In this post last year I noted the interesting constitutional procedure opinion handed down by the Tenth Circuit in US v. Haymond, No. 16-5156 (10th Cir. Aug 31, 2017) (available here), and in this post last month I noted that the Supreme Court accepted the petition for certiorari filed by the federal government in the case. I am very lucky to have a great student who is very interested in the Haymond case, and he has agreed to draft a series of preview posts on the case. Here is this first one:
The Supreme Court, on October 26, 2018, granted certiorari in United States v. Haymond. The case concerns the constitutionality of a federal statutory provision which imposes a mandatory minimum prison sentence for federally-convicted sex offenders who commit another sexually-related offense while serving a term of supervised release.
A federal district court, in 2010, convicted Haymond of possessing child pornography and sentenced him to thirty-eight months of prison and ten years of supervised release. A sentencing judge is authorized to impose a supervised release sentence based on 18 U.S.C. § 3583(a), a provision of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. Supervised release has long been considered, in the words of the Tenth Circuit, “part of the sentence” for the original crime as are the various terms and conditions that an offender must comply with during the period of supervised release. Violation of the conditions of supervised release sometimes can result in revocation and additional prison time, but the Supreme Court in Johnson v. United States, 529 U.S. 694 (2000), described “postrevocation sanctions as part of the penalty for the initial offense.” Id. at 700.
On April 24, 2013, Haymond was released from prison, and he began serving his 10-year term of supervised release. Two years into his supervised release, Haymond’s probation officers conducted a surprise search of Haymond’s apartment. The officers seized a password-protected cellphone and a personal computer belonging to Haymond, as well as other computers belonging to a roommate or in the apartment. Finding images of child pornography on the phone, the probation officers alleged Haymond violated his terms of supervised release on various grounds.
Haymond was subject to a supervised release revocation hearing before a district judge, a unique hearing generally considered comparable to parole revocation in which the "full panoply of rights due a defendant ... does not apply.” Morrisey v. Brewer, 408 U.S. 471, 480 (1972). The district court found by a preponderance of the evidence that Haymond had violated 18 U.S.C. § 2252 by possessing child pornography. Based on this finding, the court revoked Haymond’s supervised release and sentenced him to a mandatory five years in prison pursuant to § 3583(k) and an additional five years of supervised release. The relevant portion of 18 U.S.C. § 3583(k) provides that sex offenders on supervised release who commit “any criminal offense under chapter 109A, 110, or 117, or section 1201 or 1591, for which imprisonment for a term longer than 1 year can be imposed, the court shall revoke the term of supervised release and require the defendant to serve a term of imprisonment … not less than 5 years.”
Haymond appealed to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that “(1) that the presence of images in his phone cache was insufficient to show by a preponderance of the evidence that he knowingly possessed child pornography, and (2) that 18 U.S.C. § 3583(k) is unconstitutional because it deprives him of due process.” The Tenth Circuit affirmed the district court’s finding of child pornography possession and the revocation of Haymond’s supervised release, but vacated the mandatory sentence and remanded the case back to the District Court for resentencing.
A split panel of Tenth Circuit held that 3583(k) was unconstitutional for two reasons. The majority first asserted that the statute impermissibly strips the sentencing judge of discretion established under Booker and its progeny because it imposes a mandatory minimum sentence. The court also asserted that it unlawfully imposes heightened punishment using a preponderance of the evidence standard based on new conduct which contradicts the requirements of Apprendi and Alleyne.
The government filed a petition for a writ of certiorari on June 15, 2018 posing this question for review:
Whether the court of appeals erred in holding “unconstitutional and unenforceable” the portions of 18 U.S.C. 3583(k) that required the district court to revoke respondent’s ten-year term of supervised release, and to impose five years of reimprisonment, following its finding by a preponderance of the evidence that respondent violated the conditions of his release by knowingly possessing child pornography.
With certiorari granted last month and the briefs forthcoming, this case poses the potential to impact not only the operation of federal supervised release revocation, but also the future of Apprendi rights.
In coming posts, the briefs filed by the parties and potential amici will be discussed.
Prior related posts:
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