Federal Supervised Release: Fighting Unlawful Home Detention

Success in Baltimore

We recently successfully represented a client in the US Court for the District of Maryland with our co-counsel in Baltimore. The client had served a long federal prison term (after being extradited from Southeast Asia) and was on supervised release for life, with one of the conditions of their release being electronic monitoring. The management of the monitoring had been delegated to the United States Probation Office, who were making our client submit for approval an advance schedule of their whereabouts every week, a week in advance, down to minute details, including going into their backyard. This was, we argued, tantamount to being under house arrest for life, a hallmark of which is not being allowed to leave the walls of the home without prior approval.

The government initially argued that the advance notice requirement was essential for the location monitoring condition to be satisfied. The Chief Judge agreed with us that this requirement was an overreaching intrusion into our client’s liberty.

What the law says

The power to impose a term of supervised release comes from 18 U.S.C. § 3583, which states that involves no greater deprivation of liberty than is reasonably necessary for the purposes of deterring criminal conduct, protecting the public, and providing the defendant with correctional treatment.

Home detention or home incarceration is only ever allowed during a term of supervised release as an alternative to prison incarceration (see § 3583(e)(4)); essentially, it is only an option if a defendant has breached the terms of their supervised release. Home detention is considered much more onerous than simply tracking a defendant’s location, and is therefore a much greater intrusion into their liberty.

The probation officer only has the power to determine the method in which a condition of release is enforced; they do not have the power to change or impose conditions of release beyond what the sentencing court fashioned in the judgment. Enforcing effective home detention as part of a “monitoring” condition constitutes changing the condition of release, and is unlawful.

If you believe any conditions of your release from prison are being misapplied or unlawfully interpreted, reach out to us today.