Reported / Citable
Background
Lola Kasali was serving a term of supervised release when the U.S. Probation Office filed petitions in late 2025 alleging seven Grade C violations: failure to pay restitution, failure to follow probation officer instructions, failure to participate in mental health treatment, failure to permit home visits, failure to pay a special assessment, and incurring two unauthorized lines of credit — including a $150 Synchrony Bank/Amazon credit card and at least eight Department of Education student loans totaling $19,048. The special assessment charge was dropped after Kasali paid it before the revocation hearing.
At a revocation hearing held on March 4 and 9, 2026, Kasali contested all remaining charges. The government presented testimony from Probation Officer Azuree Jackson and U.S. Postal Inspector Kyle Shadowence. Kasali requested that she be allowed to remain on supervised release with a new probation officer and court-ordered mental health treatment rather than face imprisonment. The Probation Office and the government jointly recommended revocation and a three-year prison term with no subsequent supervision.
Magistrate Judge Palermo issued a Report and Recommendation finding six violations proven, recommending revocation, and recommending a three-year concurrent sentence with credit for time served and no term of supervised release upon release. Kasali filed objections, and the matter came before Senior District Judge Sim Lake for de novo review of the contested portions.
The Court’s Holding
Judge Lake overruled all of Kasali’s factual objections and adopted Magistrate Judge Palermo’s finding that she committed six supervised-release violations. As to restitution, the court found that the Report and Recommendation had accurately noted the $1,937,500 credit from seized funds and the remaining $90,186.64 balance, and that Kasali never disputed the probation officer’s testimony that she refused to make any $300 monthly payment and denied owing the money. The court similarly overruled objections to the employment, mental health, home-visit, and unauthorized-credit findings, each time noting that Kasali’s own admissions or failure to produce corroborating evidence defeated her arguments.
On the sentencing recommendation, however, the court declined to rule. It found that Kasali’s objections — including her arguments under newly effective Sentencing Guidelines Amendment 835’s tiered revocation framework, the Supreme Court’s decision in Esteras v. United States, 145 S. Ct. 2031 (2025) (holding that retribution is an impermissible basis for supervised-release sentences), and the Magistrate Judge’s failure to justify eliminating any post-release supervision — raised issues warranting further consideration. Because Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 32.1(b)(2)(E) and (c)(1) independently entitle a defendant to address the court in mitigation before sentence is imposed, the court denied Kasali’s sentencing objections as moot and scheduled a remediation hearing for July 9, 2026.
The court’s order expressly limits the July 9 hearing to determining the appropriate remedy; it will not permit argument or evidence challenging any of the court’s rulings on the underlying violations.
Key Takeaways
- A district court conducting de novo review of a supervised-release revocation recommendation may adopt the magistrate judge’s violation findings while deferring the sentencing question to a separate hearing, mooting objections to the recommended sentence without deciding their merits.
- A defendant’s own concessions — disputing only the characterization of a violation, not its factual core — are sufficient to sustain a revocation finding; arguments that the Report and Recommendation “mischaracterizes” or “over-represents” conduct will fail when the underlying facts are undisputed.
- Amendment 835 to the Sentencing Guidelines (effective November 1, 2025) creates an explicit, tiered revocation framework under new § 7C1.3: revocation for Grade C technical violations is “may be appropriate” — the lowest, most discretionary tier — and courts must engage with that standard when Grade C violations are at issue.
- Under Esteras v. United States, 145 S. Ct. 2031 (2025), a court imposing a supervised-release revocation sentence may consider forward-looking goals (deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation) but may not consider retribution; a recommendation that extensively recites a defendant’s history of obstreperous behavior risks being characterized as impermissible backward-looking punishment.
Why It Matters
This decision illustrates how Amendment 835’s restructured Chapter 7 framework is already reshaping revocation litigation. Defense counsel can now anchor proportionality arguments in the Sentencing Commission’s explicit graduation of revocation outcomes, and courts that skip over the tiered analysis when recommending the statutory maximum for purely technical violations face procedural-reasonableness challenges under Esteras and 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(5).
The case also offers a practical reminder about Rule 32.1’s procedural floor: regardless of how thoroughly a magistrate judge addresses the sentencing factors, a defendant retains an independent right to allocution and mitigation evidence at the remediation stage. Courts can — and here did — use that procedural entitlement to sidestep contested sentencing objections while still moving the case forward, leaving the ultimate sentence to be fashioned on a fuller record.