Opinion
04 Cr. 1156.
January 27, 2010
MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER
Defendant Joseph Spencer pleaded guilty to bank fraud in 2004. The Court sentenced him to time served and three years of supervised release. In 2008, the government asked the Court to revoke Spencer's term of release and resentence him. A revocation hearing was scheduled for May 21, 2008, but was adjourned a number of times, including adjournments following the expiration of Spencer's term of release on February 16, 2009. Spencer did not object to any adjournments until about April 21, 2009, when he refused to consent to further postponement of the hearing. ( See Def.'s Letter dated May 8, 2009, at 3.) On May 8, 2009, he moved to dismiss the petition for lack of jurisdiction. The Court ultimately held a hearing on June 3, 2009, during which the parties addressed both the jurisdictional question and the merits of revocation.
On December 3, 2009, the Court denied Spencer's motion and ordered sentencing submissions from the parties within fifteen days. Spencer's submission, in a letter dated December 23, 2009, "renew[ed] his motion to dismiss," and alternatively asked the Court to sentence the defendant to time served with no additional supervision. The Court will treat Spencer's letter as a letter motion for reconsideration of its December 3 decision. For the reasons that follow, the motion is denied.
Spencer's argument turns on the interpretation of the statute that gives a court jurisdiction to revoke a term of supervised release after the term has expired. That statutory provision provides that
[t]he power of the court to revoke a term of supervised release for violation of a condition of supervised release . . . extends beyond the expiration of the term of supervised release for any period reasonably necessary for the adjudication of matters arising before its expiration if, before its expiration, a warrant or summons has been issued on the basis of an allegation of such a violation.18 U.S.C. § 3583(i) (emphasis added). In his motion to dismiss, Spencer argued that the "delay beyond the agreed-upon April 28, 2009, hearing date was not `reasonably necessary' for the adjudication of the petition." (Def.'s Letter dated May 8, 2009, at 6.) The Court rejected that argument. Spencer's motion for reconsideration points to a different period of delay. It says that the post-revocation hearing papers were filed by July 24, 2009, and that the four-and-a-half-month period between that date and the December 3, 2009 decision was not reasonably necessary.
The Court disagrees. Indeed, on similar facts the Second Circuit has upheld a district court's revocation jurisdiction. See United States v. Ramos, 401 F.3d 111 (2d Cir. 2005). In that case, a defendant moved to dismiss a revocation petition for lack of jurisdiction; seven months later, the district court ruled that it still had jurisdiction, and one month after that, it revoked defendant's supervised release. The appellate court concluded that this period of adjudication was not an unreasonable delay under the statute. Id. at 118. It relied in part on the fact that Ramos "was not prejudiced by this delay." Id. That conclusion also applies here. Spencer has not suggested that he suffered prejudice from any delay. See United States v. Spencer, No. 04-1156, 2009 WL 4362498, at *4 (Dec. 2, 2009). The Court finds that it did not lose jurisdiction simply because four and a half months passed between the parties' post-hearing submissions and the Court's decision revoking supervised release.
To avoid this result, Spencer tries to distinguish Ramos away. But his efforts are unavailing. For example, he tries to limit Ramos to holding "only that the delay in adjudicating the violation petition occasioned by the defendant's incarceration elsewhere was `reasonably necessary.'" (See Def.'s Letter dated Dec. 23, 2009, at 5.) This is not all that Ramos stands for. The court in Ramos makes separate rulings about the reasonableness of three different delays: "(1) the period between [Ramos's] arrest on state charges, which gave rise to the release violation charge, and the date on which Ramos was adjudicated a felon in state court"; "(2) the period between that adjudication and the execution of the federal warrant"; "and (3) the period between that warrant execution and the adjudication of the federal charges against Ramos for the violation of his supervised release." Ramos, 401 F.3d at 117. Part of this last delay was the eight-month period of time between Ramos's motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction and the court's decision to revoke his release. To decide the case, the court in Ramos had to apply Section 3583(i) to this delay — not just to the delays "occasioned by the defendant's incarceration" in state prison.
Spencer also suggests that it would be wrong to include, and that Ramos did not impose, a "prejudice requirement in Section 3583(i) claims." (See Def.'s Letter dated Dec. 23, 2009, at 5.) He says that the prejudice language in the opinion relates only to Ramos's due process claim, not his Section 3583(i) claim, and that the prejudice language "is little more than dictum." (Id.) These contentions are not accurate. Consider the following language from the opinion:
in light of the fact that . . . Ramos was not prejudiced by this delay, we have no basis on which we can conclude that the period of delay was `unreasonable.' We conclude that the delay in the process that led to the revocation of Ramos's supervised release did not violate 18 U.S.C. § 3583(i).Ramos, 401 F.3d at 118 (emphasis added). It is self-evident that the court viewed prejudice as relevant to whether a delay was unreasonable; it is equally self-evident that the court relied in part on the lack of prejudice in reaching its decision, and thus that the language is not dicta.
Neither this Court nor the Ramos court imposed a "prejudice requirement" as defendant contends. ( See Def.'s Letter dated Dec. 23, 2009, at 4.) Both courts concluded simply that the issue of prejudice was relevant to the determination of reasonableness.
Spencer's motion for reconsideration makes one other argument: that the Court should interpret "reasonably necessary" in light of a similar provision in the Speedy Trial Act, 18 U.S.C. § 3161 et seq. (the "STA"). The STA provides for an exclusion of the "delay reasonably attributable to any period, not to exceed thirty days, during which any proceeding concerning the defendant is actually under advisement by the court." 18 U.S.C. § 3161(h)(1)(J) (emphasis added). But that provision is distinguishable from Section 3583(i) in a few important respects.
First, the two provisions serve different purposes. Subsection (i) of 18 U.S.C. § 3583 was enacted "to make absolutely clear Congress' earlier intention that sentencing courts have the authority to hold hearings to revoke or extend supervised release after expiration of the original term if they issue a summons or warrant during the release period." Ramos, 401 F.3d at 116. Although "reasonable necessity" places some limitation on a sentencing court's power, the concept is "relatively elastic," see id. at 114. Section 3161(h)(1)(J) of the STA works differently. As one of "[t]he statutory grounds for exclusion of time from the speedy trial clock, [it is] `designed to take account of specific and recurring periods of delay which often occur in criminal cases; [it is] not to be used either to undermine the time limits established by the Act, or to subvert the very purpose the Act was designed to fulfill.'" United States v. Richardson, 421 F.3d 17, 29 (1st Cir. 2005) (quoting Henderson v. United States, 476 U.S. 321, 333 (1986) (White, J., dissenting)). Section 3161(h)(1)(J) furthers the STA's goals by specifying the period of time to be excluded from time before trial. Section 3583(i) underscores courts' revocation authority by emphasizing not a specific period of time but instead a flexible concept, reasonable necessity. With such different goals in mind, the two statutes are hardly analogous.
Second, the word "reasonably" serves one function in Section 3161(h)(1)(J) and another one in Section 3583(i). In the former, it explains how attributable a delay must be to the period of time a proceeding is under the court's advisement. The delay must be reasonably attributable to that period. In the latter, by contrast, the word explains how necessary a delay must be to a court's adjudication. The delay must be reasonably necessary to the court's adjudication. Because the STA provision says nothing about what counts as reasonably necessary, it would make no sense for the Court to use it to define that term elsewhere.
CONCLUSION
For the reasons given above, the Court concludes that it retained jurisdiction to revoke Spencer's release. The motion for reconsideration is denied. A sentencing hearing shall be held on February 23, 2010, at 1:30 p.m.
SO ORDERED.