United States v. Wiltshire

PER CURIAM:

Affirmed.

Mark K. McCulloch (Patrick Michael Megaro, on the brief), Brownstone, P.A., Winter Park, FL, for Defendant–Appellant. Justin D. Lerer, Assistant United States Attorney (Susan Corkery, on the brief), for Loretta E. Lynch, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Brooklyn, NY, for Appellee.
Before: KEARSE, STRAUB, and WESLEY, Circuit Judges.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York (Dora L. Irizarry, J.). On September 20, 2013, the district court convicted Pauline Wiltshire of violating her supervised release by 1) making false statements to a probation officer; and 2) leaving the district of her supervision without permission. Wiltshire was sentenced to ninety days in custody, to be served on weekends, to be followed by five years of supervised release. On May 25, 2014, during the pendency of her appeal, Wiltshire completed her time in custody on the contested adjudication, although her term of supervision had not yet run. For the reasons stated below, we find that Wiltshire's appeal was not mooted by the expiration of her custodial sentence and that the possibility of a reduced term of supervised release can satisfy Article III's case-or-controversy requirement. We therefore proceed to the merits and AFFIRM the district court's judgment.

Having found that we have jurisdiction to review Wiltshire's appeal, we proceed to the merits. We review the district court's finding that Wiltshire violated the conditions of her supervised release for abuse of discretion and its factual findings for clear error. United States v. Glenn, 744 F.3d 845, 847 (2d Cir.2014) (per curiam). A district court may revoke a term of supervised release if it “finds by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant violated a condition of supervised release.” 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e)(3).

Here, Wiltshire admits the offending conduct: omitting her employment as an exotic dancer from the probation questionaire and leaving the judicial district without permission from the district court or probation. However, Wiltshire argues that the government did not prove that she “willfully violated” the “ambiguous conditions” of supervision. The district court reviewed the evidence and disagreed, and its conclusion that Wiltshire's violation was willful was not an abuse of discretion.

We have considered Wiltshire's remaining arguments and find them to be without merit. For the reasons stated above, the judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.