Kelley Lynn Lamberson pleaded true to violating the terms of her supervised release, having tested positive for amphetamine seven times over a two-month period. This violation triggered a mandatory revocation under 18 U.S.C. § 3583(g). The district court sentenced her to twelve months of imprisonment followed by forty-eight months of supervised release. Lamberson appealed, arguing that her sentence was substantively unreasonable because the district court relied on impermissible retributive factors under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(2)(A) and that the mandatory revocation statute is unconstitutional. She also raised a constitutional challenge regarding the preponderance of evidence standard used to find the violation, though she acknowledged this argument was already foreclosed by Fifth Circuit precedent.
The court addressed two primary issues. First, regarding the constitutional challenge, the court noted that Lamberson raised the argument for the first time on appeal and acknowledged it was foreclosed by United States v. Garner, 969 F.3d 550 (5th Cir. 2020). Second, the court reviewed the substantive reasonableness claim for plain error because Lamberson failed to object to the district court's reliance on improper sentencing considerations at the time of sentencing. The court explained that while the Supreme Court's decision in Esteras v. United States, 606 U.S. 185 (2025), prohibits district courts from considering retributive factors under § 3553(a)(2)(A) when exercising discretion under § 3583(e), this limitation does not apply to mandatory revocations under § 3583(g). The court relied on United States v. Illies, 805 F.3d 607 (5th Cir. 2015), and its progeny, stating that when a district court imposes a mandatory revocation sentence, it is not required to consider § 3553(a) factors, and it is not clear error to consider § 3553(a)(2)(A). The court further clarified that a term of supervised release is a component of the prison sentence, so the rule applies even when the sentence includes a subsequent term of supervised release. Even assuming the district court considered retributive factors, the court found no plain error because the record showed the court relied on permissible factors, such as the nature of the offense and the need to protect the public.
The decision leaves Lamberson's original sentence of twelve months imprisonment and forty-eight months of supervised release intact. It reinforces the rule that mandatory revocations under § 3583(g) are exempt from the retributive factor limitations established in Esteras for discretionary revocations. This ruling clarifies that defendants challenging mandatory revocations based on retributive factors face a high bar, as the statute itself does not require the court to weigh those factors in the first place.
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