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SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________
No. 15–7250
_________________
MARCELO MANRIQUE, PETITIONER
v. UNITED
STATES
on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the eleventh circuit
[April 19, 2017]
Justice Thomas delivered the opinion of the
Court.
Sentencing courts are required to impose
restitution as part of the sentence for specified crimes. But the
amount to be imposed is not always known at the time of sentencing.
When that is the case, the court may enter an initial judgment
imposing certain aspects of a defendant’s sentence, such as a term
of imprisonment, while deferring a determination of the amount of
restitution until entry of a later, amended judgment.
We must decide whether a single notice of
appeal, filed between the initial judgment and the amended
judgment, is sufficient to invoke appellate review of the
later-determined restitution amount. We hold that it is not, at
least where, as here, the Government objects to the defendant’s
failure to file a notice of appeal following the amended
judgment.
I
After federal agents found more than 300 files
containing child pornography on his computer, petitioner Marcelo
Manrique pleaded guilty to possessing a visual depiction of a minor
engaging in sexually explicit conduct, in violation of 18
U. S. C. §§2252(a)(4)(B) and (b)(2). Under the Mandatory
Victims Restitution Act of 1996 (MVRA), the District Court was
required to order petitioner to “make restitution to the victim of
the offense.” §3663A(a)(1); see §§2259(a), (b)(2) (“An order of
restitution under this section shall be issued and enforced in
accordance with [§]3664 in the same manner as an order under
[§]3663A”).
On June 24, 2014, the District Court entered an
initial judgment sentencing petitioner to 72 months of imprisonment
and a life term of supervised release. At the sentencing hearing,
the court acknowledged that restitution was mandatory. But,
consistent with the MVRA, the court postponed determining the
victims’ damages, which had not yet been ascertained. See,
e.g., §3664(d)(5);
Dolan v.
United States, 560
U. S. 605 –608 (2010). Accordingly, the judgment expressly
deferred “determination of restitution” and noted that an “Amended
Judgment . . . w[ould] be entered after such
determination.” App. 39. On July 8, petitioner filed a notice of
appeal “from the final judgment and sentence entered in this action
on the 24th day of June, 2014.”
Id., at 42.
The District Court held a restitution hearing on
September 17, 2014. Only one of the victims sought restitution. The
court ordered petitioner to pay $4,500 in restitution to her and
entered an amended judgment the next day imposing that sentence.
Petitioner did not file a second notice of appeal from the court’s
order imposing restitution or from the amended judgment.
Notwithstanding his failure to file a second
notice of appeal, petitioner challenged the restitution amount
before the Eleventh Circuit, arguing in his brief that the
Government had not shown he was the proximate cause of the victim’s
injuries and that the restitution amount bore no rational
relationship to the damages she claimed. The Government countered
that petitioner had forfeited his right to challenge the
restitution amount by failing to file a second notice of
appeal.
The Court of Appeals agreed that petitioner
could not challenge the restitution amount and declined to consider
his challenge. 618 Fed. Appx. 579, 583–584 (CA11 2015)
(
per curiam). We granted certiorari, 578 U. S.
___ (2016), and now affirm.
II
A
To secure appellate review of a judgment or
order, a party must file a notice of appeal from that judgment or
order. Filing a notice of appeal transfers adjudicatory authority
from the district court to the court of appeals. The statute that
governs appeals of criminal sentences, 18 U. S. C.
§3742(a), provides that a “defendant may file a notice of appeal in
the district court for review of an otherwise final sentence” in
certain specified circumstances. See
United States v.
Ruiz, 536 U. S. 622 −628 (2002). And Federal Rule of
Appellate Procedure 3(a)(1) specifies that “[a]n appeal permitted
by law as of right . . . may be taken
only by
filing a notice of appeal with the district clerk within the time
allowed by Rule 4.” (Emphasis added.)
