Hunter v U.S: Limits of a Federal Appeal Waiver

Almost every federal criminal case ends in a plea bargain, and almost every federal plea agreement now contains an appeal waiver which is a promise by the defendant to give up the right to appeal the conviction and, critically, whatever sentence the judge later imposes. You sign it before you know what your sentence will be. For years, in the Fifth Circuit, that promise was treated as nearly absolute: a waiver could be set aside only if the sentence exceeded the statutory maximum or the waiver itself was the product of ineffective assistance of counsel. Everything else (even, the Fifth Circuit assumed in this very case, an unconstitutional sentence) was locked in. That just changed.

The Case: A Fraud Plea and a Forced-Medication Condition

Munson Hunter III was charged in the Southern District of Texas with ten counts of bank and wire fraud arising from a scheme that cost financial institutions about half a million dollars. He took a deal: he pleaded guilty to a single count of aiding and abetting wire fraud, the government dismissed the other nine counts and agreed not to prosecute him further, and Hunter signed an appeal waiver which gave up his right to appeal his conviction and sentence, except for ineffective-assistance claims. The court sentenced him to 51 months in prison and three years of supervised release.

The fight was over one condition of that supervised release: a requirement that Hunter take all mental-health medications prescribed by his treating physician. Hunter objected and said he wanted mental-health treatment but did not want to be “forced to medicate.” He argued the condition violated his constitutional liberty interest in refusing unwanted medication, an interest the Supreme Court has recognized in cases like Sell v. United States and Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health. The Fifth Circuit dismissed his appeal on the waiver holding that even if the condition was unconstitutional, the waiver barred review.

A detail from Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence shows why these waivers matter so much. Although Hunter pleaded guilty to a single transaction worth $38,648.77, the district court sentenced him based on roughly $488,352.25 across 26 transactions including conduct from the dismissed counts and conduct never charged at all. That “relevant conduct” math pushed his advisory Guidelines range from 15–21 months up to 41–51 months. A guilty plea to one charge, in other words, produced a punishment built on charges the government had dropped or never brought with no appeal available to test it.

What the Court Held

Justice Kagan, writing for an 8–1 Court (Justice Thomas dissenting), adopted the rule a majority of the circuits already followed: an appeal waiver is unenforceable when it would result in a miscarriage of justice meaning when it would leave in place the kind of egregious error that would bring the judicial system into disrepute. The Court rejected both extremes. It rejected the government’s position that a knowing, voluntary waiver is always enforceable, and it rejected the Fifth Circuit’s position that a waiver fails only when the sentence tops the statutory maximum.

The reasoning turns on the courts’ own role. A plea deal is struck by the parties, but a judge must approve the waiver, and a court of appeals controls whether it is enforced. Because courts are “enmeshed” in approving and implementing waivers, the Court reasoned, automatically enforcing one no matter how badly the sentence went wrong can “risk institutional harm” and call the judiciary’s commitment to law into question. The miscarriage-of-justice limit is the safety valve.

Make no mistake about the height of the bar. The error must be obvious (“not one a judge could reasonably make”) and of a kind that would undermine public confidence in the judiciary. Ordinary, “standard-fare” sentencing mistakes do not qualify; if they did, the Court noted, appeal waivers would lose their value in plea bargaining. This is a remedy for extreme cases, not a second bite at every sentencing dispute.

The Three Examples (and They Are Just Examples)

The Court declined to catalog every situation that qualifies, but it offered three illustrations of the kind of error that would bring the judiciary into disrepute:

• A sentence beyond the statutory maximum — the classic case, like a one-year misdemeanor that draws a life term.
• A sentence infected with a blatant constitutional error — such as a judge weighing a forbidden factor like race or religion or imposing a constitutionally infirm condition of supervised release (the Court’s own example: ordering that a defendant not become pregnant and, potentially, Hunter’s forced-medication condition).
• A sentence imposed without “some minimum of civilized procedure” — the Court’s memorable hypothetical, borrowed from an earlier case, of a judge who lets “an orangutan pick a sentence out of a hat,” or, less colorfully, refuses to hold a hearing the law requires.

Crucially, the Court said these are “not intended to be exclusive.” They mark the floor of how serious an error must be, not a closed list.

