The Supreme Court held that “an agreement not to appeal a sentence is unenforceable when it would result in a miscarriage of justice.”
When individuals admit guilt to offenses, they generally surrender the option to contest any part of the result, including the sentence imposed. In the case of Hunter v. United States, decided on Thursday, the Supreme Court narrowed the reach of such appeal waivers, which are frequently described as “knowing and voluntary” even when the defendant faces intense pressure and is unaware of the exact penalties and release terms that will later apply.
“An agreement not to appeal a sentence is unenforceable when it would result in a miscarriage of justice,” Justice Elena Kagan writes in the majority opinion, which was joined by seven of her colleagues. The ruling defines “miscarriage of justice” as “the kind of egregious error that would bring the judicial system into disrepute.” It provides several illustrations, including a sentence that surpasses the statutory maximum, a sentence “infected with a blatant constitutional error” such as bias based on race, release conditions that violate core rights, and a prison term imposed by a judge who “let an orangutan pick a sentence out of a hat.”
As Justice Neil Gorsuch explains in a concurrent opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the necessity for such intervention arises from a criminal justice system that resolves nearly all cases through plea agreements. “In our times, the jury trial has given way to a conveyor belt of plea bargains,” Gorsuch writes. “At least some responsibility for that development lies with this Court. When confronted with coercive prosecutorial tactics designed to induce defendants to take plea deals, the Court has often condoned those practices or let them pass in silence.”
The dispute centers on Munson P. Hunter III, who faced charges for participating in “a years-long scheme costing various financial institutions about half a million dollars” through unauthorized wire transfers. In February 2024, Hunter pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and abetting wire fraud. The defense could be understood, since prosecutors had dropped nine other felonies in exchange for the guilty plea. Had he been convicted on all ten counts, Gorsuch notes, Hunter would have faced “up to 300 years in prison and a $10 million fine.”
As part of the plea agreement, Hunter relinquished the right to appeal his sentence. He later came to regret that decision.
The crime that Hunter admitted involved the theft of $38,649 in a single transaction. Yet at the sentencing in the Southern District of Texas three months later, Judge Sim Lake considered the dropped charges—a troubling practice that punishes conduct never admitted by the defendant or proven beyond a reasonable doubt. For sentencing purposes, Lake assumed that Hunter had aided in stealing $488,352 in 26 transactions.
“This made a significant difference for Mr. Hunter,” Gorsuch notes. “Had the district court sentenced him based on the amount he had pleaded guilty to stealing, he would have faced an advisory sentencing guidelines range of 15 to 21 months in prison. Now, though, he faced a recommended prison term of 41 to 51 months. And based on that calculation, the district court chose a prison sentence of 51 months.” In other words, “a guilty plea to a single charge enabled prosecutors to secure a punishment based on other charges they had agreed to drop or had not even brought.”
That was not Hunter’s only disconcerting surprise. As a condition of his supervised release after the prison term, Lake mandated that he “participate in a mental-health treatment program” and “take all mental health medications that are prescribed by [his] treating physician.” Hunter objected to the latter condition, arguing that it violated his “constitutionally protected liberty interest in avoiding the unwanted administration of antipsychotic drugs.”
Faced with that assertion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit concluded that Hunter could not raise it because he had waived his right to appeal his sentence. The Supreme Court disagreed, holding that Hunter should have the opportunity to argue that his compelled medication qualified as a “miscarriage of justice” because it was unconstitutional.
Gorsuch agreed with that outcome, as did all the justices except for Clarence Thomas. Under Hunter, Gorsuch notes, “prosecutors may not always leverage their plea-bargaining power to induce a defendant to forgo the right to contest his sentence on appeal.” But that question, he emphasizes, is only one facet of the broader difficulties stemming from coercive plea deals.
“The most remarkable thing about Mr. Hunter’s plea-bargaining journey may be how unremarkable it is,” Gorsuch writes. “Our criminal justice system is no longer dominated by trials and sentences based on them, but plea bargains that play out in ways not unlike his own.”
At the nation’s founding, “the right to trial by jury was regarded as part of every American’s ‘birth-right and inheritance,'” Gorsuch notes. “Outraged by British efforts to deny that right in the colonies, those who fought the Revolution cited its suppression as one of their motivations for declaring independence. After the Revolution, too, the founding generation took care to safeguard the right to trial by jury in criminal cases not just once, but twice, in the Constitution and Bill of Rights they adopted.”
Plea bargains “didn’t begin to emerge as an alternative to trial in serious criminal cases until the mid-nineteenth century,” Gorsuch writes. But today, roughly 95 percent of convictions rely on guilty pleas, making the real-world significance of the right to trial more symbolic than practical.