Both §3742(a) and Rule 4 contemplate that the
defendant will file the notice of appeal
after the district
court has decided the issue sought to be appealed. Section
3742(a)(1) permits the defendant to file a notice of appeal of a
sentence that “
was imposed in violation of law.” (Emphasis
added.) And Rule 4(b)(1)(A)(i) provides generally that, “[i]n a
criminal case, a defendant’s notice of appeal must be filed in the
district court within 14 days
after . . . the
entry of either the judgment or the order being appealed.”
(Emphasis added.)
Petitioner filed only one notice of appeal,
which preceded by many months the sentence and judgment imposing
restitution. His notice of appeal could not have been “for review”
of the restitution order, §3742(a), and it was not filed within the
timeframe allowed by Rule 4. He thus failed to properly appeal
under the statute and the Rules the amended judgment imposing
restitution.
The Government contends that filing a notice of
appeal from the judgment imposing restitution is a jurisdictional
prerequisite to securing appellate review of the restitution
amount. See,
e.g., Brief for United States 28–31. This
position follows, according to the Government, from many of our
cases emphasizing the “jurisdictional significance” of a notice of
appeal.
E.g.,
Griggs v.
Provident Consumer
Discount Co., 459 U. S. 56, 58 (1982) (
per
curiam). Because the notice of appeal is jurisdictional, the
Government explains, the Court of Appeals was required to dismiss
petitioner’s appeal regardless of whether the Government raised the
issue.
We do not need to decide in this case whether
the Government is correct. The requirement that a defendant file a
timely notice of appeal from an amended judgment imposing
restitution is at least a mandatory claim-processing rule. See
Greenlaw v.
United States, 554 U. S. 237 –253
(2008); see also Rule 3(a)(2) (“An appellant’s failure to take any
step
other than the timely filing of a notice of appeal does
not affect the validity of the appeal, but is ground only for the
court of appeals to act as it considers appropriate, including
dismissing the appeal” (emphasis added)). Mandatory
claim-processing rules “seek to promote the orderly progress of
litigation by requiring that the parties take certain procedural
steps at certain specified times.”
Henderson v.
Shinseki, 562 U. S. 428, 435 (2011) . Unlike
jurisdictional rules, mandatory claim-processing rules may be
forfeited “if the party asserting the rule waits too long to raise
the point.”
Eberhart v.
United States, 546 U. S.
12, 15 (2005) (
per curiam) (internal quotation marks
omitted). If a party “properly raise[s] them,” however, they are
“unalterable.”
Id., at 15, 19.
The Government timely raised petitioner’s
failure to file a notice of appeal from the amended judgment
imposing restitution before the Court of Appeals. See Brief for
United States in No. 14–13029 (CA11), pp. 22–25 (arguing that
petitioner “waived his right to appeal the district court’s order
of restitution by failing to file a notice of appeal from that
order” (capitalization omitted)). Accordingly, “the court’s duty to
dismiss the appeal was mandatory.”
Eberhart,
supra,
at 18.
B
Petitioner disputes this conclusion, arguing
that his single notice of appeal sufficed under the Rules to appeal
both the initial judgment and the amended judgment imposing
restitution. As we understand it, his argument depends on two
premises: First, in a deferred restitution case, there is only one
“judgment,” as that term is used in Rules 4(b)(1) and (b)(2); and
second, so long as a notice of appeal is filed after the initial
judgment, it “springs forward” under Rule 4(b)(2) to appeal the
amended judgment imposing restitution. We reject each of these
premises.
1
Petitioner argues that the initial judgment
deferring restitution and the amended judgment imposing a specific
restitution amount merge to become “the judgment” referenced in the
Federal Rules. See Rule 4(b)(1)(A)(i) (notice of appeal must be
filed within 14 days after “the entry of . . . the
judgment . . . being appealed”); Rule 4(b)(2) (“Filing
Before Entry of Judgment”). He argues that his notice of appeal,
which was filed within 14 days of the initial judgment, was
therefore sufficient to invoke appellate review of the merged
judgment.
