{"id":7415,"date":"2009-10-11T21:37:28","date_gmt":"2009-10-12T02:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=7415"},"modified":"2009-10-11T21:42:29","modified_gmt":"2009-10-12T02:42:29","slug":"seventh-circuit-criminal-case-of-the-week-halfway-houses-back-on-the-menu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2009\/10\/seventh-circuit-criminal-case-of-the-week-halfway-houses-back-on-the-menu\/","title":{"rendered":"Seventh Circuit Criminal Case of the Week: Halfway Houses Back on the Menu"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"seventhIf Congress makes an obvious error in drafting a statute, can a court correct that error by effectively adding something to the statute that is not there?\u00a0 Such was the interesting jurisprudential\u00a0question the Seventh Circuit confronted last January in United States v. Head, <\/em>552 F.3d 640 (2009).\u00a0 Because of a mix-up with statutory cross-references, the statute that lists permissible conditions of supervised release in the federal system does not include assignment to a halfway house.\u00a0 However, the first seven circuits to consider\u00a0the question held that sentencing judges could indeed order placement in a halfway house, reasoning that a\u00a0literal interpretation of the statute would produce an absurdity.\u00a0\u00a0In Head<\/em>, the Seventh Circuit\u00a0bucked the trend and rejected the government’s absurdity argument.\u00a0 (My post on Head <\/em>is here<\/a>.)\u00a0 Although Congress corrected its drafting error with a 2008 amendment,\u00a0Head\u00a0<\/em>held that the amendment could not be applied\u00a0retroactively, meaning that assignment to a halfway house seemed to be off the table\u00a0as a sentencing option for a large group of defendants still moving through the court\u00a0system in\u00a0this region.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0now the court\u00a0has significantly limited the significance of Head <\/em>in\u00a0United States v. Anderson <\/a><\/em>(No. 09-1958).\u00a0 <\/p>\n

For conditions of\u00a0supervised release, 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 3583 (in its pre-2008 form) authorized a sentencing\u00a0court to select just about\u00a0any of the permissible conditions of probation (except assignment to a halfway house) and “any other condition it considers to be appropriate.”\u00a0 In Anderson<\/em>, the Seventh Circuit (per Judge Wood) held that this latter language, the “catch-all provision,” permits assignment to a halfway house.\u00a0 In Head<\/em>, the court had rejected this reading of the catch-all provision, reasoning that the inclusion <\/em>of the halfway-house condition in the probation statute and the lack of specific authorization for the condition in the supervised release statute decided the question; a general catch-all provision could not overcome the negative implication created by the statute’s failure to authorize the condition expressly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Anderson <\/em>downplayed this aspect of Head<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Head <\/em>indicated in a footnote that the catch-all provision did not recapture the power to impose the halfway-house condition . . . . This theory, however, had not been pressed by the Government . . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In effect, Anderson <\/em>seems to treat\u00a0Head’s <\/em>analysis of the catch-all provision as mere dicta and adopts a quite different interpretation: the “any other condition” language means what it says, “confer[ring] broad discretion on the district courts to fashion appropriate conditions of release that compl[y] with the broad goals of sentencing.”\u00a0 Thus, it turns out (per Anderson<\/em>)\u00a0that Head <\/em>only held that the halfway-house condition was not expressly authorized by the supervised-release statute; Head <\/em>did not really decide whether the condition was prohibited.\u00a0 Anderson <\/em>now tells us that the condition is not prohibited.<\/p>\n

Anderson<\/em>‘s interpretation of Head <\/em>strikes me as rather strained.\u00a0 But the Anderson <\/em>panel circulated its opinion to the full court, and not one judge voted to hear the case en banc<\/em>.\u00a0 It seems odd that the court has so thoroughly undermined such a recent decision as Head<\/em>, which is only nine months old, without a single voice raised in protest.\u00a0 I suppose this is a rather arcane aspect of sentencing law, and perhaps no one really cares.\u00a0 Or perhaps something in the new cases convinced the judges that Head <\/em>had sacrificed too much\u00a0by way of sound corrections\u00a0policy in the name of textualist purity.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps the overwhelming weight of contrary precedent in the other circuits also contributed to the judges’ discomfort with Head.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Congress makes an obvious error in drafting a statute, can a court correct that error by effectively adding something to the statute that is not there?\u00a0 Such was the interesting jurisprudential\u00a0question the Seventh Circuit confronted last January in United States v. Head, 552 F.3d 640 (2009).\u00a0 Because of a mix-up with statutory cross-references, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[85,30,28,74,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-circuit-splits","category-criminal-justice","category-criminal-law-process","category-federal-sentencing","category-seventh-circuit","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}