Docket 24-1063
Hunter v. United States
DecidedJun 18, 2026
8-1decision
Source: CourtListener.
Court rules appeal waivers in plea deals cannot block review of extreme sentencing errors
Impact6/10
What it does
The Court held that an appeal waiver in a plea agreement is unenforceable when enforcing it would result in a "miscarriage of justice" — meaning the sentence contains the kind of egregious, obvious error that would bring the judicial system into disrepute. This standard sets a high bar: ordinary sentencing mistakes do not overcome a waiver, but extreme errors such as a sentence exceeding the legal maximum, a sentence based on a blatantly unconstitutional factor like race, or a sentence imposed without basic procedural fairness can. The case was sent back to the Fifth Circuit to decide whether the specific sentencing condition at issue here meets that standard.
Who benefits
Criminal defendants who signed plea agreements containing appeal waivers but later received sentences with extreme or obvious legal errors now have a pathway to challenge those sentences on appeal. Defendants subject to supervised release conditions that may violate constitutional rights are among those who could benefit.
Who is affected
Federal prosecutors who rely on appeal waivers as a bargaining tool in plea negotiations may find those waivers less absolute, since courts of appeals can now decline to enforce them in cases of egregious sentencing error. Federal judges and courts of appeals must now apply the miscarriage-of-justice standard when a defendant seeks to appeal despite a waiver.
Practical impact
Going forward, federal courts of appeals must evaluate whether enforcing an appeal waiver in a given case would produce a miscarriage of justice — an egregious, obvious error that would undermine public confidence in the courts — rather than automatically dismissing appeals from defendants who signed waivers. Defendants who received sentences with extreme legal errors (such as a term exceeding the statutory maximum, a sentence based on an unconstitutional factor, or a sentence imposed without basic procedural fairness) now have a recognized avenue to appeal despite having signed a waiver. In this specific case, the Fifth Circuit must reconsider whether the mandatory mental-health medication condition imposed on Hunter qualifies as a miscarriage of justice under the new standard.
Majority — Kagan
Joined by: Roberts, Alito, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, Jackson
The majority held that courts — not just the parties to a plea agreement — play a central role in approving and implementing appeal waivers, which means the judiciary has its own institutional interest in the outcome. Because a court of appeals is the body that actually decides whether to enforce a waiver, and because enforcement cements a sentence in place whether or not it is lawful, blindly enforcing every waiver could bring the judicial system into disrepute. The Court reasoned that prior cases recognized federal courts have an independent interest in ensuring legal proceedings appear fair, and that some errors are so fundamental they cannot be papered over by a defendant's consent. The majority rejected both the Government's position — that knowing and voluntary waivers are always enforceable — and the Fifth Circuit's narrower rule allowing only two exceptions, because both would force courts to uphold sentences that are obviously and egregiously unlawful, such as a life sentence for a minor offense or a sentence chosen by an orangutan. The miscarriage-of-justice standard, already used by most federal circuits, sets a high but not insurmountable bar, limited to obvious errors that undermine public confidence in the courts, and the majority expressed doubt it would open the floodgates to a wave of new appeals.
Dissent reasoning
Justice Thomas argued that the right to appeal a federal criminal sentence is a purely statutory right of relatively recent origin — federal defendants had no right to appeal at all for more than a century after the founding — and that statutory procedural rights can be knowingly and voluntarily waived, as defendants routinely do with far more fundamental rights like the right to a jury trial. He contended that Hunter's waiver was knowing and voluntary, that he received enormous benefits from his plea deal, and that he should be held to his agreement. Thomas further argued that the Court failed to identify any source of law — no constitutional text, statute, Federal Rule, or established common-law doctrine — that supports the new miscarriage-of-justice exception, and that the Court appeared to be relying on a "supervisory power" over lower courts whose very existence is doubtful and whose scope would not extend to rewriting the substantive terms of a valid plea agreement. He also noted that the Rules Committee responsible for the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure had specifically considered and declined to adopt a rule like the one the Court announced, and that the Court was bypassing that deliberative process. Finally, Thomas warned that the decision could generate a large volume of new appeals from defendants who will allege a miscarriage of justice even when none exists, undermining the utility of appeal waivers as a bargaining tool and potentially harming future defendants by reducing the concessions prosecutors are willing to offer.
Constitutional question
When a criminal defendant signs a plea agreement waiving the right to appeal his sentence, can that waiver be enforced even if the resulting sentence contains a serious error — and if not, what standard governs when the waiver may be set aside?
Precedent changed
The ruling resolves a circuit split and narrows the approach of the Fifth Circuit (and a few other circuits) that had limited exceptions to appeal-waiver enforcement to only two narrow circumstances; it does not explicitly overrule a Supreme Court precedent but extends the reasoning of Wheat v. United States and United States v. Mezzanatto to the appeal-waiver context.