70
Rehnquist, C. J., dissenting
most natural meaning of these two words, and I therefore dissent.
Section 3565(a) does not indicate on its face whether a defendant found in violation of probation must be sentenced to prison or resentenced to another term of probation. I agree with the Court that § 3565(a) must be read to require imposition of a term of imprisonment; otherwise, as the Court explains, the proviso would be senseless.1 See ante, at 45; In re Chapman, 166 U. S. 661, 667 (1897) ("[N]othing is better settled than that statutes should receive a sensible construction, such as will effectuate the legislative intention, and, if possible, so as to avoid an unjust or an absurd conclusion"). If the Court had stopped there, I would have been happy to join its opinion. Having correctly resolved one ambiguity in § 3565(a), however, the Court proceeds to find another, regarding the meaning of the term "original sentence," where none exists. The Court thus ultimately concludes, incorrectly in my view, that the rule of lenity should be applied.
The Court believes that the Government's reading of § 3565(a) is not "unambiguously correct." Ante, at 54. As we have explained, however, the rule of lenity should not be applied "merely because it [is] possible to articulate a construction more narrow than that urged by the Government." Moskal v. United States, 498 U. S. 103, 108 (1990). Instead we have reserved lenity for those situations where, after "[a]pplying well-established principles of statutory construction," Gozlon-Peretz v. United States, 498 U. S. 395, 410 (1991), there still remains "a grievous ambiguity or uncer-1 The option of imposing a fine after revocation is also foreclosed. As a matter of common usage, the prepositional phrase following a noun need not be repeated when the noun appears again in the same sentence. Thus, § 3565(a) reads: "[T]he court shall revoke the sentence of probation and sentence the defendant to not less than one-third of the original sentence [of probation]." (Emphasis added.) "[N]ot less than one-third" of a term of probation is a period of time. A fine cannot follow revocation, then, because a fine is measured in money, not time.
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