Opinion ID: 6340581
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Constitutional Workaround

Text: As a plurality of the Supreme Court recognized in Haymond, the structural differences between parole, probation, and supervised release may, in the context of revocation, “bear[] constitutional consequences.” Haymond, 139 S. Ct. at 2382 (considering the constitutionality of section 3583(k)). Relevant here, although section 3583(e) speaks of “revocation,” a judge who “revokes” supervised release is not reimposing the term of imprisonment from which she previously granted a reprieve. Instead, she is imposing a new term of imprisonment. See Johnson, 529 U.S. at 715 (“the ordinary meaning of revoke is to annul by recalling or taking back”) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (cleaned up); United States v. Trotter, 321 F. Supp. 3d 337, 346-47 (E.D.N.Y. 2018) (“The term ‘revoke’ appears to be somewhat of a misnomer. . . . Supervised release is not being ‘revoked’; rather, a supervisee is being punished for violating conditions. . . .”); see also United States v. Ka, 982 F.3d 18 219, 229 (4th Cir. 2020) (Gregory, J., dissenting) (“Unlike parole and probation revocations, supervised release revocation proceedings uniquely allow for the imposition of new prison sentences.”). As the Supreme Court recognized in Johnson, the idea that a court can sanction a supervised release violation with additional imprisonment raises “serious constitutional questions.” Johnson, 529 U.S. at 700. First, though the acts of violation may “lead to reimprisonment, the violative conduct need not be criminal.” Id. Even when the act of violation is a criminal offense in its own right (which, because of section 3583(d), it often will be), guilt “need only be found by a judge under a preponderance of the evidence standard, not by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.” Id. In addition (though not discussed in Johnson) nearly every violation of supervised release carries a potential penalty of more than one year of imprisonment, see 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e)(3) (setting forth penalties available upon revocation), implicating the right to indictment. See Mackin v. United States, 117 U.S. 348, 354 (1886). Finally, when the “acts of violation . . . may be the basis for separate prosecution,” double jeopardy problems arise. Johnson, 529 U.S. at 700. The problem, as the Johnson Court implicitly recognized, is that imposing a new term of imprisonment to sanction a supervised release violation mirrors the 19 structure of a traditional criminal prosecution to which the fundamental trial rights apply. Since enactment of the SRA, courts have dodged the constitutional “difficulties” created by section 3583 by “[t]reating postrevocation sanctions as part of the penalty for the initial offense,” see id. at 700, rather than as punishment for the violative conduct itself. See, e.g., United States v. McInnis, 429 F.3d 1, 5 (1st Cir. 2005) (“Although the punishment imposed in response to the release violations is in addition to prior punishment, it is treated as part of the penalty for the initial offense, thus obviating double jeopardy concerns.”); United States v. Jackson, 559 F.3d 368, 371 (5th Cir. 2009); United States v. Sharpe, 2021 U.S. App. LEXIS 29416, at  (11th Cir. Sept. 29, 2021) (unpublished) (“the revocation of [appellant’s] supervised release and the resulting prison sentence are considered a part of the penalty for [his] original offense”); see also Doherty, supra, 1004-10 (discussing development of caselaw attributing postrevocation penalties to the original offense). 7 7In an attempt to avoid constitutional problems, courts have stumbled into a statutory bramble; with few exceptions, Congress in the SRA “forbade the federal courts from ‘modifying a term of imprisonment once it has been imposed.’” United States v. Jones, 980 F.3d 1098, 1103-04 (6th Cir. 2020) (quoting Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, Pub. L. No. 98-473, Title II, ch. 2, § 212(a), 98 Stat. 1837, 1998 (enacting 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)); see also Fort Wayne Books, Inc. v. Indiana, 489 U.S. 46, 54 (1989) (“The general rule is that finality in the context of a criminal prosecution is defined by a 20 In a similar attempt to avoid those constitutional pitfalls, some courts have construed the sanctions imposed for violating the conditions of supervised release as punishment for breaching the court’s “trust,” rather than as punishment for the violative conduct itself. See Haymond, 139 S. Ct. at 2386 (Breyer, J., concurring) (“[t]he consequences that flow from violation of the conditions of supervised release are first and foremost considered sanctions for the defendant’s ‘breach of trust’—his ‘failure to follow the court-imposed conditions’ that followed his initial conviction—not ‘for the particular conduct triggering the revocation as if that conduct were being sentenced as new federal criminal conduct’”) (quoting U.S. Sent’g Guidelines Manual ch. 7, pt. A, intro. 