In United States v. Oliver, --- F.4th ---, No. 30137 (9th Cir. 2022), the Court affirmed the district court’s judgment revoking supervised release based on Oliver's committing a new crime, and the sentence imposed upon revocation.
The district court revoked Oliver's supervised release for violating 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a) by submitting a monthly supervision report with false statements to his probation officer. Oliver argued that, because the report was eventually forwarded to a judge, his conduct fell within the exemption in 18 U.S.C. § 1001(b) for statements “submitted to a judge or magistrate” in a judicial proceeding.
The Court rejected that argument: "By its plain language, the judicial proceeding exception only protects statements made 'by [the] party . . . to the judge or magistrate'—not statements made to others in the judicial branch."
"To be sure, we’ve held that some judicial branch “intermediar[ies]” may be such a direct conduit to a judge that the requirement is satisfied by submission to the intermediary. Horvath, 492 F.3d at 1081. For example, we’ve said that delivery of material to a judge “by means of couriers, court clerks, secretaries, and other staff” is sufficiently connected to a judge to meet the submission requirement. Id. We’ve also said that a defendant’s interview with a probation officer before sentencing meets the submission requirement, but “only if the law requires the probation officer to include the statement in the [presentence report (“PSR”)] and submit the PSR to the court.” Id. (emphasis added). There, the probation officer is a “neutral, information-gathering agent of the court” who directs the defendant’s statements to the judge “without superimposing any analysis of his own.” Id. at 1079. We explicitly “limited [the] reach of our holding” in Horvath to that narrow circumstance of a pre-sentencing interview for preparing a PSR. Id. at 1081. None of Horvath’s exceptions apply here. Oliver lied on a monthly supervision report provided to his probation officer during his term of supervised release."
The Court also rejected Oliver's argument "that a jury must find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt before a court may revoke his supervised release under 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e) for committing a new crime in violation of his supervised release conditions."
"Because a sentence for a supervised release violation is generally part of the penalty for the original offense, it is not a new and additional punishment requiring Apprendi-style jury findings beyond a reasonable doubt. That is true even when the violative act is a criminal offense with no mandatory minimum revocation sentence, as is the case here."
