United States v. Carpenter

104 F.4th 655

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Seldrick R. CARPENTER, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 23-3295

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit

Argued May 29, 2024

Decided June 17, 2024

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of Illinois. No. 1:18-cr-10009-MMM-JEH-1 — Michael M. Mihm, Judge.

Jeffrey Kienstra, Attorney, Office of the United States Attorney, Peoria, IL, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Michael Will Roy, Attorney, Office of the Federeal Public Defender, Urbana, IL, for Defendant-Appellant.

Jacob Schuman, Esq., Attorney, Pennsylvania Law School, University Park, PA, for Amici Curiae Evan D. Bernick, Brittany Deitch, Ingrid V. Eagly, Eric Fish, Cynthia Godsoe.

Before Easterbrook, Brennan, and Scudder, Circuit Judges.

Scudder, Circuit Judge.

The United States Constitution guarantees criminal defendants the right to a jury trial in two places. Section 2 of Article III provides that "[t]he Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury." And, for its part, the Sixth Amendment promises that in "all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed." This case presents the question whether a supervised release revocation proceeding held under 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e)(3) constitutes the "trial of [a] crime" or a "criminal prosecution" within the meaning of either clause. Agreeing with the district court, we hold that it does not.

I

A

Little space need be devoted to the facts. In 2020 Seldrick Carpenter commenced a six-year term of supervised release after completing a federal sentence for distributing fentanyl. For a time, Carpenter complied with his conditions. But following the death of his mother, he began using drugs and lashing out against his probation officer. When efforts to address these issues through behavioral therapy failed, Carpenter's probation officer petitioned to revoke his supervised release. The district court released Carpenter on bond pending a final revocation hearing, only then to see him come under suspicion for setting a car on fire.

B

The Probation Office alleged that Carpenter committed a litany of supervised release violations, the most serious of which included the offenses of arson, criminal damage to property, intimidation, and aggravated battery. In advance of the revocation hearing, Carpenter moved for a jury trial under the Sixth Amendment and, alternatively, under Article III, § 2, cl. 3. The district court denied the motion and presided over Carpenter's revocation hearing without a jury. In the end, it found Carpenter guilty of several violations and exercised the discretion conferred by 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e)(3) to revoke Carpenter's supervised release. It then imposed a revocation sentence of 30 months' imprisonment.

Carpenter appeals, challenging the district court's refusal to impanel a jury and failure to recommend that the Bureau of Prisons house him in a specified low-security prison in Michigan.

II

The constitutional question pressed by Carpenter is important not only because supervised release violations occur with some frequency, but also because of the consequential deprivation of liberty that accompanies revocation. In the final analysis, we conclude that neither the Sixth Amendment nor Section 2 of Article III of the U.S. Constitution guarantee a jury trial in a revocation hearing like Carpenter's. A defendant situated like Carpenter is entitled only to those procedures dictated by the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

A

By its terms, the Sixth Amendment applies only to "criminal prosecutions." U.S. Const. amend VI. Carpenter contends that his supervised release revocation met that description. He begins from the observation that "the scope of the constitutional jury right must be informed by the historical role of the jury at common law." So. Union Co. v. United States, 567 U.S. 343, 353, 132 S.Ct. 2344, 183 L.Ed.2d 318 (2012) (quotations omitted). From there he seeks to leverage recent scholarly research purporting to show that defendants in the founding era received jury trials in proceedings analogous to today's supervised release revocations. See Jacob Schuman, Revocation at the Founding, 122 Mich. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2024).

As Carpenter recognizes, however, his position collides with thirty years of contrary precedent. We have long held that supervised release revocations—whether conducted under § 3583(e)(3) or some other provision—are not "criminal prosecutions" within the meaning of the Sixth Amendment. See United States v. Boultinghouse, 784 F.3d 1163, 1171 (7th Cir. 2015) ("[A] revocation proceeding, because it focuses on the modification of a sentence already imposed and implicates the conditional (rather than absolute) liberty that the defendant enjoys as a result of that sentence, is not considered to be a stage of a criminal prosecution."); United States v. Kelley, 446 F.3d 688, 691 (7th Cir. 2006) (same); United States v. Pratt, 52 F.3d 671, 675 (7th Cir. 1995) (same).

