Today, the Supreme Court held that the Sentencing Reform Act does not authorize a rule automatically extending a defendant’s term of supervised release when the defendant absconds. See Rico v. United States, No. 24-1056 (Mar. 25, 2026).
In 2010, Petitioner Isabel Rico pleaded to drug charges and was sentenced to seven years in prison followed by 4 years of supervised release. After leaving prison in 2017, Rico violated her supervised release conditions. She was returned to prison for two months and ordered to serve another 42-month term of supervised release. The new term of supervised release was to terminate in June 2021.
Upon her second release from prison in December 2017, Rico changed her address without notifying her probation officer, again violating the conditions of her supervised release. A judge issued a warrant for her arrest in 2018. But the feds didn’t catch up with her until January 2023. During her abscondment, Rico committed two new state law offenses, resulting in convictions: (1) evading police and driving without a license in January 2021; and (2) possessing illicit drugs for sale in January 2022. In her subsequent VOSR proceedings, the district court treated Rico’s 2022 drug offense as a Grade A violation of her supervised release conditions and sentenced her to 16 months incarceration followed by two more years of supervised release.
Rico appealed, arguing the district court lacked authority to treat her 2022 drug offense as a supervised release violation since it occurred after her supervised release period had expired. The Ninth Circuit disagreed, holding that Rico’s abscondment “tolled” the clock so that her term continued to run until authorities caught up with her. As a result, her 2022 state drug offense occurred while she was on supervised release and could be treated as a violation of supervised release.
In an 8 to 1 opinion written by Justice Gorsuch, the Court reversed, over Justice Alito’s dissent. The Court disagreed with the Ninth Circuit’s holding that a defendant who absconds during supervised release “tolls” his existing term of supervised release until federal authorities find him. In the Court’s view, tolling is a “misnomer” because what such a “rule really does is extend the period of supervised release beyond what a judge has ordered,” which nothing in the Sentencing Reform Act authorizes. The Court reasoned that the “Sentencing Reform Act provides courts with many tools to address defendants who fail to report or otherwise violate their supervised release conditions. But automatically extending a term of supervised release is not among them.”
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