48
Opinion of the Court
Granderson's reading of the proviso also avoids the startling disparities in sentencing that would attend the Government's interpretation. A 20-month minimum sentence would exceed not only the 6-month maximum punishment under the Guidelines for Granderson's original offense; it would also exceed the 1-year statutory maximum, see 21 U. S. C. § 844(a), that Granderson could have received, had the Government prosecuted him for cocaine possession and afforded him the full constitutional protections of a criminal trial, rather than the limited protections of a revocation hearing.6 Indeed, a 20-month sentence would exceed consecutive sentences for destruction of mail and cocaine possession (18 months in all).
Furthermore, 20 months is only the minimum revocation sentence, on the Government's reading of the proviso. The Government's interpretation would have allowed the District Court to sentence Granderson to a term of imprisonment equal in length to the revoked term of probation. This prison term—five years—would be 10 times the exposure to imprisonment Granderson faced under the Guidelines for his
nn. 4-5. None of those cases, statutes, or rules, however, involves an interpretive problem such as the one presented here, where, if the "original sentence" is the sentence actually imposed, a "plain meaning" interpretation of the proviso leads to an absurd result. See supra, at 41, 45, and n. 4.
The dissent observes, further, that other federal sentencing provisions
"us[e] the word 'sentence' to refer to the punishment actually imposed on a defendant." Post, at 71, n. 2. In each of the cited instances, however, this reference is made clear by context, either by specifying the type of sentence (e. g., "sentence to pay a fine," "sentence to probation," 18 U. S. C. § 3551(c)), or by using a variant of the phrase "impose sentence" (see §§ 3553(a), (b), (c), (e); 3554-3558).
6 At a revocation hearing, in contrast to a full-scale criminal trial, the matter is tried to the court rather than a jury; also, the standard of proof has been held to be less stringent than the reasonable-doubt standard applicable to criminal prosecutions. See 18 U. S. C. § 3565(a); Fed. Rule Crim. Proc. 32.1; United States v. Gordon, 961 F. 2d 426, 429 (CA3 1992) (citing cases).
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