Rico v. United States · ¶34

This plea is misdirected. If the government thinks § 3583(i)'s warrant-or-summons requirement too demanding, the proper place to register that complaint is with those who drafted it. This Court is not free to rewrite the directions Congress has provided. Nor is it clear to us, for that matter, how serious the government's supposed problem is. Defendants may commit many violations late in their terms of supervised release. Some of those violations, like secretive or nascent criminal activities, may be difficult to detect. By comparison, a defendant's failure to report to a probation officer as instructed is presumably among the easiest violations for federal authorities to notice. So even if we had the authority to rewrite the law's terms to address “late-interm-and-difficult-to-detect-violations,” it is not clear why we would start with failure to report violations.

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