3(b) (Nov. 2018) (cleaned up)); United States v. Edwards, 834 F.3d 180, 194 (2d Cir. 2016) (“the critical ‘subject under consideration’ at a revocation proceeding is . . . the breach of trust manifested by the violation”) (citing to U.S. Sent’g Guidelines Manual, ch. 7, pt. A., intro. 3(b)). By labeling reimprisonment for supervised release violations something other than punishment for the violative conduct itself, courts have artificially distinguished the rights afforded to one facing revocation of supervised release judgment of conviction and the imposition of sentence.”). But Johnson intimates that a court may do precisely that—modify the original prison sentence by adding a new period of incarceration. 529 U.S. at 700. 21 from those afforded to an accused in a criminal prosecution. See, e.g., United States v. Doka, 955 F.3d 290, 294 (2d Cir. 2020) (post-revocation consequences are “authorized by the original conviction” and defendants in revocation proceedings are therefore not entitled to “the full panoply of rights that criminal defendants generally enjoy”) (cleaned up); United States v. Meeks, 25 F.3d 1117, 1123 (2d Cir. 1994), abrogated on other grounds by Johnson, 529 U.S. 694 (constitutional protections that govern criminal prosecutions “have been ruled inapplicable because the conduct that violates the conditions of supervised release is not viewed as a separate criminal offense”); 8 United States v. Soto-Olivas, 44 F.3d 788, 792 (9th Cir. 1995) (“The limited procedural protections afforded [revocation] proceedings are justified precisely because revocation of supervised release is not new punishment for a new crime. It is part of the whole matrix of punishment which arises out of a defendant’s original crime . . . .”) (cleaned up); United States v. Work, 409 F.3d 484, 491 (1st Cir. 2005) (reasoning that “once the original sentence has been imposed in a criminal case, further proceedings with respect to that sentence are not subject to Sixth Amendment protections”). 8Meeks additionally suggests that the statutory limitation on procedural protections in revocation proceedings resolves any constitutional question. See id. at 1123; see also Doherty, supra, at 1006 (discussing reasoning in Meeks). But, of course, Congress’s passage of a statute does not alleviate federal courts of the burden of ensuring its constitutionality. Cf. Booker, 543 U.S. at 248. 22 Relatedly, this Court has suggested that the conditional nature of the liberty afforded one on supervised release justifies the surrender of constitutional rights in a revocation proceeding. See United States v. Carlton, 442 F.3d 802, 809 (2d Cir. 2006) (“[t]he full panoply of procedural safeguards does not attach to [supervised release] revocation proceeding because . . . a probationer [sic] already stands convicted of a crime”) (cleaned up) (emphasis mine). According to the Carlton Court, the “conditions placed on a defendant's liberty in supervised release encompass by implication” the “condition . . . that the defendant surrender his rights to trial by jury and to having accusations against him proved beyond a reasonable doubt.” 442 F.3d at 810; see also United States v. Ward, 770 F.3d 1090, 1098-99 (4th Cir. 2014) (“Like parolees, individuals on supervised release also enjoy only ‘conditional liberty’ because they already have been convicted of the underlying criminal offense . . . . [T]he conditional liberty to which those under supervised release are subject entails the surrender of certain constitutional rights . . . .”); United States v. Cunningham, 607 F.3d 1264, 1268 (11th Cir. 2010) (same). But the fact that supervised release is imposed as part of a criminal sentence does not convert a new and additional term of imprisonment triggered by new conduct into part of the original penalty imposed. Nor does supervised release 23 involve the same sort of conditional liberty relied upon in Morrissey and Gagnon; it does not replace prison on the condition that an individual abide by certain rules for the duration of that prison sentence. 9 It is similarly unpersuasive to suggest that any new term of imprisonment imposed merely sanctions a breach of “trust” rather than the underlying violation conduct; including a sentence of supervised release entails no leap of faith or “trust” by a district court, nor does the evidence suggest that judges impose less severe prison terms by virtue of the discretion to include a term of supervised release. See Schuman, supra, at 907 (“[S]upervised release is the opposite of trust— additional supervision to follow full service of the prison term.”). Because “revocation” of supervised release is nothing less than new punishment imposed by a court after finding an accused guilty of a new wrong, a supervised release revocation proceeding is fundamentally a new criminal prosecution. 10 See Haymond, 139 S. Ct. at 2376 (plurality opinion) (noting that a 9 The majority points out that the Sentencing Commission “explicitly considered and rejected the approach of treating supervised release violations as new criminal conduct.” Ante at 40 n.15. But, of course, the Sentencing Commission does not determine the constitutionality of a statutory scheme. 