Cert Grant on Preserving a Sentence-Length Argument for Appeal

The Supreme Court granted cert this week in Holguin-Hernandez v. United States, No. 18-7739, to decide whether criminal defendants must object after sentencing to preserve for appeal a challenge to the substantive reasonableness (read: length) of their sentence. The courts of appeals have split on this matter. And given the United States’s concession that a post-sentencing objection is not required, Holguin-Hernandez will likely mark the end of the rule requiring them.

Parties generally must first raise an issue in the district court to preserve that issue for appeal. Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 51 implements that general rule in federal criminal proceedings. Rule 51 requires that parties inform the district court of any action they want the court to take—or object to any action the court does take—to preserve a claim of error.

In the sentencing context, most courts of appeals hold that defendants need not object after a sentence is announced to preserve for appeal a challenge to the length of that sentence. After all, parties have already presented the relevant issues in their pre-sentencing arguments. That should be sufficient to preserve the matter.

But not the Fifth Circuit. It has long required a post-sentencing objection to preserve the issue for appeal. And absent an objection, that court reviews a sentence’s length for only plain error.

Holguin-Hernandez, which comes out of the Fifth Circuit, illustrates that court’s rule. The defendant violated the terms of his supervised release, and the district court imposed a sentence of 12 months’ imprisonment. The defendant did not object to the length of this sentence after it was imposed. But in his subsequent appeal, he argued that the sentence was “greater than necessary to effectuate the sentencing goals of 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) and . . . therefore unreasonable.” Because the defendant had not made this argument in the district court after sentencing, the Fifth Circuit held that it was not preserved and reviewed the sentence length for only plain error.

When the defendant petitioned for cert, the United States admitted in its response that the Fifth Circuit’s approach is wrong:

That [court’s] practice of applying plain-error review to substantive-reasonableness claims incorrectly extends Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 51’s contemporaneous-objection requirement. When a defendant argues for a given sentence and the district court imposes a different sentence, the defendant has already put the court on notice of his objection to the length of the sentence and so—in accord with Rule 51(a), which provides that “[e]xceptions to rulings” are unnecessary—need not repeat that objection after the court announces the sentence.

The government nevertheless opposed cert, arguing that the defendant’s sentence would have been affirmed under the appropriate standard of review.

Given the United States’s concession, Holguin-Hernandez will almost certainly spell the end of the Fifth Circuit’s post-sentencing-objection requirement. And good riddance—the rule seems to serve no practical purpose. The parties have already argued about the appropriate sentence, thereby presenting the issue to the district court. If the district court imposes a sentence other than what a party wanted, no one should be surprised when that party wants to challenge the sentence on appeal. What good is served by making the parties re-hash their views on the appropriate sentence after it has been imposed?

For those interested in the case, below are some helpful links to brush up on the issue.

Links

• Holguin-Hernandez v. United States, No. 18-7739
  • Supreme Court Docket
  • Cert Petition (PDF, 463KB)
  • Opposition Brief (PDF, 78KB)
  • Reply in Support of Cert Petition (PDF, 422KB)
  • United States v. Holguin-Hernandez, 746 F. App’x 403 (5th Cir. 2018) (per curiam), available at Google Scholar and Westlaw
• Relevant Courts of Appeals Cases
  • United States v. Ruiz-Huertas, 792 F.3d 223 (1st Cir. 2015), available at Google Scholar
  • United States v. Autery, 555 F.3d 864 (9th Cir. 2009), available at Google Scholar
  • United States v. Peltier, 505 F.3d 389 (5th Cir. 2007), available at Google Scholar
• Other Coverage
  • SCOTUSBlog’s page for Holguin-Hernandez v. United States
  • “Fourteen+ years after inventing reasonableness review in Booker, SCOTUS finally grants cert to address how it works procedurally,” Sentencing Law & Policy (June 3, 2019)