In United States v. Shaday, 16-529, the Second Circuit (Jacobs, Livingston, and Kaplan (sitting by designation)) vacated and remanded the supervised release portion of defendant Yova Kana Shaday’s sentence after finding that the district court had applied the wrong Guidelines range. The district court had sentenced Shaday to a Guidelines sentence of twenty-four months’ imprisonment for failing to register as a sex offender under 18 U.S.C. § 2250(a), along with a supervised release term of ten years. Reviewing for plain error, the Second Circuit found that the district court had miscalculated the supervised release portion of Shaday’s sentence when it applied a three-years-to-life Guidelines range instead of the correct five-year fixed term. Such an error was not harmless, the Court continued, as there was no indication in the record that the district court would have imposed the same supervised release sentence had it applied the correct Guidelines range; rather, the district court mistakenly believed it was imposing a within-Guidelines supervised release sentence and thus never considered whether to impose an upward departure.
The Court’s decision serves as another reminder that supervised release terms are part and parcel of a defendant’s sentence and therefore require the same care in calculation as imprisonment terms. In addition, Shaday reiterates the importance of providing clear justification for a non-Guidelines sentence to avoid reversal, an issue the Second Circuit has also addressed recently.