10 Although the majority acknowledges the structural distinctions between parole, probation, and supervised release, it nonetheless maintains that “it goes too far to argue . . . that because a term of supervised release is distinct from the original term of incarceration, it must also be distinct from the original sentence.” Ante at 38. In my view, the issue is not whether to consider the term of 24 crime was traditionally defined as those “acts to which the law affixes . . . punishment” and a criminal prosecution as “the process of exhibiting formal charges against an offender before a legal tribunal”) (cleaned up); id. at 2393 (Alito, J., dissenting) (a prosecution was historically defined as “the means adopted to bring a supposed offender to justice and punishment by due course of law”) (quoting H. Holthouse, New Law Dictionary 344 (1847)); Rothgery v. Gillespie Cnty., 554 U.S. 191, 221 (2008) (“‘Prosecution,’ as Blackstone used the term, referred to ‘instituting a criminal suit,’ by filing a formal charging document—an indictment, presentment, or information—upon which the defendant was to be tried in a court with power to punish the alleged offense.”) (Thomas, J., dissenting) (quoting 4 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 309 (1769)) (cleaned up); see also id. at 223 (“the term ‘criminal prosecution’ in the Sixth Amendment refers to the commencement of a criminal suit by filing formal charges in a court with jurisdiction to try and punish the defendant”) (cleaned up). Consider the sequence of events in the case at bar. In 2007, following a conviction for armed bank robbery, Peguero was sentenced to a lengthy term of supervised release part of the original sentence; the issue is whether imposition of a new term of imprisonment as punishment for new conduct is materially different than resentencing an individual on the original offense conduct (probation) or reimposing the term of imprisonment from which he or she was granted a reprieve (parole). 25 imprisonment followed by a term of supervised release. Nearly a decade later, Peguero got into an altercation with his former girlfriend, during which he purportedly struck her over the head with a glass bottle. Although there was insufficient evidence to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in state court, Peguero was nonetheless accused of assault in federal court, and, following a hearing where a United States Attorney attempted to prove that he had committed that crime, found guilty by a judge employing a preponderance of the evidence standard. He was then sentenced to serve twenty-eight months in federal prison. The majority maintains that “well-settled, binding precedent”—from which we are not free to deviate—compels that unnatural outcome. Ante at 49. But decisions from this Circuit purporting to distinguish the rights of an accused in a criminal prosecution from those afforded in a supervised release revocation proceeding offer a jumble of inconsistent and artificial reasons for doing so. In particular, many opinions rely heavily on Morrissey to declare that supervised release revocation proceedings are not criminal prosecutions. E.g., United States v. Diaz, 986 F.3d 202, 208–09 (2d Cir. 2021); United States v. Carthen, 681 F.3d 94, 99 (2d Cir. 2012). Morrissey, however, was handed down more than a decade before supervised release was created, and its holding is premised in part on structural 26 aspects of parole that do not apply to supervised release. See Morrissey, 408 U.S. at 477, 480 (explaining that “[t]he essence of parole is release from prison, before the completion of sentence” and noting that “supervision [of a parolee] is not directly by the court” and that “[r]evocation deprives an individual . . . only of . . . conditional liberty”). Some opinions invoke the rationale set forth in Johnson, suggesting that the inclusion of a term of supervised release as part of a criminal sentence authorizes any penalty imposed for a violation of its conditions. See, e.g., Doka, 955 F.3d at 294. Other opinions, however, recognize the flaws of that rationale. See, e.g., Carlton, 442 F.3d at 809 (“[W]e cannot fully attribute the penalty imposed at a revocation hearing to the original conviction.); United States v. McNeil, 415 F.3d 273, 277 (2d Cir. 2005) (concluding in the same breath that “the imprisonment that ensues from revocation is . . . wholly derived from a different source” than the original sentence, but also that “imposition supervised release is authorized by the original conviction, and so too are the consequences of its violation”); United States v. Smith, 982 F.2d 757, 761 (2d Cir. 1992) (concluding that the original term of imprisonment and the term of imprisonment imposed following revocation are “separate punishments”); United States v. Wirth, 250 F.3d 165, 170 n.3 (2d Cir. 2001) 27 (“punishment for a violation of supervised release is separate from punishment for the underlying conviction and may, when combined with the latter, exceed the statutory maximum for the underlying offense”); see also United