704
Opinion of the Court
"(3) revoke a term of supervised release, and require the person to serve in prison all or part of the term of supervised release without credit for the time previously served on postrelease supervision, if it finds by a preponderance of the evidence that the person violated a condition of supervised release, pursuant to the provisions of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that are applicable to probation revocation and to the provisions of applicable policy statements issued by the Sentencing Commission . . . ."
The text of subsection (e)(3) does not speak directly to the question whether a district court revoking a term of supervised release in favor of reimprisonment may require service of a further term of supervised release following the further incarceration. And if we were to concentrate exclusively on the verb "revoke," we would not detect any suggestion that the reincarceration might be followed by another term of supervised release, the conventional understanding of "revoke" being simply "to annul by recalling or taking back." Webster's Third New International Dictionary 1944 (1981). There are reasons, nonetheless, to think that the option of further supervised release was intended.
First, there are some textual reasons, starting with the preceding subsection (e)(1). This is an unequivocal provision for ending the term of supervised release without the possibility of its reimposition or continuation at a later time. Congress wrote that when a court finds that a defendant's conduct and the interests of justice warrant it, the court may "terminate a term of supervised release and discharge the person released," once at least a year of release time has been served. If application of subsection (3) had likewise been meant to conclude any possibility of supervised release later, it would have been natural for Congress to write in like terms. It could have provided that upon finding a defendant in violation of the release conditions the court could "terminate a term of supervised release" and order the de-
Page: Index Previous 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007