Banned from the County

The First Circuit recently upheld a district court’s imposition of a special condition of supervised release banning two convicted drug dealers from Suffolk County, Massachusetts (basically, Boston) during the entirety of their eight- and twelve-year periods of supervision (United States v. Garrasteguy). The case caught my eye for two reasons. First, that’s a long time to be banned and a big area to be banned from, even if the defendants had a history of violating no-trespass orders from the Boston Housing Authority. Second, the defendants were selling crack in the Bromley-Heath public housing project—a development I used to ride by twice a week on my way to work as an after-school counselor in nearby Dorchester. The appellate court’s decision turned primarily on the standard of review it applied. Though the court was troubled that the ban was longer and broader than similar release conditions upheld in other circuits, because the defendants failed to object to the conditions at trial the lower court’s decision was subject only to plain-error review. “Even assuming that exclusion from all of Suffolk County would unjustifiably impinge the defendant's fundamental rights,” the court wrote, “we cannot conclude that leaving the imposed condition intact would bring judicial proceedings into public disrepute.” This sort of sentence wouldn’t fly in North Carolina. “In North Carolina a court has no power to pass a sentence of banishment,” State v. Doughtie, 237 N.C. 368 (1953), and banishment has been broadly defined here to include orders compelling people “to quit a city, place, [...]