Although our full court could revisit these decisions, they stand today as controlling authority. See Wilson v. Cook Cty., 937 F.3d 1028, 1035 (7th Cir. 2019) ("[P]rinciples of stare decisis require that we give considerable weight to prior decisions." (quoting McLain v. Retail Food Emp'rs Joint Pension Plan, 413 F.3d 582, 586 (7th Cir. 2005))). They reflect the court's reasoned judgment on a question of constitutional law, and we would need "compelling reason[s]" to chart a different course. See United States v. Lamon, 893 F.3d 369, 372 (7th Cir. 2018) (quotations omitted). Mere disagreement with the law or a desire to see the law change is not enough. See Tate v. Showboat Marina Casino P'ship, 431 F.3d 580, 582 (7th Cir. 2005) ("[I]f the fact that a court considers one of its previous decisions to be incorrect is a sufficient ground for overruling it, then stare decisis is out the window, because no doctrine of deference to precedent is needed to induce a court to follow the precedents that it agrees with.").

None of this is lost on Carpenter, who candidly admits that he is asking us to overrule our precedent. In extending that invitation, he directs our attention to the Supreme Court's 2019 decision in United States v. Haymond, 588 U.S. 634, 139 S. Ct. 2369, 204 L.Ed.2d 897, which he reads as unsettling and indeed conflicting with our precedent. See Wilson, 937 F.3d at 1035 (explaining that a subsequent Supreme Court decision undermining Circuit precedent is a compelling reason to revisit a settled issue). We disagree, at least in the context of supervised release revocations conducted under the authority of 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e)(3).

Haymond involved a Sixth Amendment challenge not to § 3583(e)(3)—the provision at issue here—but instead to § 3583(k), a supervised release revocation provision applicable only to defendants required to register under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act. In the event such a defendant is found to have committed any one of an enumerated list of sex crimes while on supervised release, § 3583(k) requires district courts to revoke his term of supervised release and impose a revocation sentence of "not less than 5 years."

Andre Haymond had been convicted of possessing child pornography in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2252(b)(2), an offense that carried a statutory range of 0 to 10 years' imprisonment. See Haymond, 139 S. Ct. at 2373. After completing a 38-month prison sentence, he began serving a ten-year term of supervised release. See id. While under supervision, Haymond was accused once again of possessing child pornography—one of the offenses covered by § 3583(k). See id. At his revocation hearing and on appeal, Haymond argued that § 3583(k) violated the Sixth Amendment by increasing his sentencing exposure based on judge-found facts. See id. at 2375; see also Alleyne v. United States, 570 U.S. 99, 116, 133 S.Ct. 2151, 186 L.Ed.2d 314 (2013) (plurality opinion) (holding that "facts that increase mandatory minimum sentences must be submitted to [a] jury"). The Tenth Circuit agreed and held § 3583(k) unconstitutional as applied to Haymond. Haymond, 139 S. Ct. at 2375.

The Supreme Court affirmed, but no single opinion commanded the support of five Justices. Writing for three others, Justice Gorsuch relied heavily upon the Court's prior holding in Alleyne and concluded that § 3583(k) violated the Sixth Amendment by compelling the district court to find facts triggering a heightened sentencing exposure: a mandatory minimum revocation sentence of five years even though the jury's verdict in Haymond's underlying criminal prosecution did not itself authorize any mandatory minimum. See id. at 2378-79. En route to that conclusion, Justice Gorsuch appeared to suggest that—contrary to our precedent—most, if not all, supervised release revocations are "criminal prosecutions" as that term was understood at the founding. See id. at 2376 (observing that, historically, "the concept of a 'crime' was a broad one linked to punishment"). The dissenting Justices disagreed. Writing for three others, Justice Alito would have held—consistent with our precedent—that no supervised release proceedings are "criminal prosecutions" within the meaning of the Sixth Amendment. See id. at 2393-95.

In a solo concurrence Justice Breyer supplied the necessary fifth vote for affirming the Tenth Circuit. See id. at 2385-86. He "agree[d] with much of the dissent, in particular that the role of the judge in a supervised-release proceeding is consistent with traditional parole." Id. at 2385. But he disagreed with Justice Gorsuch's "transplant" of Alleyne "to the supervised-release context." Id. Justice Breyer nonetheless then explained that "three aspects" of § 3583(k) made it "less like ordinary revocation and more like punishment for a new offense,...