In United States v. Tripodis, No. 22-12826 (Feb. 29, 2024) (Wilson, Grant, Lagoa), the Court upheld the supervised-release portion of the sentence for Mr. Tripodis’s general-conspiracy conviction under a negotiated plea agreement.
Mr. Tripodis argued that the plea agreement did not contemplate
the imposition of supervised release, and that the government and the district therefore
breached the agreement by recommending supervised release and erred by ordering
it, respectively. The Court rejected both arguments. It determined that the plea
agreement’s scope was unambiguous: it required only that the government
recommend a total custodial sentence of sixty months. In the absence of a
supervised-release provision, the government was free to recommend supervised
release. The Court alternatively determined that, even if the agreement was
ambiguous, extrinsic evidence reflected Mr. Tripodis’s understanding that he could
be subject to supervised release. This evidence included Mr. Tripodis’s and his
counsel’s statements at the initial plea entry and sentencing, Mr. Tripodis’s
affirmative response to the district court’s asking if he understood that the
court could sentence him to a three-year term of supervised release, and
counsel’s failure to dispute the government’s argument for supervised release
at sentencing.
Notably, the Court acknowledged that a defendant might be “unintentionally misled” where his plea agreement does not “explicitly state” the extent of the government’s promises to, or requirements of, the defendant. The Court therefore expressed that the government, in future cases, “should” make “clear . . . what it is promising—and what it is not—to the defendant.”
