United States v. Darrin Maranda

761 F.3d 689, 2014 WL 3748934, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 14724
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
DecidedJuly 31, 2014
Docket13-3917
StatusPublished
Cited by13 cases

This text of 761 F.3d 689 (United States v. Darrin Maranda) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. Darrin Maranda, 761 F.3d 689, 2014 WL 3748934, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 14724 (7th Cir. 2014).

Opinion

FLAUM, Circuit Judge.

This appeal requires us to decide when the clock starts on a criminal defendant’s term of supervised release. Ordinarily, the answer is straightforward — supervised release begins once the defendant leaves prison and reenters society. Darrin Mar-anda’s case, however, presents an unusual situation: a defendant who has completed his prison sentence, but who remains in federal custody while he awaits a determination of whether he will be civilly committed pursuant to the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act. The government argues that because the Adam Walsh Act stayed Maranda’s release pending the outcome of his civil-commitment hearing, his term of supervised release did not begin until these proceedings were resolved in his favor and the stay was lifted. Mar-anda argues that his term of supervised release began on the date his criminal sentence expired, even though he remained in prison at that time. If Maranda is right, then his term of supervised release was over long before his civil-commitment proceedings ended — and long before he committed the violations of his conditions of release that he’s now accused of.

The district court held that Maranda’s term of supervised release did not begin until he was actually freed from custody. We agree. Read together, the relevant supervised-release provision, 18 U.S.C. § 3624(e), and the stay-of-release provision in the civil-commitment statute, 18 U.S.C. § 4248(a), establish that Maranda was not “released from imprisonment” while awaiting the outcome of his Adam Walsh Act proceedings. We therefore join two of the three circuits to have addressed this question, see United States v. Neuhauser, 745 F.3d 125 (4th Cir.2014), petition for cert. *691 filed (U.S. July 22, 2014) (No. 14-5372); United States v. Mosby, 719 F.3d 925 (8th Cir.2013), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 134 S.Ct. 905, 187 L.Ed.2d 790 (2014), and affirm the district court’s revocation of Maranda’s supervised release.

I. Background

Darrin Maranda committed his first sex offense in 1994, and he has been in and out of prison ever since. In February 1994, Maranda exposed himself to a six-year-old girl. Four days later, he exposed himself to a female cashier at a drive-through window and attempted to pull her into his car. He pleaded guilty to state charges of public indecency and was sentenced to home confinement and conditional discharge. Six months later, Maranda molested a six-year-old boy. He pleaded guilty to a state charge of criminal sexual assault and was sentenced to eight years in prison. He was released on parole in May 1998, taken back into custody a few months later due to his failure to gain employment, and then released again in October of that year.

While on parole, Maranda downloaded and stored child pornography on his computer. He was arrested by federal authorities, and in April 2000, he pleaded guilty to one count of receipt and one count of possession of child pornography before the United States District Court for the Central District of Illinois, in the case that is now before us. The district court sentenced him to a total of 40 months’ imprisonment and five years of supervised release.

In December 2002, Maranda was released from federal prison and began serving his first term of supervision. However, in January 2005, he was arrested on a state charge of aggravated criminal sexual abuse based on the allegation that he molested the nine-year-old daughter of his then-girlfriend. In June 2005, he pleaded guilty to aggravated domestic battery instead. Maranda’s probation officer petitioned the district court to revoke his supervised release based on this state conviction as well as other violations of the conditions of his release; the district court did so in August 2005. The court then sentenced Maranda to another 30 months in prison and two years of supervised release.

Maranda began serving his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina (“FCI Butner”). This sentence was set to expire on March 16, 2008. But on March 10, the government filed a certificate in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina stating that Maran-da was a “sexually dangerous person” under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, 18 U.S.C. § 4248, a federal civil-commitment statute that “authorizes the Department of Justice to detain a mentally ill, sexually dangerous federal prisoner beyond the date the prisoner would otherwise be released.” United States v. Comstock, 560 U.S. 126, 129, 130 S.Ct. 1949, 176 L.Ed.2d 878 (2010). As a result, Maranda’s release from prison was automatically stayed pending the outcome of his civil-commitment hearing. 18 U.S.C. § 4248(a) (“A certificate filed under this subsection shall stay the release of the person pending completion of procedures contained in this section.”); see also Comstock, 560 U.S. at 130, 130 S.Ct. 1949 (“When [a certificate] is filed, the statute automatically stays the individual’s release from prison ... thereby giving the Government an opportunity to prove its claims at a hearing through psychiatric (or other) evidence.... ”).

The district court did not hold Maran-da’s civil-commitment hearing until more *692 than four years later. 1 For the court to order Maranda’s commitment under the Act, it had to find by clear and convincing evidence that he (1) had previously “engaged or attempted to engage in sexually violent conduct or child molestation,” (2) “suffered] from a serious mental illness, abnormality, or disorder,” and (3) “as a result of’ that mental illness, abnormality, or disorder, “would have serious difficulty in refraining from sexually violent conduct or child molestation if released.” 18 U.S.C. §§ 4247(a)(5)-(6), 4248(d); Corn-stock, 560 U.S. at 130, 130 S.Ct. 1949. During questioning at the hearing, Maran-da affirmed that if he were released, he would “be subject to very intense supervised release conditions ... for a period of two years.” When asked whether he intended to comply with those conditions, Maranda responded, “Fully and to completeness.” To emphasize the point, his attorney recited eleven of the conditions out loud and asked Maranda whether he would comply with each one. Maranda answered affirmatively to each.

The district court ultimately ruled that Maranda was not a sexually dangerous person subject to commitment under the Act.

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Bluebook (online)
761 F.3d 689, 2014 WL 3748934, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 14724, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-darrin-maranda-ca7-2014.