Writing for a unanimous Court, Justin Albin held in relevant part as follows: All four defendants committed sex offenses long before the 2014 Amendment to N.J.S.A. 2C:43-6.4. As a result, they were convicted and sentenced to prison terms and a special sentence of CSL. The terms of their CSL required that they abide by certain general conditions, which included reporting to a parole officer, securing the officer’s permission to live at a residence or change an address, and complying with any curfew imposed by the officer. N.J.A.C. 10A:71-6.11(b)(2), (7), (8), and (19). At the time of the commission of their offenses, a violation of a general condition of CSL was punishable as a fourth-degree crime. After the 2014 Amendment, the same violation is not only punishable as a third-degree crime, with a presumption of imprisonment, but also converts a defendant’s CSL into PSL. See N.J.S.A. 2C;43-6.4(a) and (d).
Under PSL, the Parole Board has the authority to simply revoke a defendant’s supervised release for a violation of a general condition and bypass the panoply of procedural rights afforded under the criminal justice system, such as the rights to trial by jury and to have guilt proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In Perez, the State conceded “that the almost-universal practice since the enactment of [PSL] is to revoke a defendant’s parole and return him to prison” for a condition-of-release violation rather than prosecute him for a crime.
The conversion of CSL to PSL is as significant a penalty as the upgrading of the charge carrying a mandatory period of parole ineligibility. It strips a defendant of fundamental constitutional rights in addition to subjecting him or her to 3 to 5 years in prison with a presumption of imprisonment that, with very limited exceptions, only applies to first or second degree offenses.