Richmond — The Supreme Court of Virginia on Monday heard argument in Commonwealth of Virginia v. Silfredo Castillo Canales over how to apply the statute that caps sentences for a single course of conduct in probation revocation proceedings.

Victoria Johnson, Senior Assistant Attorney General for the Commonwealth, told the court the trial judge made factual findings showing the alleged violations occurred over roughly 140 days and were not an uninterrupted series of events. "The record demonstrates that sometimes the probationer complied with his probation responsibilities," Johnson said, and at other times he "skipped office appointments, skipped drug testing." The circuit court, she said, found the defendant's behavior had "gotten off the rails," and that the gaps supported treating the incidents as separate violations rather than one continuous course.

The question matters because Virginia Code § 19.2-306.1 limits how consecutive technical violations are aggregated for sentencing. "What goes into determining whether it's a single course of conduct?" Johnson told the justices, arguing ordinary meaning and established doctrines that examine continuity, sequence and interruption should govern the analysis.

Brad Haywood, counsel for Silfredo Castillo Canales, urged a different framing. He said probation is fundamentally rehabilitative and that the statutory amendments to § 19.2-306.1 were meant to supplement, not replace, existing probation practice. "The purpose of probation ... is rehabilitative. It's remedial," Haywood said, arguing that treating individual probation rules as separately dispositive would undermine the statutory scheme and grant undue power to probation officers to determine how violations are grouped.

Multiple justices pressed both counsel with hypotheticals about timing and relatedness. One line of questioning asked whether seven consecutive failed drug tests over seven days would be a single course of conduct, while another asked whether one failed test in December and another in March could be aggregated. Counsel and the bench repeatedly circled the factors of time, place and circumstance as tools for distinguishing a continuous course from discrete breaches.

Johnson acknowledged there is a range of reasonable outcomes and emphasized that the statute requires circuit courts to make factual findings about continuity before imposing cumulative punishments. Haywood argued that allowing a probation officer's discretionary decision to aggregate violations into a single major violation report effectively would let officers determine how many violations a person faces without the procedural protections of a court hearing.

No decision was announced from the bench. Argument focused on whether the statutory phrase "single course of conduct" should be interpreted to require a temporal and circumstantial continuity that makes the acts effectively one event, or whether the probationary regime's collective purpose and the structure of major violation reporting should guide the inquiry.

If the court adopts a continuity-focused test emphasizing time, place and circumstances, judges would retain the primary fact-finding role in separating or aggregating violations. If it adopts a broader view keyed to the probation system's rehabilitative purpose and the content of major violation reports, that could affect when multiple acts are counted together for sentencing. The justices' questioning indicates the court is considering both statutory text and long-standing probation practice in reaching its decision.

The case record noted 13 alleged violations taking place over about 140 days (roughly one alleged violation every 12 days). Counsel cited examples and hypotheticals during argument but no new factual findings were made during the session. The court's forthcoming opinion will determine how trial judges must analyze continuity and will affect revocation procedures in Virginia's probation system.