What happened
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Jaron Burnett's supervised-release case, but Justice Neil Gorsuch used a dissent from the denial of certiorari to press a Sixth Amendment question over prison time that exceeds the statutory maximum tied to the original conviction.
Burnett had pleaded guilty to a federal crime carrying a 120-month maximum sentence, according to the dissent. He initially received 105 months in prison followed by 15 years of supervised release, then later received additional prison time after alleged violations of that supervised release.
The dispute before the justices arose after the government again accused Burnett of violating supervised release and sought more prison time. Gorsuch said the district court proceeded without a jury, used a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, found some violations and imposed another 14 months, bringing Burnett's total prison time to 132 months, 12 months above the statutory maximum for the underlying offense. The court of appeals affirmed.
Gorsuch wrote that Burnett was not objecting to new prison time for supervised-release violations in general, or even to judge-found violations under a preponderance standard when the resulting punishment stayed within the statutory maximum. The issue, as the dissent framed it, was whether a jury must decide contested facts beyond a reasonable doubt when the added prison time pushes the total sentence above that maximum.
The dissent warned that defendants on long or lifetime supervised-release terms could otherwise face more imprisonment based on judge-found violations rather than jury findings. Bypassing juries and the reasonable-doubt standard may offer prosecutors advantages, Gorsuch wrote, but "whether this arrangement can be squared with the Constitution is another thing."
The court's denial leaves the lower-court judgment intact and creates no Supreme Court merits ruling on the Sixth Amendment question. Gorsuch said he hoped the court would take up a similar case soon and that lower courts would more carefully consider the Sixth Amendment's application in the supervised-release context in the meantime.