Opinion ID: 788611
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Relation of a Condition to the Offense of Conviction

Text: 19 A condition of supervised release does not have to be related to the offense of conviction. The applicable statute requires the judge, at sentencing, to consider the need to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant. 2 That language does not limit the court to looking only at the offense already committed, but rather requires the court to look forward in time to crimes that may be committed in the future. Under the statute, the court may order conditions of supervised release, not only if they are related to the offense of conviction, but also if they are reasonably related to other factors, such as the need to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant. 3 20 One value of a criminal prosecution and presentence report is that they expose to judicial intervention other problems (such as alcoholism and drug addiction) and other crimes that may need to be addressed in sentencing for the offense of conviction. This is not to say that the wide discretion of the district court is unfettered. [T]he conditions imposed are permissible only if they are reasonably related to the goal of deterrence, protection of the public, or rehabilitation of the offender, and even if conditions meet the above requirements, they still can involve `no greater deprivation of liberty than is reasonably necessary for the purposes' of supervised release. 4 21 Here, although the district court did not say so, we can infer that the condition prohibiting residing with, maintaining custody of, or being in the presence of children was responsive to Wise's apparent mental problems and her history involving sexual abuse of children, and was related to the goal of protecting children, who constitute part of the public. That the condition was unrelated to Wise's offense of trying to defraud the Social Security Administration into helping her establish a fake identity is not of itself a sound reason to vacate the condition. Nevertheless, there must be a nexus between the past behavior and the public safety rationale sufficient to justify the specific conditions imposed. In United States v. T.M., for example, this court rejected a similar, but less extreme condition of release when the defendant had a history of inappropriate behavior with children, concluding that even considered cumulatively, [defendant's past] do[es] not establish a reasonable relationship between his sexually-related conditions of supervised release and either deterrence, public safety, or rehabilitation. 5