Opinion ID: 6340581
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Supervised Release is Different

Text: Supervised release was not intended to be punitive. Created in 1984 by the Sentencing Reform Act (“SRA”), supervised release is a “unique method of postconfinement supervision,” Gozlon-Peretz v. United States, 498 U.S. 395, 407 (1991), explicitly designed to afford a defendant rehabilitation. See S. Rep. No. 98-225, at 124 (1983) (explaining that the primary purpose of supervised release is “to ease the defendant’s transition into the community after the service of a long prison term for a particularly serious offense, or to provide rehabilitation to a defendant who has spent a fairly short period in prison for punishment . . . but still needs supervision and training programs after release”). That rehabilitative purpose is reflected in the text of the SRA; “a court may not take account of retribution . . . when imposing a term of supervised release.” Tapia v. United States, 564 U.S. 319, 326 (2011); 18 U.S.C. § 3583(c); see also United States v. Johnson, 529 U.S. 53, 59 (2000) 11 (“Supervised release fulfills rehabilitative ends, distinct from those served by incarceration.”). 2 The architects of the SRA meant to make a clean break with past federal sentencing practice. Johnson v. United States, 529 U.S. 694, 724-25 (2000) (Scalia, J., dissenting); see also Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361, 366 (1989) (noting that the SRA ushered in “sweeping reforms”); Haymond, 139 S. Ct. at 2382 (plurality opinion) (describing the SRA as part of an effort to “overhaul[] federal sentencing procedures”). By design, supervised release is structurally different from parole, which the SRA prospectively abolished, and from probation, which it reformed. First, consider parole. “The essence of parole is release from prison, before the completion of a sentence, on the condition that the prisoner abide by certain rules during the balance of the sentence.” Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U.S. 471, 477 (1972). Under the now-abolished federal parole system, a defendant “was generally eligible for parole after serving only one-third of his sentence” and could be released to serve the remainder of that prison sentence in the community, so long as he complied with certain restrictions. Haymond, 139 S. Ct. at 2389 (Alito, J., 2 On the premise that supervised release fulfills rehabilitative ends, “courts have held that sentencing defendants to lifetime terms of supervised release does not violate the Eighth Amendment.” Mica Moore, Escaping from Release: Is Supervised Release Custodial under 18 U.S.C. § 751(a)?, 83 U. Chi. L. Rev. 2257, 2267 (2016). 12 dissenting). If he violated any of those restrictions, he could be returned to prison to serve “the remaining balance of the term of imprisonment.” Id. at 2377 (plurality opinion); see also Johnson, 529 U.S. at 725 (“[W]hen parole was revoked (unlike when supervised release is revoked), there was no need to impose a new term of imprisonment; the term currently being served (on parole) was still in place.”) (cleaned up). Parole, in other words, “replace[d] a portion of the defendant’s prison term.” Id. at 2382 (plurality opinion). Probation is similar. Instead of early release from prison, however, probation allows a defendant to “avoid prison altogether” and serve his entire sentence in the community, again subject to certain restrictions. Haymond, 139 S. Ct. at 2381 (plurality opinion); see also S. Rep. No. 98-225, at 59 (1983) (describing probation as a “form of sentence with conditions” and an “alternative to a term of imprisonment”). Like parole, probation is a discretionary reprieve from prison, once considered “an act of grace to one convicted of a crime.” Escoe v. Zerbst, 295 U.S. 490, 492 (1935). Leniency is granted in exchange for a defendant’s promise to comply with certain conditions; failure to do so at least arguably breaches the “trust” placed in the defendant by the sentencing judge. United States v. Sindima, 488 F.3d 81, 86 (2d Cir. 2007); see also Jacob Schuman, Revocation and Retribution, 96 13 Wash. L. Rev. 881, 907 (2021) (“By sentencing a defendant to probation, the [court] trusts in the promise that they will return to society and function as a responsible, self-reliant person. The scope of this trust is expressed in the conditions of probation, which the defendant must obey in exchange for being spared a term of imprisonment.”) (cleaned up). To sanction that breach of trust, the court may (and, sometimes, must) revoke probation and resentence the defendant “to any term that could have been imposed” on the original conviction. United States v. Verkhoglyad, 516 F.3d 122, 128 (2d Cir. 2008); 18 U.S.C. § 3565. Accordingly, the term of incarceration that can be imposed upon revocation is limited by “the maximum statutory penalty” applicable to the underlying offense. United States v. Goffi, 446 F.3d 319, 323 (2d Cir. 2006). Probation and parole allow a defendant to serve all or part of a sentence of imprisonment in the community in exchange for compliance with certain conditions, and revocation of either therefore “deprives an individual, not of the absolute liberty to which every citizen is entitled, but only of the conditional liberty properly dependent on observance of [those] . . . restrictions.” Morrissey, 408 U.S. at 480; Gagnon v. Scarpelli, 411 U.S. 778, 781 (1973). Commensurate with the pared-down liberty interest at stake, a probationer or parolee is entitled only 14 to limited procedural protections before a court revokes the grant of leniency and reimposes the original term of imprisonment (parole) or imposes the term of imprisonment originally available (probation). Id.; see also Gagnon, 411 U.S. at 78182. Those protections include: (a) written notice of the claimed violations of [probation or] parole; (b) disclosure to the [probationer or] parolee of evidence against him; (c) opportunity to be heard in person and to present witnesses and documentary evidence; (d) the right to confront and cross-examine adverse witnesses (unless the hearing officer specifically finds good cause for not allowing confrontation); (e) a neutral and detached hearing body . . . ; and (f) a written statement by the factfinders as to the evidence relied on and reasons for revoking [probation or] parole. Gagnon, 411 U.S. at 786 (quoting Morrissey, 408 U.S. at 489) (cleaned up). 