United States v. Doe

This appeal asks whether 18 U.S.C. § 3582(a), which forbids a district court from imposing a term of imprisonment at initial sentencing for the purpose of drug rehabilitation, restricts a district court from considering medical and rehabilitative needs when revoking a defendants supervised release and requiring the defendant to serve the remainder of his sentence in prison. The District Court sentenced the defendant, John Doe, to 24 months of imprisonment upon revocation of his supervised release with the objective of helping him recover from his cocaine addiction. On appeal, Doe challenges the procedural and substantive reasonableness of that sentence. Because we hold that the plain language of § 3583(e) governing discretionary revocation of supervised release expressly requires consideration of medical needs, we will affirm.