United States v. Taylor, 17-3450
| Decision Date | 29 June 2018 |
| Docket Number | No. 17-3450,17-3450 |
| Parties | UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plain tiff-Appellee, v. TERRY N. TAYLOR, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1
Submitted June 29, 2018*
Before DIANE P. WOOD, Chief Judge MICHAEL S. KANNE, Circuit Judge MICHAEL Y. SCUDDER, Circuit Judge
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Western Division.
ORDER
Terry Taylor appeals the denial of his motion for termination of his remaining term of supervised release. He argues that early release is warranted because he was imprisoned for longer than the statutory maximum for his offenses and he so far has complied with his supervised-release conditions. The district court found that continued supervised release was necessary to help Taylor reintegrate into thecommunity. Because the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying Taylor's motion, we affirm.
Taylor was convicted of possessing a firearm as a felon, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), and possessing an unregistered sawed-off shotgun, 26 U.S.C. § 5861(d). The judge sentenced him under the Armed Career Criminal Act, 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(1), based on three prior convictions that qualified as "violent felonies": two for armed robbery and one for theft from a person. As a result, Taylor was subject to a fifteen-year statutory minimum sentence, see 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(1), rather than the ten-year statutory maximum that would otherwise apply, see 18 U.S.C. § 924(a)(2); see also 26 U.S.C. § 5871. The judge sentenced him to a total of 300 months' imprisonment.
Taylor appealed his sentence, arguing that his theft conviction did not constitute a violent felony because no violence occurred during the commission of the crime. But the Armed Career Criminal Act's "residual clause" defines violent felony as any crime that "involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another," see 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(2)(B)(ii), and we upheld the district court's conclusion that theft from a person creates the potential for violence or injury. See United States v. Taylor, 179 F. App'x. 957, 961 (7th Cir. 2006).
Taylor successfully challenged his sentence after the Supreme Court in Samuel Johnson v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2551 (2015), held that the residual clause of the ACCA was unconstitutionally vague. He was initially resentenced to a total term of 176 months' imprisonment, but we vacated that sentence, United States v. Taylor, 833 F.3d 795, 796-97 (7th Cir. 2016), and Taylor was resentenced to time-served and three years' supervised release. By then, he had been incarcerated for about fourteen years.
After completing one year of supervised release, Taylor moved for early termination on grounds that he was imprisoned longer than the ten-year statutory maximum under both 18 U.S.C. § 924(a)(2) and 26 U.S.C. § 5871, and that he had complied with all supervised-release conditions. The district court denied the motion. The court acknowledged that Taylor had followed his supervised-release conditions and that medical issues limited any risk that he posed to the public, but the court also pointed out Taylor's "long history of criminal behavior" and his four major incident reports during a recent thirty-seven-day stay in a residential re-entry center. This recent behavior, the court said, suggested that Taylor was having trouble reintegrating into the community and could continue to pose a significant public risk.
On appeal Taylor maintains that the time he spent unlawfully imprisoned should count toward his term of supervised release. But prison time and supervised release are not interchangeable: "Supervised release fulfills rehabilitative ends, distinct from those served by incarceration." United States v. Johnson, 529 U.S. 53, 59 (2000). A key purpose of supervised release is to ease an individual's transition back into the community after a long prison term, United States v. Maranda, 761 F.3d 689, 697 (7th Cir. 2014), and that...
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