3 Supervised release is structurally different. Rather than replacing imprisonment, it is a period of post-confinement monitoring that begins only after a defendant has completed her full carceral sentence. See 18 U.S.C. § 3583(a) (providing that “[t]he court . . . may include as a part of the sentence a requirement that the defendant be placed on a term of supervised release after imprisonment”) (emphasis mine); Mont v. United States, 139 S. Ct. 1826, 1833 (2019) (“supervised release has no statutory function until confinement ends”) (cleaned up); United 3Those procedural protections were later transposed, in substance, into Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 32.1, which governs probation and supervised release revocation proceedings. See Fed. R. Crim. P. 32.1 (Notes of Advisory Committee on Rules —1979). 15 States v. Granderson, 511 U.S. 39, 50-51 (1994) (“Supervised release, in contrast to probation, is not a punishment in lieu of incarceration . . . . [P]robation sans imprisonment and supervised release following imprisonment are sentences of unlike character.”); 4 Johnson, 529 U.S. at 725 (“Unlike parole, which replaced a portion of a defendant’s prison sentence, supervised release is a separate term imposed at the time of initial sentencing.”) (Scalia, J., dissenting); Haymond, 139 S. Ct. at 2382 (plurality opinion) (“[S]upervised release wasn’t introduced to replace a portion of the defendant’s prison term, only to encourage rehabilitation after the completion of his prison term.”) (cleaned up); Mica Moore, Escaping from Release: Is Supervised Release Custodial under 18 USC § 751(a)?, 83 U. Chi. L. Rev. 2257, 2263 (2016) (“supervised release is not an alternative to incarceration, but a separate and additional period of monitoring concerned with facilitating the reintegration of the defendant into the community”); United States v. Thompson, 777 F.3d 368, 372 (7th 4 The majority sets forth a hypothetical fact pattern to support the claim that acknowledging supervisees’ constitutional rights “would lead to probationers and supervised releasees being conferred with vastly different constitutional rights.” Ante at 43 – 44. To the contrary, the difference results not from recognizing supervisees’ constitutional rights, but by failing to do so; that vast difference exists today. In the majority’s hypothetical, the probationer was afforded the full range of constitutional rights for the conduct underlying his new prison sentence, i.e., he was indicted and was offered the right to jury trial on the original bank fraud conviction. As things now stand, the probationer is conferred with vastly greater constitutional rights than the supervisee; that disparity can only be corrected by recognizing that the supervisee similarly enjoys the right to indictment and the right to a jury trial for the conduct for which he will be sentenced, i.e., the violation conduct. 16 Cir. 2015) (“Parole mitigates punishment; supervised release augments it. . . .”); Fiona Doherty, Indeterminate Sentencing Returns: The Invention of Supervised Release, 88 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 958, 997 (2013). 5 Although compliance with certain “conditions” is required of one sentenced to supervised release, supervised release is no reprieve from prison. 6 As a result, the liberty of one sentenced to supervised release is distinct from the contract-like “conditional” liberty described by Morrissey (and, later, Gagnon), where reprieve 5Originally, the SRA included no mechanism for “revocation” of supervised release. Doherty, supra, at 999-1000. Instead, violations of court-imposed conditions could be punished only by charging and prosecuting a defendant for criminal contempt. Id. In 1986, however, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act (“ADAA”), which, in addition to implementing new mandatory minimums for certain drug crimes, authorized a judge to: revoke a term of supervised release, and require the person to serve in prison all or part of the term of supervised release without credit for time previously served on post-release supervision, if it finds by a preponderance of the evidence that the person violated a condition of supervised release. Id. at 1000-01. With that last-minute “technical amendment” to the statute, the ADAA “grafted the . . . same rules of diluted procedure applicable to parole and probation revocation hearings” onto supervised release revocation proceedings, id. at 1001-02, thus creating the constitutional problems at the crux of this case. 6 In Mont, Justice Thomas, writing for the majority, described supervised release as “a form of postconfinement monitoring that permits a defendant a kind of conditional liberty by allowing him to serve part of his sentence outside of prison.” 139 S. Ct. at 1833 (cleaned up). That description may logically describe probation or parole, but it does not accurately reflect the nature of supervised release. See S. Rep. No. 98-225, at 125 (1983) (noting different purposes of supervised release and imprisonment). Moreover, there is no evidence that judges in practice impose shorter prison sentences by virtue of the discretion to add a period of supervised release; judges instead “impose supervised release on virtually all eligible defendants, with both the average prison sentence and the number of people under supervision rising dramatically since 1984.” Schuman, supra, at 908; see also Christine S. Scott-Hayward, Shadow Sentencing: The Imposition of Federal Supervised Release, 18 Berkeley J. Crim. L. 180, 206 (2013). 17 from prison is given in exchange for continued compliance with certain restrictions. Cf. Morrissey, 408 U.S. at 478 (“those who are allowed to leave prison early are subjected to specified conditions for the duration of their terms”) (emphasis mine). Rather than a form of “conditional liberty,” then, supervised release is more aptly described as “restricted liberty.” Schuman, supra at 908 n.198.