The Trap That Did Not Save Hunter

There is a practice lesson buried in Part II of the opinion. At sentencing, the judge told Hunter, “You have a right to appeal,” and the prosecutor said nothing to correct it. Hunter argued that the judge’s misstatement, plus the government’s silence, wiped out his waiver. The Court disagreed. The plea agreement required any modification to be in writing and signed by all parties; an offhand remark cannot rewrite it. And the government’s silence was neither a waiver nor a forfeiture. The time for the government to invoke an appeal waiver is after the defendant files a notice of appeal, not at the sentencing hearing. The Court found this a near-mirror of Class v. United States (2018). The takeaway for defendants: do not count on a judge’s casual “you can appeal” to undo a waiver you signed.

The Concurrences — Where This Is Headed

The separate writings are worth reading, because they map the next decade of litigation:

• Justice Gorsuch (joined by Sotomayor and Jackson). A sweeping concurrence on how plea bargaining (now roughly 95% of convictions) came to dominate the system, and how appeal waivers, “rare or nonexistent” forty years ago, became routine. He reads the majority’s three examples broadly (reaching, for instance, plainly miscalculated Guidelines ranges and supervised-release conditions “wholly unrelated to legitimate sentencing purposes”), and he flags two deeper questions for future cases: whether a defendant can truly knowingly waive the right to appeal a sentence he cannot yet see, and whether prospective appeal waivers should be void like the prospective waivers of statutory rights the Court has refused to enforce in other areas.
• Justice Kavanaugh (joined by Alito and Barrett). A short concurrence stressing that the bar is high (reserved for “extreme,” “egregious,” “obvious” errors) and pushing back on Justice Gorsuch’s broader reading. Watch this tension: how widely the “miscarriage of justice” net is cast will be fought out in the lower courts.
• Justice Barrett. A solo concurrence locating the decision in the courts’ traditional “procedural common law” of waiver rather than any free-floating supervisory power.
• Justice Thomas (dissent). He would enforce the waiver, arguing the Court invented an exception with no source in the Constitution, a statute, or the Rules of Criminal Procedure and that a knowing, voluntary waiver should bind the defendant who reaped its benefits.

What It Means for Texas Federal Defendants

This is a Fifth Circuit case from a Texas federal court, and it directly loosens the rule that governs every federal defendant in the state. The Fifth Circuit’s narrow two-exception approach (statutory-maximum and ineffective-assistance) is now supplemented by the miscarriage-of-justice safety valve the Supreme Court just endorsed. For the many defendants in the Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western Districts of Texas who signed appeal waivers, a door that Circuit law had bolted shut is open a crack.

Where it may matter most: a sentence carrying a blatant constitutional defect such as an infirm supervised-release condition, reliance on an impermissible factor or a term above the statutory cap, or a gross procedural failure. The case was remanded so the Fifth Circuit can decide whether enforcing Hunter’s own waiver, given the forced-medication condition, would be a miscarriage of justice; that decision will be worth watching. But the honest caveat bears repeating: the bar is high, ordinary Guidelines disputes will not clear it, and the smartest protection is still to negotiate the waiver’s exceptions carefully at the plea stage and to preserve constitutional objections on the record at sentencing.

Hunter was one of two Fifth Circuit criminal cases the Supreme Court decided the same day in the defense’s favor; we covered the other, United States v. Hemani (the §922(g)(3) marijuana-and-guns case), separately. Together they made June 18, 2026 ,an unusually consequential day for federal criminal defense in Texas.

Sources

• Hunter v. United States, No. 24–1063, 608 U.S. ___ (2026) (decided June 18, 2026) — slip opinion
• Class v. United States, 583 U.S. 174 (2018)
• Sell v. United States, 539 U.S. 166 (2003)
• 18 U.S.C. §3742 — review of a sentence
• R. Crim. P. 11 — pleas and plea agreements

If you signed a federal appeal waiver and believe your sentence carries the kind of serious error Hunter describes (or you have a federal sentencing or appeal question in Texas) call (214) 225-7117 for a confidential consultation. James Lee Bright handles federal criminal defense and appeals in all four Texas federal districts, the Fifth Circuit, and the United States Supreme Court.