‘Abscondment’ doesn’t toll term of supervised release, SCOTUS rules

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A criminal defendant did not subject herself to an automatic extension of her term of supervised release by absconding after failing to report a change of residence to her probation officer, a divided U.S. Supreme Court has ruled.

In 2010, a federal judge sentenced defendant Isabel Rico to seven years in prison followed by four years of supervised released after she pleading guilty to federal drug trafficking charges.

After being released from prison in 2017, the defendant violated the terms of her supervised release conditions. A federal judge revoked her release and ordered her to serve two additional months in prison and a new 42-month term of supervised release to expire in 2021.

When released from prison a second time, the defendant violated the terms of her supervised release by changing her residence without notifying her probation officer. While a warrant for her arrest was issued at that time, federal authorities failed to locate her until January 2023.

While still on the run from federal authorities in January 2022, the defendant committed a state law drug offense, which resulted in a conviction.

In her federal case, the judge treated Rico’s state drug offense as a Grade A violation of her supervised release conditions and sentenced her to 16 months in prison to be followed by an additional two years of supervised release.

In an appeal before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the defendant argued that the district court erred in treating her state drug offense as a supervised release violation since that crime occurred after her supervised term expired in June 2021.

Upholding the lower court, the 9th Circuit concluded the defendant’s period of “abscondment” after failing to report her change of residence “tolled” the clock so that her term of supervised release continued to run until federal authorities arrested her in 2023.

Accordingly, the 9th Circuit held Rico’s January 2022 drug offense could count as a violation of her federal supervised release.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve a circuit split on the question of whether abscondment automatically extends a term of supervised release.

In an 8-1 decision, the court concluded Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 does not authorize a rule automatically extending a defendant’s term of supervised release when the defendant absconds.

Click here to read the full text of the U.S. Supreme Court’s March 25 decision in Rico v. United States.

BULLET POINTS: “The Sentencing Reform Act provides courts with many tools to address defendants who fail to report or otherwise violate their supervised release conditions. But automatically extending a term of supervised release is not among them. An array of textual clues proves the point. Start with what the Act says about when supervised release begins and ends. The Act instructs that a term of supervised release starts “the day the person is released from imprisonment.” [18 U.S.C.] §3624(e). The Act then tells us when a term of supervised release must end, generally setting its maximum length at one, three, or five years, depending on the severity of the defendant’s underlying offense. §3583(b). Neither provision hints at anything like the Ninth Circuit’s automatic extension rule. To the contrary, that rule risks flouting the Act by permitting courts to extend supervised release beyond even the maximum terms set by Congress.

“Next, consider how the Act treats absconders. As a condition of supervised release, a court may order a defendant to report to a probation officer and inform authorities if he changes his residence. See §§3563(b)(15), (17). Should a defendant violate those (or any other) conditions, a court may (and sometimes must) revoke his supervised release and send him back to prison with a new term of supervised release to follow. §§3583(e)(3), (g). That the Act authorizes those potent tools for addressing absconders — but makes no mention of anything like the Ninth Circuit’s automatic extension rule — is telling too..”

— Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett M. Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson, opinion of the court

“I am bemused by the notion that petitioner was on supervised release when she was evading all supervision. (I suppose she was on ‘unsupervised supervised release.’) And it seems strange to regard a crime committed after the expiration of ‘unsupervised supervised release’ as a non-event. By that logic, if petitioner had gone on a murder spree after the expiration of the period of unsupervised supervised release, the sentencing judge would have been required to put that out of his mind.

“As I see it, however, the whole debate about whether petitioner’s term of supervised release continued to run or was ‘tolled’ while she was on the lam is pointless. The [Sentencing] Guidelines are merely advisory, and this Court has made it clear that a judge is allowed to impose a sentence outside the recommended Guidelines range when that range ‘fails properly to reflect §3553(a) considerations.’ Rita v. United States, 551 U. S. 338, 351 (2007).

“That is what the judge did here, and it makes no difference that he started with the 33-to-36-month range and then varied downward to 16 months instead of starting with the lower range of 8 to 14 months and varying upward by 2 months based on the drug crime. Not only was this permitted by the Guidelines, but the judge stated that Rico’s sentence was imposed ‘regardless of the applicable sentencing guideline range.’ By taking petitioner’s January 2022 drug crime into account in this way, the judge acted in conformity with the Sentencing Reform Act, the Sentencing Guidelines, and the authority that this Court recognized in Rita.”

— Justices Samuel L. Alito Jr., dissenting