68
Stevens, J., dissenting
"text" does not limit the meaning of official detention, and then there is absolutely no reason for concluding that court-ordered 24-hour-a-day confinement is not official detention. The majority cannot have it both ways.
Given the anomalous implications of the Court's decision, one may fairly question how the majority justifies its result. It is surely not the plain language of the statute, because the majority's reading requires that a judicially mandated, 24-hour-a-day confinement in a jail-type facility is neither "official" (because it is ordered by a judge and not the Attorney General) nor "detention" (because the judicial order is labeled "release"). Nor does the majority rely on the nature of the facility itself, because the majority concedes that if the Attorney General rather than the court had confined respondent in the exact same facility, respondent's confinement would have been "official detention" under the statute. The majority purports to rely on some sort of Chevron deference, ante, at 61, but it is indeed an odd sort of deference given that (as I have noted above) the majority adopts an interpretation that the Bureau of Prisons itself has rejected.
The majority suggests at one point that it relies on the history of the interpretation of the word "custody," arguing that Congress did not intend to change the settled meaning of "custody" that existed prior to the Bail Reform Act. However, not one of the cases cited by the majority, ante, at 59, stands for the proposition that custody does not include confinement in a jail-type facility. Instead, all of those cases involved situations in which the defendant was at large. See Polakoff v. United States, 489 F. 2d 727, 730 (CA5 1974) (defendant faced "travel and social restrictions and was required to report weekly to a probation officer"); United States v. Robles, 563 F. 2d 1308, 1309 (CA9 1977) (defendant required to "obey all laws, remain within the jurisdiction unless court permission was granted to travel, obey all court orders, and keep his attorney posted as to his address and employment"); Ortega v. United States, 510 F. 2d 412, 413
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