Defendant Successfully Challenges Mental-Health Treatment Supervised Release Condition, Restitution

U.S. v. Majors, 2011 WL 2356466 (6/15/11) (Colo.) (unpub'd) - The defendant successfully challenges a mental-health-treatment supervised-release condition and restitution.

The 10th first holds that, whenever a defendant argues there was insufficient evidence to support an aspect of the sentence, he is making a substantive-reasonableness claim and therefore he does not have to raise the issue below to avoid plain error review.

There was insufficient evidence to support a requirement that the defendant submit to mental health treatment where the district court said it would not consider a couple of disputed mental-health-related matters and the only evidence left was unsupported speculation the defendant might have suffered a head injury 10 years ago and he admitted to situational depression several years ago. And there was no evidence to support the restitution amount, only the prosecutor's unsupported assertion. The 10th left it up to the district court to decide whether to allow the government to present more evidence to support the condition and the restitution.