States v. Pettus, 303 F.3d 480, 487 (2d Cir. 2002) (attempting to reconcile the inconsistency). Still others conclude that revocation merely sanctions a “breach of trust,” but do so without identifying the “trust” the district court has placed in a defendant by sentencing him to a term of supervised release. See, e.g., Edwards, 834 F.3d at 194-96. In sum, I cannot agree that this Court has articulated a clear or consistent basis for concluding that the rights afforded an accused in a criminal prosecution do not extend to supervised release revocation proceedings. Moreover, although the majority contends that the “United States Supreme Court. . . ha[s] thoroughly examined the legal principles supporting the constitutionality of the current revocation system,” see ante at 36, the sparse Supreme Court jurisprudence on the constitutionality of supervised release belies that contention. In particular, “between 1984 and 2019, the Supreme Court said almost nothing about how this new system of post-release supervision fit into the nation’s constitutional framework.” Ka, 982 F.3d at 228 (Gregory, J., dissenting) (quoting Jacob Schuman, Supervised Release Is Not Parole, 53 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 587, 612 (2020)). Significantly, 28 the Supreme Court has not explicitly considered whether supervisees, as opposed to probationers and parolees, enjoy a right to indictment for violation conduct that could send them to prison for more than one year. 11 Tellingly, the majority opinion (and the jurisprudence on which it relies) is littered with statements revealing the constitutional cracks in the statutory scheme governing supervised release; at various points, the majority suggests that postrevocation penalties should be “treated” as part of the penalty for the original offense, or “deemed” distinguishable from a criminal prosecution. See ante at 23, 30, 38 (“[r]evocation proceedings are not deemed part of a criminal prosecution”) (quoting Carthen, 681 F.3d at 99) (emphasis mine); ante at 42 (“[I]t makes little sense to treat [a defendant] as the accused . . . when he has been charged not with a crime, but with violating the terms of a jury-authorized sentence that flowed from his original conviction.”) (quoting Haymond, 139 S. Ct. at 2393 (Alito, J., 11The majority asserts that this Court has “repeatedly held” that there is no right to indictment for charged violations of supervised release that subject a person to more than one year in prison. Ante at 31. As the majority acknowledges, however, that statement is merely an extrapolation from the decisions holding that supervised release revocation proceedings are not “prosecutions.” Id. at 32 n.8. To be clear, neither this Court nor the Supreme Court has ever analyzed whether supervised release proceedings implicate the right to indictment. Our difference on this point can be explained as follows: the majority suggests that because supervised release proceedings are not deemed criminal prosecutions, the right to indictment cannot apply; I suggest that because supervised release proceedings subject defendants to more than one year in prison for conduct that has never been the subject of an indictment, the right to indictment (and the related fundamental criminal trial rights) must apply. 29 dissenting) (emphasis mine); see also Meeks, 25 F.3d at 1123 (“the conduct that violates the conditions of supervised release is not viewed as a separate criminal offense”) (emphasis mine). But the scope of constitutional rights does not vary with the words we use to characterize a proceeding. It is the substance that matters. Peguero was sentenced for bank robbery in 2007; that conviction cannot constitutionally be invoked years later to justify imprisoning him for allegedly committing felony assault. To say that Peguero was not an “accused” for purposes of his supervised release violation proceeding, or that the proceeding was anything other than a new criminal prosecution, is merely an attempt “to dodge the demands of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments by the simple expedient of relabeling.” Haymond, 139 S. Ct. at 2379 (plurality opinion); cf. In re Winship, 397 U.S. at 365-66 (“labels and good intentions do not themselves obviate the need for criminal due process safeguards . . . for a proceeding where the issue is whether the [individual] will be . . . subjected to the loss of his liberty for years. . .”) (cleaned up). I therefore cannot agree that Peguero was entitled to less than the full panoply of rights that attend a new felony prosecution, including: indictment, trial by an impartial jury, the right to confront and cross-examine his accusers, and the 30 right to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt before he was sentenced to more than two years in prison. Cf. Haymond, 139 S. Ct. at 2386 (Breyer, J., concurring) (holding a different subsection of 3583 unconstitutional because it too “closely resemble[d] the punishment of new criminal offenses, but without granting a defendant the rights, including the jury right, that attend a new criminal prosecution”).