Mont v. United States

Mont had a five-year federal term of supervised release, scheduled to end on March 6, 2017. In June 2016, he was arrested on state drug trafficking charges. In October 2016, Mont pleaded guilty to state charges. He then admitted in a federal court filing that he violated his supervised-release conditions by virtue of the new state convictions. The district court rescheduled his hearing several times to allow the state court to first sentence Mont. On March 21, 2017, Mont was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. His 10 months of pretrial custody were credited as time served. On March 30, the district court set a supervised-release hearing. Mont unsuccessfully challenged the court’s jurisdiction, arguing that his supervised release had expired on March 6. The court ordered him to serve an additional 42 months’ imprisonment consecutive to his state sentence. The Sixth Circuit and Supreme court affirmed, citing 18 U.S.C. 3624(e), which provides that a “term of supervised release does not run during any period in which the person is imprisoned in connection with a conviction for a . . . crime unless the imprisonment is for a period of less than 30 consecutive days.” Pretrial detention later credited as time served for a new conviction is "imprisonment in connection with a conviction" and tolls the supervised-release term, even if the court must make the tolling calculation after learning whether the time will be credited. The Court noted that there is no reason to give a defendant the windfall of satisfying a new sentence of imprisonment and an old sentence of supervised release with the same period of pretrial detention. The defendant need not be supervised when he is in custody; there is nothing unfair about the defendant not knowing during pretrial detention whether he is also under supervised release. View "Mont v. United States" on Justia Law