Opinion ID: 2790599
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Equitable Consideration of Excess Prison Time

Text: Defendant’s first argument, that the district court erred by failing to give equitable consideration to any excess time he spent in prison, is premised on United States v. Johnson, 529 U.S. 53 (2000). There, the Supreme Court considered whether a defendant’s excess imprisonment should be credited to his supervised release term, thereby reducing its length. Id. at 54. Reciting the language of 18 U.S.C. § 3624(e), the Court noted that, with limited, inapplicable exceptions, a term of supervised release does not “commence until an individual is 5 While unpublished, and therefore non-precedential, decisions of this Court have applied this standard to rulings on motions to modify terms of supervised release, we have found no published (precedential) cases on this issue. But we can discern no good reason why an abuse of discretion standard would not be applicable here. 8 Case: 14-12594 Date Filed: 04/01/2015 Page: 9 of 19 ‘released from imprisonment.’” Id. at 57–59. The Court further emphasized that imprisonment and supervised release serve separate and distinct ends. Id. at 59– 60. Consequently, the Court held that a term of supervised release is not required to be shortened by excess time an individual spends in prison. Johnson, 529 U.S. at 54, 58, 60. That said, though, the Supreme Court acknowledged that “equitable considerations of great weight exist when an individual is incarcerated beyond the proper expiration of his prison term.” Id. at 60. Thus, while incarceration in excess of the appropriate sentence does not require a court to shorten a term of supervised release, a district court can certainly take that fact into account when deciding whether to terminate early the defendant’s supervised release. Id. Here, Defendant asserts that he was in prison five-and-a-half years longer than he should have been. This is so because, in Defendant’s view, Amendment 750 directed that his sentence should have been between 140 and 175 months, rather than the 262-month sentence he ultimately received. Even though Defendant actually served only 228 months, he notes that this period of time also exceeds the amended Guidelines’ range that he says should have applied. Accordingly, Defendant argues that the district court should have taken this excess imprisonment into account when ruling on his motion for early termination of supervised release, and that the court erred by not doing so. 9 Case: 14-12594 Date Filed: 04/01/2015 Page: 10 of 19 Contrary to Defendant’s assertion, however, the district court did not err by refusing to give dispositive effect to Defendant’s allegedly excessive incarceration. First, and importantly, Defendant did not spend any excess time in prison, albeit he persists in claiming that he did. See infra at 12–13. Contrary to his contention, application of Amendment 750 to his case in 2011 did not mean that Defendant’s sentencing range was to be between 140 and 175 months. 6 The November 2011 resentencing did lower the adjusted offense level for Defendant’s Count 1 drug conspiracy conviction to 30. However, this adjustment meant that the offense level for Defendant’s Hobbs Act conspiracy conviction, which was 31, now became the highest offense level for a count of conviction. See discussion supra at 6. Consequently, when the district court calculated Defendant’s new Guidelines’ range, it did so based upon this latter offense level of 31. See U.S.S.G. § 3D1.4. Given Defendant’s criminal history category of VI, the resulting Guidelines’ range for Defendant’s Hobbs Act conspiracy conviction was 262 to 327 months. U.S.S.G. § 5A. The district court then sentenced Defendant to the low-end of this Guidelines’ range, 262 months, of which he served 228 months. In short, Defendant served no excess time in prison. 6 Leaving aside the fact that, with the second reduction, the Hobbs Act conspiracy conviction became the determiner of the base offense level, see infra, Defendant’s calculation of a Guidelines’ range dictated by his drug conspiracy conviction is still incorrect. With a reduced offense level of 28, enhanced by two levels to level 30, and adding three more levels for Defendant’s additional counts of conviction, Defendant’s total offense level would have been a 33. With Defendant’s criminal history, his resulting range would have been 235–293 months, not 140–175 months. 10 Case: 14-12594 Date Filed: 04/01/2015 Page: 11 of 19 Second, while Johnson permits a district court to consider excess imprisonment when ruling on a motion to terminate early an individual’s supervised release, it does not require the court to end supervision early, based just on that fact. Johnson, 529 U.S. at 60 (“The statutory structure provides a means to address [equitable considerations] . . . the court may terminate an individual’s supervised release obligations . . . ‘if it is satisfied that such action is warranted by the conduct of the defendant released and the interest of justice.’”) (internal citation omitted) (emphasis added); Reynolds v. Thomas, 603 F.3d 1144, 1148 (9th Cir. 2010) (“A court could consider this alleged period of over-incarceration under 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e) as a factor weighing in favor of reducing the term of supervised release.”) (emphasis added), abrogated on other grounds by Setser v. United States, 566 U.S. __, 132 S. Ct. 1463 (2012). Indeed, consistent with the structure of 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e), a district court’s consideration of excess prison time is discretionary. See Rhodes v. Judiscak, 676 F.3d 931, 933–35 (10th Cir. 2012) and Johnson v. Pettiford, 442 F.3d 917, 918 (5th Cir. 2006) (“[A] district court may exercise its discretion to modify an individual’s term of supervised release, taking into account that an individual has been ‘incarcerated beyond the proper expiration of his prison term.’”). What’s more, there is no indication here that when ruling on his motion for early termination of supervised release, the district court failed to take into 11 Case: 14-12594 Date Filed: 04/01/2015 Page: 12 of 19 consideration Defendant’s claim that he had spent excess time in prison. Defendant raised that claim in both his initial motion to terminate supervision and in his motion for reconsideration, and the court’s order granting in part the latter motion stated that it “considered all the relevant factors and determined that early termination was inappropriate in this case.” Notably, the district court had previously rejected, on at least two other occasions, Defendant’s very same argument that Amendment 750 dictated that his sentence must fall within the Guidelines’ range of 140 to 175 months. And finally, although excess imprisonment is an “equitable consideration[] of great weight” under Johnson, it does not automatically override other factors the district court must consider. Incarceration and supervised release serve different purposes: imprisonment is punitive, whereas supervised release aims to “assist convicted felons in their transitions to community life.” Johnson, 529 U.S. at 55, 59. On this latter point, Congress acknowledged that a successful transition to community life depends upon a number of factors, and it left it to the district court to use its discretion in balancing those factors. 18 U.S.C. §§ 3553(a), 3583(e)(1); see Zinn, 321 F.3d at 1089 (“[E]ach [§ 3553(a) factor] is an independent consideration to be weighed.”) and United States v. Pregent, 190 F.3d 279, 282–83 (4th Cir. 1999) (discussing, before issuance of Johnson, the factors a court considers when contemplating early termination of supervised release). To require 12 Case: 14-12594 Date Filed: 04/01/2015 Page: 13 of 19 early termination of release because of excess time served in prison would undermine this statutory framework. Thus, the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying Defendant’s motion for early termination based on the latter’s allegation that he had served more prison time than the Guidelines’ range called for.