The Supreme Court was initially wary of this trend, worrying about the ability of prosecutors to coerce guilty pleas by threatening defendants with additional charges and harsher penalties if they insisted on proving the government’s case. Yet by 1971, the Court described plea bargaining as “highly desirable,” something “to be encouraged,” and “an essential component of the administration of justice.”
Why did it matter? “If every criminal charge were subjected to a full-scale trial,” the Court warned in Santobello v. New York, “the States and the Federal Government would need to multiply by many times the number of judges and court facilities.”
The Court reiterated that idea six years later in Blackledge v. Allison. “Whatever might be the situation in an ideal world,” it stated, “the fact is that the guilty plea and the often concomitant plea bargain are important components of this country’s criminal justice system. Properly administered, they can benefit all concerned.”
What does a “properly administered” plea-bargaining system look like? The Court offered a hint in the 1978 case Bordenkircher v. Hayes, which weighed what happened after a Kentucky man faced a check-forgery charge for $88.30.
Based on that accusation, Paul Hayes faced a sentence of two to ten years in prison. If Hayes pleaded guilty, the prosecutor claimed, a five-year sentence would be recommended. But if Hayes pressed for a trial, the prosecutor warned, he would be charged under Kentucky’s “three strikes” law, potentially yielding a life sentence. Unfazed, Hayes opted for a trial. The prosecutor carried out the threat, and Hayes received a life term. The Supreme Court saw no issue with the prosecutor’s tactics.
Waivers of the right to appeal add another layer to this issue, and now the Court has recognized that justice may require overruling them. In addition to the examples laid out in the majority opinion, Gorsuch asserts that the “miscarriage of justice” principle should also apply to “sentences imposing penalties the law reserves for offenses different [from] those of which the defendant stands convicted.” Hunter’s 51-month sentence fits that description, and there are numerous other instances as well.
Under the Court’s ruling in Hunter, “a defendant may be able to appeal a sentence that imposes a release condition violating his right to be free from forced medication, or a condition that infringes his right to speak or worship freely, or any other term that breaches one of his recognized constitutional rights,” Gorsuch notes. “I would anticipate a miscarriage of justice almost inevitably arising whenever a sentence infringes a constitutional right that was ‘firmly established at the time of sentencing.'”
The majority also indicated that sentences “marred by serious procedural errors” should be appealable despite waivers, Gorsuch observes. In his view, this would include “not only a sentence chosen by an orangutan” but also penalties “that reflect a marked departure from mandatory sentencing procedures.”
Even “aspects of sentencing that allow for a degree of judicial discretion,” such as “the application of the advisory sentencing guidelines,” “the imposition of supervised release conditions within statutory and constitutional limits,” and the weighing of sentencing factors, could trigger the exception recognized by the Court, Gorsuch says. “A miscarriage of justice would seem to arise, as well, when a district court imposes a punishment so substantively unreasonable that it would fail under the ‘deferential abuse-of-discretion standard’ that appellate courts already apply in sentencing challenges.”
Gorsuch identifies “deeper problems” with appeal waivers. “The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, this Court has held, tolerates only ‘voluntary and knowing’ guilty pleas,” he notes. A guilty plea “must be made both ‘voluntarily’ and ‘with full understanding of the consequences.'” Yet “how can a defendant ‘know’ and ‘fully understand’ at the time he signs a plea agreement that a court might later order punishment that defies the Constitution, a federal statute, or this Court’s precedents?”
Gorsuch also observes that the Supreme Court “has found prospective waivers of many other statutory rights invalid and unenforceable.” He notes that the Trump administration, which urged the justices to uphold the 5th Circuit’s decision in Hunter’s case, “has offered no colorable explanation why a defendant’s prospective waiver of his statutory right to appeal his sentence should be treated differently.”
If a defendant “may prospectively waive the right to appeal his sentence,” Gorsuch writes, “one might wonder what would prevent prosecutors from pushing their luck even further. Could we eventually see plea agreements that include prospective waivers of a defendant’s right to challenge future unreasonable searches and seizures of his home? Or prospective waivers of a defendant’s right to seek a jury (rather than a bench) trial in future proceedings if he faces another charge?”
Two centuries ago, “it was likely unimaginable that nearly every federal criminal case would conclude through plea bargaining,” Gorsuch says. “Forty years ago, it may have been hard to foresee that plea-bargaining defendants would be pressed to waive their statutory right to appeal sentences yet to be imposed. Let alone that the federal government would argue these waivers prevent defendants from appealing even
blatantly unlawful or unconstitutional sentences chosen by an orangutan.”
Although the Supreme Court “is not responsible for all these developments,” Gorsuch writes, “it has encouraged some of them and stood silent while others took hold. Today, the Court finally begins to correct course, taking a meaningful step toward reining in appeal waivers. It is not a universal solution to all of plea bargaining’s excesses, and perhaps not even to all issues tied to appeal waivers. But it is a beginning.”
