The U.S. Supreme Court issued a defendant-friendly ruling regarding federal plea deals. The case, Hunter v. United States, resolves a decades-old circuit split and delivers a significant, if carefully limited, protection for the tens of thousands of federal criminal defendants who plead guilty each year — the vast majority of whom sign away their right to appeal as part of their deals.
The Underlying Case
Munson P. Hunter III pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and abetting wire fraud in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. His plea agreement included a broad appeal waiver, drafted by the prosecutor, that contained one narrow carve-out for ineffective assistance of counsel claims. The agreement further specified that "[a]ny modification" of its terms "must be in writing and signed by all parties." Hunter "knowingly and voluntarily” waived the right to appeal his conviction and sentence.
At sentencing, the district court imposed 51 months in prison and three years of supervised release. It also added, over Hunter's explicit objection, a special condition requiring him to take all of the mental health medications prescribed by his physician. The condition was based solely on Hunter's self-reported childhood diagnoses of anxiety and depression; no medical evaluation was conducted, and no factual findings were made at sentencing justifying the requirement. Hunter told the court he did not want "to be forced to medicate." The court imposed the condition anyway, without explanation.
At the close of sentencing, the district court told Hunter: "You have a right to appeal." The prosecutor said nothing to correct that statement when given the opportunity. Hunter appealed, challenging both the mandatory-medication condition as a due process violation and arguing that the waiver was unenforceable against a constitutional challenge to his sentence (or alternatively, that the judge's uncorrected statement voided the waiver entirely).
The Fifth Circuit dismissed the appeal without reaching the merits. Under its binding precedent, appeal waivers have only two exceptions: if there was ineffective assistance of counsel, or if the sentence exceeded the statutory maximum. Here, neither applied. The judge's misstatement, the court held, was legally irrelevant.
The Circuit Split
The Fifth Circuit's practice of having only two exceptions was the most stringent in the country. Every other circuit recognized more grounds for appeal notwithstanding a waiver.
On one side of the split, the Sixth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits have added a handful of narrow additional exceptions to the appeal waiver. For example, sentences based on a constitutionally impermissible factor (such as race) can be appealed even if the defendant waived it.
On the other side, the First, Second, Fourth, and Ninth Circuits take a broader approach. They won’t enforce appeal waivers when doing so would produce a "miscarriage of justice," meaning an egregious error serious enough to bring the judicial system into “disrepute.” The Ninth Circuit had specifically applied that standard to reach the merits of appeals challenging mandatory medication conditions of supervised release – exactly the kind of claim Hunter was trying to bring.
Because of the circuit split on such a big issue, the U.S. Supreme Court granted cert last October. Before the Supreme Court, both sides agreed the Fifth Circuit's rule was wrong — but for opposite reasons. Hunter argued that two exceptions were too few.
The government argued that two was too many. It claimed that voluntary waivers should always be enforceable, with no exceptions beyond those expressly stated in the agreement itself. This was a harder line than any court of appeals has ever adopted. In fact, the government had previously called the Fifth Circuit's approach "draconian" in separate proceedings. Hunter pointed out this inconsistency, with the government now pivoting to urge a still stricter rule.
In a near-unanimous opinion, the SCOTUS rejected both extremes.
SCOTUS Weighs In
Justice Kagan's majority opinion adopted the “miscarriage-of-justice” standard already used by many circuits, but grounded it in the institutional role of the judiciary in the plea process.
The Court observed that a district court must accept a plea agreement before it takes effect, while a court of appeals controls whether an appeal waiver is actually enforced. If enforced, it "will cement into place a district court's sentence, whether or not lawful." The majority reasons that courts are too deeply enmeshed in that process to escape responsibility for its results. Automatic enforcement of any waiver, no matter how egregious the underlying sentence, would risk bringing the judicial system into disrepute.
The standard the Court adopted sets a deliberately high bar. A waiver may be set aside only for the kind of obvious, egregious error that would undermine public confidence in the judiciary — not for ordinary sentencing mistakes. The Court offered three illustrative categories: a sentence exceeding the statutory maximum; a sentence imposed without some minimum of civilized procedure; and a sentence infected with a blatant constitutional error. Regarding the last one, in addition to the “race-based sentence” example presented earlier, a waiver would also qualify to be set aside if it imposed a supervised release condition that violated the Constitution. An example of this might be requirements that infringe on a fundamental liberty interest (such as the right to be free from unwanted medical treatment, as in Hunter’s case) without sufficient legal justification.
On the second question, the Court ruled against Hunter. The judge's statement that he had "a right to appeal" did not modify the plea agreement — the agreement itself required any modification to be in writing and signed by both parties, and a stray remark from the bench, likely a momentary mistake, cannot substitute for that. Nor did the government's silence forfeit its right to enforce the waiver; the proper time for the government to invoke that right is after a notice of appeal is filed, not at sentencing. Hunter lost on this question cleanly.
The majority threw out the Fifth Circuit's dismissal and sent the case back, ordering the lower court to apply the miscarriage-of-justice standard to Hunter's challenge. SCOTUS did not decide whether Hunter's mandatory-medication condition actually crosses that line; that question is now for the Fifth Circuit to answer.
Not Quite a Consensus
Although the ruling was 8-1, multiple separate writings reveal that some justices found internal fault lines in the majority's reasoning.
Although the ruling was 8-1, multiple justices wrote separately. Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, concurred to sound a broader alarm about plea bargaining. They noted that Hunter was sentenced based on conduct far beyond what he pleaded guilty to, including charges the government had agreed to drop. Justices Kavanaugh, Alito, and Barrett also concurred separately.
Justice Thomas dissented alone. He argued that the miscarriage-of-justice exception has no basis in constitutional text, statute, or common law. He noted that Hunter got exactly what he bargained for: dismissal of nine counts and a 270-year reduction in his maximum exposure. Justice Thomas maintained that "[c]oncerns about public perception of the judiciary provide no justification for the Court's decision."
