“Expedient Imprisonment: How Federal Supervised Release Sentences Violate the Constitution”

The title of this post is the title of this notable new article now available on SSRN and authored by Stefan Underhill and Grace Powell. (Among the reasons this article is interesting is because one of its authors is Chief Judge of the US District Court for the District of Connecticut.) Here is the article’s abstract:

Supervised release sentences violate the grand jury clause and double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment.  Because supervisees have a right to indictment, violation proceedings constitute prosecutions within the meaning of the Sixth Amendment.  Violation proceedings should not provide an expedient path to imprisonment but instead should afford defendants the full range of criminal constitutional rights.

UPDATE: The final published version of this article is now available here at 108 Va. L. Rev. Online 297 (Nov. 15, 2022).