Can You Hit 'Pause' on Freedom? My Take on Rico v. United States

Verun Mekala

I've been following a case that just went before the Supreme Court-Rico v. United States-and it's one of those fascinating cases that seem minute until you look into it.

At a glance, this case is about a woman, Isabel Rico, who was on supervised release, which is like the new version of parole. She was serving 42 months that ended in June 2021. In 2018, she absconded. She just left. She had been a fugitive for almost five years until she was arrested in January 2023.

But here's the catch: while she was out, she committed new crimes, including some after her original June 2021 end date.

The government wants to punish her for those later crimes as violations of her supervised release. But her lawyers are saying, "You can’t do that! Here term expired in June 2021.The court has no jurisdiction." This sparked a huge legal fight over a simple question: When you run from supervised release, does the clock stop?

The Government's 'Pause Button' Argument

The government's position is about common sense. Their argument, which they just made to the Supreme Court, was basically: "How can you be supervised if you're not even there?

They're arguing for something called the "fugitive-tolling doctrine." "Tolling" is just a fancy legal word for pausing. The idea here is that the second Ms. Rico fled, the government hit "pause" on her 42-month sentence; in their view, that clock was still frozen in 2022 when she committed another crime and thus she was still technically on supervised release and can be punished for it.

To them, allowing the clock to run out while she's on the lam would be to "take advantage of her own wrong." It feels right, doesn't it? It feels like justice. You run from the law, you don't get "credit" for time served. Simple. Except, that's not what the law says. 

What the law actually says and doesn't say

Rico's lawyers pointed out a glaring problem. The law that created supervised release, the Sentencing Reform Act, is super specific. It clearly states that a term of supervised release is paused, only for one reason, if the person is imprisoned.

It doesn't say, "if the person is imprisoned or if they run away." It just says imprisonment.

When Congress crafts legislation, it is fairly assumed that if they intended to include something, they would have. They knew how to write into this law a "pause button," and they chose to apply it only to time spent in prison.

For me, this is the whole case. It's not the job of the court to "fix" a law they think Congress wrote badly.

What the government is asking the Supreme Court to do is to add words to a federal statute. That’s a massive overstep, in my opinion. It's Congress's job to write the law and it's the Court's job to read it.

So, does she just get away with it?

No! And that's the most frustrating part about this whole "common sense" argument. This is not an all or nothing kind of deal.

Isabel Rico already violated her release. The moment she absconded in 2018, she committed a Grade C violation. The court always had the power to revoke her release and send her back to prison for that act alone.

The real point of the case is whether the government can "rewind the clock" in this instance and punish her for more serious Grade A violations after her term was supposed to have ended. And at oral argument, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Rico's attorney had a great exchange over this. They noted the government's argument is somewhat absurd: How can the government argue that Rico was violating the conditions of her release at the very same time that it argues she wasn't on release (because the clock was supposedly paused)? It cannot be both. The law is the law. If the government doesn't like it, they should ask Congress, not the courts, to change it.