Cite as: 511 U. S. 39 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
ment," the court may "suspend the imposition or execution of sentence and place the defendant on probation for such period and upon such terms and conditions as the court deems best"). The proviso would fit the suspension-of-execution scheme precisely: The "original sentence" would be the sentence imposed but not executed, and one-third of that determinate sentence would be the revocation sentence. In that application, the proviso would avoid incongruities presented in Granderson's and the Government's interpretations of the words "original sentence": An imposed, albeit unexecuted, term of imprisonment would be an actual, rather than a merely available, sentence, and one-third of that sentence would be a term of imprisonment, not probation. If Granderson could demonstrate that the proviso's drafters in fact drew the prescription to match the pre-1984 suspension-of-execution scheme, Granderson's argument would be all the more potent: The closest post-1984 analogue to the suspended sentence is the Guidelines sentence of imprisonment that could have been implemented, but was held back in favor of a probation sentence.10
We cannot say with assurance that the proviso's drafters chose the term "original sentence" with a view toward pre-1984 law.11 The unexacting process by which the proviso was enacted, however, and the evident anachronism in another probation-related section of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, leave us doubtful that it was Congress' design to punish drug-possessing probationers with the extraordinarily disproportionate severity the Government urges.
10 See Cunningham, Levi, Green, & Kaplan, Plain Meaning and Hard Cases, 103 Yale L. J. 1561, 1579-1581 (1994).
11 The chief difficulty with such an interpretation is that pre-1984 law recognized two kinds of suspended sentences, each of which could lead to probation. While suspension of the execution of sentence, as mentioned, neatly fits Granderson's theory, suspension of the imposition of sentence fits the theory less well: In that situation, no determinate "original sentence" would be at hand for precise calculation of the revocation sentence.
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