Rico v. United States
The Court holds that a defendant who absconds while on federal supervised release does not automatically extend the term of that release. The Sentencing Reform Act gives courts many tools to punish a failure to report, but a fugitive-tolling rule that keeps the term running past the date a judge set is not one of them.
Case background
Isabel Rico pleaded guilty to federal drug trafficking charges and, after violating the conditions of her supervised release, was sent back to prison and ordered to serve a new 42-month term of supervised release set to expire in June 2021. After her second release, she changed her residence without notifying her probation officer. A warrant issued for her arrest, but federal authorities did not locate her until January 2023. While she was absconding, Ms. Rico committed a state drug offense in January 2022, which resulted in a conviction. Back in federal district court, the judge treated that drug offense as a Grade A violation of her supervised release and sentenced her to 16 months of incarceration followed by two more years of supervised release. Ms. Rico appealed, arguing that the offense occurred after her term had expired. The Ninth Circuit disagreed, holding that her abscondment “tolled” the clock so that her term kept running until authorities caught up with her. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve a circuit split.
Questions Presented
(1) Whether the fugitive-tolling doctrine applies in the context of supervised release.
Holding
The Sentencing Reform Act does not authorize a rule automatically extending a defendant’s term of supervised release when the defendant absconds. The Act sets when supervised release begins and its maximum length, lets courts revoke release and impose more prison and supervised release for violations, and contains narrow extension and tolling rules with their own limits, including the warrant-or-summons requirement of Section 3583(i). The absence of anything like the Ninth Circuit’s automatic extension rule among those detailed instructions is telling. The government’s arguments from the statutory text, from Mont v. United States and United States v. Johnson, from the common-law rule for escaped prisoners, and from policy all fail to fill that gap. The judgment of the Ninth Circuit is reversed and the case remanded.
The Court
Justice Gorsuch delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Jackson joined. Justice Alito filed a dissenting opinion.
What this episode contains
This episode is an AI-narrated reading of the majority opinion in Rico v. United States, written by Justice Gorsuch.
AI disclosure: The voice in this episode is AI-generated, using a machine learning model styled to loosely resemble the authoring justice. Tone, inflection, pacing, and emphasis are artifacts of the model and should not be attributed to Justice Gorsuch. The text being read is the Court’s published majority opinion, lightly adapted to improve readability for the spoken format.