Opinion ID: 812932
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Reasonable Relation

Text: To be “reasonably related” to the enumerated sentencing factors, § 3583(d)(1), a condition “does not need to be reasonably related to all of the factors in § 3553.” United States v. Hahn, 551 F.3d 977, 983–84 (10th Cir. 2008). A reasonable relationship to just one factor will suffice. See id. Thus, we have upheld special conditions forbidding defendants from associating with specified groups of people even when the conditions were unrelated to the offense of conviction. In Hahn, for example, the defendant was convicted of misapplying the funds of his employer, a financial institution. See 551 F.3d at 979. But based on his earlier state conviction for a sex offense involving a child, the district court imposed special conditions of supervised release proscribing his association with children and his holding of a job with access to children without the probation officer’s consent. See id. at 982 & n.9. Although the conditions did not relate to the nature and circumstances of the defendant’s offense, they did relate to his history and characteristics as well as the need to protect the public from future crimes. See id. at 984. Similarly, in United States v. Mike, 632 F.3d 686, 689–90, 696–97 (10th Cir. 2011), we upheld a special condition forbidding the -12- defendant from having contact with children based on his past commission of a sex offense, even though the offense of conviction was a nonsexual assault on an adult. In light of these precedents, the district court committed no “clear or obvious” error under § 3583(d)(1) when it forbade Defendant from associating with members of the Iron Horsemen or allied gangs while on supervised release. Puckett, 556 U.S. at 135. Defendant has not contested the court’s finding that the Iron Horsemen was a criminal gang. And the court could properly find that his drug transactions arose out of his activities as a nomad for the Iron Horsemen. No clear precedent would prohibit the district court from concluding that the restriction on Defendant’s association was reasonably related to Defendant’s history and characteristics, deterring future criminal conduct, and protecting the public from further crimes. See 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(1), (a)(2)(B), (a)(2)(C). 2. No Greater Deprivation of Liberty than Reasonably Necessary Similarly, no clear precedent from either this court or the Supreme Court compels the conclusion that the special condition “involves . . . greater deprivation of liberty than is reasonably necessary” to advance the statutorily enumerated interests. Id. § 3583(d)(2). Defendant points out that § 3563(b)(6) refers only to forbidding a defendant “from associating unnecessarily with specified persons.” Id. § 3563(b)(6) (emphasis added). He contends that this -13- language does not permit a categorical prohibition on his associating with members of the Iron Horsemen or allied gangs. This argument overlooks, however, the likelihood that a prohibition solely on membership in the Iron Horsemen and its allied gangs could have been readily evaded in the absence of an accompanying prohibition on association with gang members. Indeed, other circuits have upheld conditions that categorically forbade association with members of entire groups. For example, the Seventh and Ninth Circuits approved conditions that prohibited association with members of any neo-Nazi or whitesupremacist organization. See United States v. Ross, 476 F.3d 719, 721 (9th Cir. 2007); United States v. Showalter, 933 F.2d 573, 574 (7th Cir. 1991). This precedent establishes that the prohibition on association in this case was not “clearly” improper. Defendant does cite one case, United States v. Johnson, 626 F.3d 1085, 1091 (9th Cir. 2010), in which a special condition relating to association with gang members was struck down as overly restrictive (although under the First Amendment, not § 3583(d)). The special condition in Johnson, however, was critically different from the one imposed on Defendant in that it proscribed the defendant from associating not only with the members of a designated gang but also with persons associated with that gang. See id. at 1090. The Johnson court, after noting several cases in which it had approved special conditions that restricted association with gang members, explained that “[t]here is a -14- considerable difference . . . between forbidding a defendant from associating with gang members and precluding him from associating with persons who associate with gang members.” Id. at 1091. It therefore vacated the condition for inflicting a greater deprivation of liberty than necessary for the goals of supervised release. See id. We infer that a restriction on associating with gang members alone would have passed muster. We recognize, and emphasize, that courts should take care to observe § 3583(d)(2)’s injunction against conditions that restrict liberty more than the § 3553(a) factors demand. It is also true, however, that courts are faced with pragmatic limits on the capacity of the probation office to conduct individual background checks on a defendant’s associates. Of course, nothing we say here precludes the district court from modifying its order upon a proper showing. We conclude that even if the district court’s decision to impose the gang condition was contrary to § 3583(d)(2), the error was not plain.