Supreme Court Grapples With Dispute Over Supervised Release Revocations

The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on Feb. 10, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

The Supreme Court considered on Feb. 25 what factors federal judges may weigh when revoking a person’s supervised release and sentencing them for violating release conditions.

Supervised release is a form of post-prison monitoring, similar to parole. A prisoner is released from custody but remains under restricted freedom for a set period. During that time, the person must follow specific conditions and be supervised by a probation officer. If those conditions are violated, the individual may be sent back to prison.

In Esteras v. United States, the justices examined a disagreement among several federal appeals courts over what factors judges may consider when sentencing someone for violating conditions of supervised release.

They also looked at whether judges may take into account factors not mentioned in the supervised release law, which includes Section 3583(e) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code.

The lead petitioner, Edgardo Esteras, who was convicted of an unspecified federal crime, said in his petition that sentences for violating the terms of supervised release should not be imposed as punishment. He urged the Supreme Court to take up his case because there is a split among federal courts of appeals that needs to be resolved.

Five courts of appeals have determined that federal district courts are allowed to look at the so-called retribution factors identified in Section 3553(a)(2)(A) of Title 18, but four courts of appeals have decided they may not, according to the petition.

The factors in that section include the need for a sentence to reflect the seriousness of the crime, promote respect for the law, and render just punishment for the crime.

Prosecutors argued that courts of appeals may look at these factors and that “any modest disagreement among the courts of appeals on the question presented has no practical effect,” the petition said.

The case goes back to 2018 when Esteras entered a guilty plea to conspiracy to distribute heroin.

Sentencing guidelines recommended a sentence of 15 to 21 months, but the federal district court sentenced him to 12 months in prison, to be served in addition to 15 months for violating probation from a previous federal drug trafficking conviction. This was followed by six years of supervised release.

In its Aug. 16, 2023, decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit referenced Esteras’s 2018 guilty plea.

The Sixth Circuit said the six-year term of supervised release began in January 2020. In January 2023, probation officials notified the district court that Esteras violated the conditions of his supervised release by committing acts of domestic violence and possessing a firearm. The officials later told the court that the new criminal charges had been dropped at the request of the victim.

When the district court looked at the government’s allegation that Esteras violated the terms of the supervised release, the court refused to find he had committed a new legal violation but determined he had possessed a firearm. The court revoked supervised release and sentenced him to 24 months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release, the circuit court said.

Esteras objected to the district court considering the retribution factors.

In its ruling, the Sixth Circuit cited its own United States v. Lewis precedent from 2007 which states that “it does not constitute reversible error to consider [Section] 3553(a)(2)(A) when imposing a sentence for violation of supervised release, even though this factor is not enumerated in [Section] 3583(e).”

The circuit court affirmed the district court.

During the oral argument on Feb. 25, Esteras’s attorney, assistant federal public defender Christian Grostic, said that because sentences for supervised release violations are not supposed to be punitive, Congress did not want judges to take into account the retribution factors.

Supervised release, unlike the prison term itself, is aimed at rehabilitation, protecting society, and helping a prisoner re-enter society, Grostic said.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told the lawyer, “[T]he purposes there relate to other things. You’re not imposing supervised release to punish the person for the crime that they committed. That’s the incarcerative term that you’ve already imposed.”

Grostic said that according to the Sixth Circuit, district courts may “treat a supervised release revocation the same as in an initial sentencing, where they can punish the offender for what’s happened before, no matter what has changed in the meantime.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch said the district courts “can’t go beyond ... the factual findings of the jury to issue a new sentence. That’s not permissible.”

Gorsuch wondered how judges could keep the retribution factors out of a supervised release hearing when Congress included them in the statute. He also questioned how a prison term could not be considered retribution.

“In the real world, an individual comes before a judge having violated a term of supervised release and is remanded to prison. In what world does he think he’s not being punished?” Gorsuch said.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said courts can’t be prevented from examining the evidence in a case.

“Courts do this all the time with hearsay,” she said. “We tell courts you can’t use hearsay for the purpose of the truth of the matter, but you could use it for ... a lot of other reasons.”

U.S. Department of Justice attorney Masha Hansford said Section 3583(e) does not prevent a district court from thinking “about any considerations it finds helpful at a sentencing or sentence modification proceeding.”

It would not make sense for Congress “to prohibit a court from considering” the retribution factors, she said.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case by the end of June.