Supreme Court Rules Absconding from Court’s Supervision While Serving a Term of Supervised Release Doesn’t Atomically Extend Term of Supervised Release
In a recent ruling, the Supreme Court weighed whether or not a criminal defendant’s term of supervised release is automatically extended when a defendant absconds or flees from a Federal court’s authority. In an 8–1 opinion, the Court ruled that courts cannot automatically extend a defendant’s supervised release term just because a defendant goes on the run, resolving a circuit split and reaffirming the limits of district court judges under the Sentencing Reform Act.
In the federal judicial system, a criminal defendant who has been found guilty of a crime and completes any prison sentence imposed by the sentencing judge, they are typically placed on “supervised release” in which the sentencing judge imposes a series of conditions for a certain period of time (sometimes incorrectly thought of as an equivalent of parole as there are several key differences). Any violation of those conditions, including committing a new crime or failing to report to their probation officer, gives judges the discretion to reprimand that individual, including the authority to impose a new term of imprisonment, extend supervision , amongst other options upon revocation. In the case at hand, Isabel Rico pled guilty in 2010 to federal drug trafficking and was sentenced to seven years in prison followed by four years of supervised release. After only a few months on supervised release, she violated her conditions, her release was revoked, and she was sentenced to an additional 42 months in prison and an additional term of supervised release set to expire in June 2021. Upon her subsequent release, she then again violated her conditions of supervised release and in May 2018, following a second round of failures, a warrant was issued for her arrest. Federal authorities did not locate her until January 2023, nearly five years later. During those five years of abscondment, Rico committed multiple state-level offenses, including a drug crime in January 2022. Ultimately the district court nonetheless treated the 2022 offense as a Grade A supervised release violation, triggering an advisory sentencing guideline range of 33 to 36 months of incarceration before ultimately sentencing her to additional 16 months in prison. However, there in lies the problem, since her judicially ordered supervised release term had expired in June 2021, before her 2022 “violation.” Rico challenged this additional sentence, arguing that just because she ran away and was subject to an arrest warrant, the term of her supervised release should not have paused or “tolled” and thus the Court lacked the authority to impose such a sentence for allegedly breaking the terms of her supervised release. That argument was rejected by the Ninth Circuit of Appeals, which found that fleeing did in fact toll her supervised release term.
Writing for the majority, Justice Gorsuch succinctly pointed out that by doing so, “What the Ninth Circuit’s rule really does is extend the period of supervised release beyond what a judge has ordered.” The Sentencing Reform Act lays out specific procedures and authorities of judges for their authority over those on supervised release, including statutory limits on the length and specific mechanisms for extending or tolling a term, none of which contemplate automatic extension for abscondment. The government argued that because Rico received no supervision during her abscondment, she should receive no “credit” for that period she fled the Court’s authority, while simultaneously contending that she in fact remained subject to supervised release conditions and could be penalized for violations during that same window. The Court found this contradiction unacceptable, resolving the Circuit split that had emerged in favor of the defendant in this case which will have immediate effects on individuals subject to federal supervised release conditions. In practice, this means that federal courts can no longer invoke abscondment to retroactively stretch a supervised release term, regardless of a defendant’s alleged violations. However, it may also cause prosecutors to act more urgently for any alleged violations and execute arrests in those instances, as they will lack the jurisdiction if they seek additional imprisonment or extensions of supervised release if they fail to detect or act on those violations in time, regardless of whether or not the defendant fled knowing that additional repercussions are possible.
