM A. WHITE,

Petitioner-Appellant, 

v. 

DANIEL SPROUL, 

Respondent-Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District 

Court for the Southern District of 

Illinois. 

No. 19-CV-1291-SPM

Stephen P. McGlynn, 

Judge. 

O R D E R

Federal prisoners may now receive up to 54 days of good-conduct credit for each 

year of their prison term. 18 U.S.C. § 3624(b). William White—an inmate currently in 

prison after, among other things, violating conditions of supervised release—petitions 

under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 to receive credit for his good conduct during an alreadycompleted prison sentence. Like the district court, we conclude that he may receive 

sentencing credit only for his conduct during his current prison term and thus affirm. 

This case involves two periods of incarceration. The first began in October 2008, 

when White was charged in the Northern District of Illinois for soliciting violence 

* We have agreed to decide the case without oral argument because the briefs and 

record adequately present the facts and legal arguments, and oral argument would not 

significantly aid the court. FED. R. APP. P. 34(a)(2)(C).

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION

To be cited only in accordance with FED. R. APP. P. 32.1
No. 21-2202 Page 2 

against a juror. See 18 U.S.C. § 373. Before he stood trial in Chicago, he was convicted in 

a separate federal case in Virginia of other crimes. For those crimes, he was sentenced to 

33 months in prison, a term that began in April 2010, which was to be followed by 

nearly three years of supervised release. After a jury convicted him in the Chicago case, 

the district court granted his motion for a judgment of acquittal in April 2011. By then, 

he had served the 33-month prison term (he was credited with 540 days of pretrial time 

served and 93 days of good-conduct time). The next day he began his term of 

supervised release.

White’s second period of incarceration began in June 2012, when he was arrested 

for violating the conditions of his supervised release in the Virginia case. He was 

sentenced to 10 months of imprisonment for that violation. While he was serving that 

term, this court reversed the judgment of acquittal in his Chicago case, see United States 

v. White, 698 F.3d 1005, 1020 (7th Cir. 2012), and in February 2013, the district court 

sentenced him to 42 months in prison, to run concurrently with the remainder of his 

revocation sentence (about 4 months). White also received two lengthy sentences in 

2014 for other federal crimes, to run consecutively to his other sentences. See 18 U.S.C.

§ 875(b), (c). Altogether, his current prison term lasts until 2037. The term reflects 132 

days of prior custody credit that he earned awaiting trial or sentencing in his Chicago 

case.

White has petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, see 28 U.S.C. § 2241, seeking 

good-conduct credit based on a change to 18 U.S.C. § 3624(b). The statute now grants up 

to 54 days of good-conduct credit to each qualifying prisoner for each year of a prison 

term “imposed by the court.” 18 U.S.C. § 3624(b). (The statute previously based credits 

on prison time “served.”) The government agrees with White that the change to § 3624 

qualifies him for 200 more days of good-conduct credit for his current incarceration (the 

combined sentences for the revocation in the Virginia case, the Chicago conviction, and 

the 2014 convictions). But White also seeks an additional 27 days of credit by including

in his calculation the Virginia case’s original 33-month prison term—which ended in 

April 2011. He reasons that, because his current incarceration started when he violated

conditions of his release in the Virginia case, the court should include in its calculation

the underlying prison term from that case. 

The district court granted White’s petition in part but denied the part seeking the 

extra 27 days of credit based on the expired 33-month term. The court explained that 

White can receive good-conduct credit only for the prison term he is currently serving.
No. 21-2202 Page 3 

On appeal, White maintains that he is entitled to 27 more days of good-conduct 

time based on the 33-month prison term. We review the district court’s decision de 

novo, Shepherd v. Krueger, 911 F.3d 861, 864 (7th Cir. 2018), and the text of § 3624(b) 

refutes White’s argument. It states that a prisoner who “is serving” a term of 

imprisonment for more than one year may receive 54 days of credit for each year of “the 

prisoner’s sentence imposed by the court.” White “is serving” a combined prison 

“sentence” for his revocation of supervised release and the convictions in the Chicago 

case and the 2014 cases. But it is not accurate to say that he also “is serving” the 33-

month prison sentence for the Virginia case. He completed that prison term in April 

2011 and immediately began supervised release. “[P]rison and supervised release are 

not interchangeable.” United States v. Downs, 784 F.3d 1180, 1182 (7th Cir. 2015). Thus, 

because that 33-month prison sentence ended before he began the current prison 

sentence that he “is serving,” White cannot extract more credit from that expired prison 

term under § 3624(b). 

White responds with two unavailing arguments. First, he contends that he “is 

serving” the 33-month prison term from the Virginia case because the Bureau of Prison 

has credited his current prison term with 540 days that he served in pretrial custody in 

the Virginia case. But he misstates the record. The Bureau credited his previous prison 

term—the 33-month sentence—with 540 days of pretrial custody time, which he

accumulated before he was released in April 2011. By contrast, the Bureau has credited 

his current prison term with 132 days of prior custody credit—time that he accumulated 

only after his release from prison in the Virginia case in April 2011.

Second, by assuming that “in custody” under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 and “serving” a 

prison term under 18 U.S.C. § 3624(b) mean the same thing, White contends that the 

warden is estopped from arguing that he is not still “in custody” on his 33-month term. 

He points to two of his other post-conviction cases in which, in his view, courts ruled 

that he is still “in custody” on his 33-month term. See White v. True, 2020 WL 489429, at 

*2 (S.D. Ill. Jan. 30, 2020); White v. United States, 2015 WL 1257487, at *3 (W.D. Va.

Mar. 18, 2015). The warden leaves this contention alone, but contrary to White’s 

suggestion, the silence does not mean that White wins, for even when an appellee does 

not file a brief, the appellant need not prevail. See Saccameno v. U.S. Bank Nat’l Ass’n, 943 

F.3d 1071, 1082 (7th Cir. 2019); Krieger v. United States, 842 F.3d 490, 499 (7th Cir. 2016). 

Neither collateral nor judicial estoppel applies here because White’s assumption 

is wrong. Collateral estoppel requires that the issue in this case be the same as the one 

decided in the earlier cases. See Taylor v. Sturgell, 553 U.S. 880, 891–92 (2008). True, the 
No. 21-2202 Page 4 

earlier cases decided that White was “in custody” under § 2241. But a petitioner can be 

“in custody” even when not serving a prison term, see United States v. Trotter, 270 F.3d 

1150, 1152 (7th Cir. 2001), and the prior rulings that White was “in custody” appear to 

be based on his sentence for violating his conditions of supervised release, not on his 

completed, 33-month prison term. Judicial estoppel does not apply either, because the 

warden’s current position does not contradict an earlier one on which he prevailed.

See Reed Elsevier, Inc. v. Muchnick, 559 U.S. 154, 170 (2010). 

AFFIRMED