On June 20, the Supreme Court voted 7–2 to limit the factors that judges are allowed to consider when revoking supervised release.
The court majority, which ruled in favor of alleged supervised release violators, said in the complex ruling that judges must base such decisions on reasons specifically spelled out in a federal supervised release law, as opposed to a federal sentencing law.
Two justices dissented from the majority opinion in Esteras v. United States written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Another two justices concurred with the majority opinion only in part.
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.
The federal sentencing statute includes Section 3553(a)(2)(A) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code. The federal supervised release statute includes Section 3583(e) of Title 18.
The case concerns whether courts considering revoking supervised release should be allowed to take into account sentencing factors, such as retribution, that are not enumerated in the supervised release law.
Five federal courts of appeals had previously held that federal district courts are allowed to look at the so-called retribution factors identified in the sentencing statute, but four courts of appeals ruled that they may not.
The retribution factors in the sentencing law 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.
During the oral argument on Feb. 25, Christian Grostic, attorney for the lead petitioner, Edgardo Esteras, said judges should not be permitted to take into account the seriousness of the initial conviction when deciding how to punish an individual who violates supervised release rules.
Grostic said sentences for supervised release violations are not supposed to be punitive. Supervised release, unlike the prison term itself, is aimed at rehabilitation, protecting society, and helping a prisoner re-enter society, he said.
Grostic said that according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which ruled against his client, 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.”
Department of Justice attorney Masha Hansford said at the same hearing that the supervised release statute 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 case goes back to 2018, when Esteras entered a guilty plea to conspiracy to distribute heroin.
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 August 2023 decision, 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 federal district court looked at the government’s allegation that Esteras violated the terms of the supervised release, it declined to find that he had committed a new legal violation, but determined that 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 one of its own precedents from 2007, which states that “it does not constitute reversible error to consider [the sentencing statute] when imposing a sentence for violation of supervised release, even though this factor is not enumerated” in the supervised release statute, according to the petition filed by Esteras.
The circuit court affirmed the district court.
In her new opinion, Barrett sided with Esteras, writing that a district court may revoke a term of supervised release and order an individual’s reincarceration only “after considering” a list of sentencing factors identified in the supervised release law.
District courts may not take into account the sentencing law—which includes retribution factors—when they consider revoking supervised release, she wrote.
“This conclusion follows directly from the application of a well-established canon of statutory interpretation: ‘expressio unius est exclusio alterius’—in plain English, ‘expressing one item of [an] associated group or series excludes another left unmentioned,’” the opinion reads.
A canon of statutory interpretation consists of rules and presumptions that judges rely on when interpreting statutes that contain unclear or ambiguous language.
Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Elena Kagan, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the majority opinion in full.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a separate opinion concurring in part with the majority opinion, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her opinion. Jackson wrote her own separate opinion, also concurring in part with the majority opinion.
Sotomayor wrote that district courts considering revocation of a term of supervised release “should not consider retribution for any purpose.”
Jackson wrote that the majority opinion goes too far when it seems “to opine as to the precise contours of the retributive concerns that Congress has taken off the table.”
The majority opinion delves into subjects that are “unnecessary to the outcome of [the] litigation,” she wrote.
The Supreme Court vacated the ruling of the Sixth Circuit and returned the case to that court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissenting opinion, which Justice Neil Gorsuch joined.
Alito wrote that “veteran trial judges often complain that their appellate colleagues live in a world of airy abstractions and do not give enough thought to the practical effects of their holdings.”
“Today’s decision is likely to earn the rank of Exhibit A in the trial bench’s catalog of appellate otherworldliness,” he wrote.
In this case, Alito wrote, the majority interprets the sentencing statute to mean that a district court judge “must engage in mind-bending exercises” by taking into account the circumstances and nature of a defendant’s offense, while at the same time being forbidden to look at its seriousness.
The judge has to examine what is necessary to deter legal violations or promote a defendant’s rehabilitation, but is not allowed to factor in a desire “to promote respect for the law.”
“Neither the statutory text, the interpretive canon on which the Court relies, nor the structure of the Act supports the Court’s interpretation,” Alito wrote.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared June 21, 2025, in The Epoch Times. It was updated June 22, 2025.
Photo: Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett