United States v. Granderson

• Decision Date: 22 March 1994
• Docket Number: 921662
• Citation: 511 U.S. 39,114 S.Ct. 1259,127 L.Ed.2d 611
• Parties: UNITED STATES, Petitioner v. Ralph Stuart GRANDERSON, Jr
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

511 U.S. 39

114 S.Ct. 1259

127 L.Ed.2d 611

UNITED STATES, Petitioner

v Ralph Stuart GRANDERSON, Jr.

No. 92-1662.

Supreme Court of the United States

Argued Jan. 10, 1994.

Decided March 22, 1994.

Syllabus ^*

Respondent Granderson, a letter carrier, pleaded guilty to one count of destruction of mail. The potential imprisonment range for that crime was 0-6 months under the United States Sentencing Guidelines. The District Court imposed no prison time, sentencing Granderson instead to 5 years' probation and a fine. After Granderson tested positive for cocaine, the court resentenced him under 18 U.S.C. § 3565(a), which provides that if a person serving a sentence of probation possesses illegal drugs, "the court shall revoke the sentence of probation and sentence the defendant to not less than one-third of the original sentence." Accepting the Government's reading of the statute, the District Court concluded that the phrase "original sentence" referred to the term of probation actually imposed (60 months), rather than the 0-6 month imprisonment range authorized by the Guidelines. Accordingly, that court resentenced Granderson to 20 months' imprisonment. The Court of Appeals upheld the revocation of Granderson's probation, but vacated his new sentence. Invoking the rule of lenity, the court agreed with Granderson that "original sentence" referred to the potential imprisonment range under the Guidelines, not to the actual probation sentence. Because Granderson had already served 11 months of his revocation sentence—more than the 6-months maximum under the Guidelines —the court ordered him released from custody.

Held: The minimum revocation sentence under § 3565(a)'s drug-possession proviso is one-third the maximum of the originally applicable Guidelines range of imprisonment, and the maximum revocation sentence is the Guidelines maximum. Pp. ____.

(a) The Government is correct that the proviso mandates imprisonment, not renewed probation, as the required type of punishment. The contrast in §§ 3565(a)(1) and (2) between "continu[ing]" and "revok[ing]" probation as the alternative punishments for a defendant who violates a probation condition suggests that a revocation sentence must be a sentence of imprisonment, not a continuation of probation. Moreover, it would be absurd to punish drug-possessing probationers by revoking their probation and imposing a new term of probation no longer than the original. However, the Government contends incorrectly that the term "original sentence" unambiguously calls for a sentence based on the term of probation. The statutory language appears to differentiate, not to equate or amalgamate, "the sentence of probation" and "the original sentence." The Government's interpretation, furthermore, reads the proviso's word "sentence" inconsistently. Pp. ____.

(b) Under Granderson's reading of the proviso, the "original sentence" that sets the duration of the revocation sentence is the applicable Guidelines sentence of imprisonment, not the revoked term of probation. That reading avoids both the linguistic anomalies presented by the Government's construction and the sentencing disparities that would attend the Government's interpretation. Furthermore, contrary to the Government's arguments, Granderson's reading satisfies the statute's purpose by treating the class of drug possessors more severely than other probation violators, and the proviso need not be interpreted in pari materia with the discrete, differently worded provision prescribing revocation of the supervised release of drug possessors. Moreover, the proviso's history furnishes additional cause to resist the Government's interpretation, for it indicates that the proviso may not have received Congress' careful attention and may have been composed with an obsolete federal sentencing regime in the drafter's mind. In these circumstances, where the text, structure, and statutory history fail to establish that the Government's position is unambiguously correct, the rule of lenity operates to resolve the statutory ambiguity in Granderson's favor. Pp. ____.

(c) The benchmark for the revocation sentence under the proviso is the maximum Guidelines sentence of imprisonment. Pp. ____.

(d) Because Granderson's maximum revocation sentence under the proviso was 6 months, and because he had already served 11 months imprisonment at the time the Court of Appeals issued its decision, that court correctly ordered his release. P. ____.

969 F.2d 980 (CA11 1992), affirmed.

GINSBURG, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which BLACKMUN, STEVENS, O'CONNOR, and SOUTER, JJ., joined. SCALIA, J., and KENNEDY, J., filed opinions concurring in the judgment. REHNQUIST, C.J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which THOMAS, J., joined.

Thomas G. Hungar, for petitioner.

Gregory S. Smith, appointed by this Court, for respondent.

Justice GINSBURG delivered the opinion of the Court.

This case presents a question of statutory interpretation regarding revocation of a federal sentence of probation. The law at issue provides that if a person serving a sentence of probation possesses illegal drugs, "the court shall revoke the sentence of probation and sentence the defendant to not less than one-third of the original sentence." 18 U.S.C. § 3565(a). Congress did not further define the critical term "original sentence," nor are those words, unmodified, used elsewhere in the Federal Criminal Code chapter on sentencing. Embedded in that context, the words "original sentence" in § 3565(a) are susceptible to at least three interpretations.

Read in isolation, the provision could be taken to mean the reimposition of a sentence of probation, for a period not less than one-third of the original sentence of probation. This construction, however, is implausible, and has been urged by neither party, for it would generally demand no increased sanction, plainly not what Congress intended.

The Government, petitioner here, reads the provision to draw the time period from the initially imposed sentence of probation, but to require incarceration, not renewed probation, for not less than one-third of that period. On the Government's reading, accepted by the District Court, respondent Granderson would face a 20-month mandatory minimum sentence of imprisonment.

Granderson maintains that "original sentence" refers to the sentence of incarceration he could have received initially, in lieu of the sentence of probation, under the United States Sentencing Guidelines. Granderson's construction calls for a 2-month mandatory minimum. The Court of Appeals accepted Granderson's interpretation, see 969 F.2d 980 (CA11 1992); returns in other circuits are divided.¹

The "original sentence" prescription of § 3565(a) was a late-hour addition to the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, a sprawling enactment that takes up 364 pages in Statutes at Large. Pub.L. 100-690, 102 Stat. 4181-4545. The provision appears not to have received Congress' careful attention. It may have been composed, we suggest below, with the pre-1984 federal sentencing regime in the drafter's mind; it does not easily adapt to the regime established by the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984.

According the statute a sensible construction, we recognize, in common with all courts that have grappled with the "original sentence" conundrum, that Congress prescribed imprisonment as the type of punishment for drug-possessing probationers.² As to the duration of that punishment, we rest on the principle that " 'the Court will not interpret a federal criminal statute so as to increase the penalty . . . when such an interpretation can be based on no more than a guess as to what Congress intended.' " Bifulco v. United States, 447 U.S. 381, 387, 100 S.Ct. 2247, 2252, 65 L.Ed.2d 205 (1980), quoting Ladner v. United States, 358 U.S. 169, 178, 79 S.Ct. 209, 214, 3 L.Ed.2d 199 (1958). We therefore adopt Granderson's interpretation and affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

I

Granderson, a letter carrier, pleaded guilty to one count of destruction of mail, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1703(a). Under the Sentencing Guidelines, the potential imprisonment range, derived from the character of the offense and the offender's criminal history category, was 0-6 months. The District Court imposed no prison time, but sentenced Granderson to 5 years' probation and a $2,000 fine.³ As a standard condition of probation, Granderson was required to submit periodically to urinary testing for illegal drug use.

Several weeks after his original sentencing, Granderson tested positive for cocaine, and his probation officer petitioned for revocation of the sentence of probation. Finding that Granderson had possessed cocaine, the District Court revoked Granderson's sentence of probation and undertook to resentence him, pursuant to § 3565(a), to incarceration for "not less than one-third of the original sentence." The term "original sentence," the District Court concluded, referred to the term of probation actually imposed (60 months) rather than the imprisonment range authorized by the Guidelines (0-6 months). The court accordingly sentenced Granderson to 20 months' imprisonment.

The Court of Appeals upheld the revocation of the sentence of probation but vacated Granderson's new sentence. 969 F.2d 980 (CA11 1992). That court observed that the probation revocation sentence of 20 months' imprisonment imposed by the District Court was far longer than the sentence that could have been imposed either for the underlying crime of destroying mail (six months) or for the crime of cocaine possession (one year). Id., at 983, and n. 2. The Court of Appeals called it "legal alchemy" to convert an "original sentence" of "conditional liberty," with a correspondingly long term, into a sentence of imprisonment with a time span geared to the lesser restraint. Id., at 984, quoting United States v. Gordon, 961 F.2d 426, 432 (CA3 1992). Invoking the rule of lenity, id., at 983, the...