Petitioner’s approach is inconsistent with our
reasoning in
Dolan, 560 U. S. 605 . The petitioner in
that case argued that the amended judgment imposing restitution is
the
only final
, appealable judgment in a deferred
restitution case. See
id., at 616. Although we did not
decide “whether or when a party can, or must, appeal”—the question
presented here—we were not persuaded by the argument that “a
sentencing judgment is not ‘final’ until it contains a definitive
determination of the amount of restitution.”
Id., at
617–618. To the contrary, we recognized “strong arguments”
supporting the proposition that both the “initial judgment [that]
imposed a sentence of imprisonment and supervised release” and the
subsequent “ ‘sentence that impose[d] an order of
restitution’ ” were each immediately appealable final
judgments.
Ibid. (citing 18 U. S. C. §§3582(b)
(imprisonment), 3583(a) (supervised release), and 3664(
o)
(restitution)). Consequently, we were not surprised “to find
instances where a defendant ha[d] appealed from the entry of a
judgment containing an initial sentence that includes a term of
imprisonment” and “subsequently appealed from a later order setting
forth the final amount of restitution.” 560 U. S., at 618. Our
analysis in
Dolan thus makes clear that deferred restitution
cases involve two appealable judgments, not one.[
1]
2
Petitioner’s reliance on Rule 4(b)(2) is also
misplaced. That Rule provides that a “notice of appeal filed after
the court announces a decision, sentence, or order—but before the
entry of the judgment or order—is treated as filed on the date of
and after the entry.” A prematurely filed notice of appeal will
become effective under the Rule to challenge a later-entered
judgment in some circumstances. As this Court explained in
construing Rule 4(a)(2)’s parallel provision for civil cases, the
Rule “was intended to protect the unskilled litigant who files a
notice of appeal from a decision that he reasonably but mistakenly
believes to be a final judgment, while failing to file a notice of
appeal from the actual final judgment.”
FirsTier Mortgage
Co. v.
Investors Mortgage Ins. Co., 498 U. S. 269,
276 (1991) .
By its own terms, however, Rule 4(b)(2) applies
only to a notice of appeal filed after a sentence has been
“announce[d]” and before the judgment imposing the sentence is
entered on the docket. See Rule 4(b)(6) (“A judgment or order is
entered for purposes of this Rule 4(b) when it is entered on the
criminal docket”). If the court has not yet decided the issue that
the appellant seeks to appeal, then the Rule does not come into
play. Accordingly, it does not apply where a district court enters
an initial judgment deferring restitution and subsequently amends
the judgment to include the sentence of restitution. By deferring
restitution, the court is
declining to announce a
sentence.
When petitioner filed his notice of appeal in
this case, the District Court had observed only that restitution
was “mandatory.” App. 27. The court did not announce the
restitution amount (or even hold a hearing on the issue) until
months later. Even if describing restitution as mandatory could
qualify as a “sentence” that the District Court “announced” under
Rule 4(b)(2), petitioner has never disputed that restitution is
mandatory for his offense. Rather, he argued on appeal that the
amount of the restitution imposed—an issue the court did not
consider until months later—is unlawful. Because petitioner’s
notice of appeal was filed well before the District Court announced
the sentence imposing $4,500 in restitution, the notice of appeal
did not “spring forward” to become effective on the date the court
entered its amended judgment imposing that sentence.
C
Finally, petitioner argues in the alternative
that any defect in his notice of appeal should be overlooked as
harmless error, citing
Lemke v.
United States, 346
U. S. 325 (1953) (
per curiam). In that case, the
petitioner filed a notice of appeal the day after his sentence was
announced but three days before the judgment was entered.
Id., at 326. His notice of appeal was dismissed as premature
under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 37(a)(2), which then
governed notices of appeal in criminal cases. This Court reversed
on the ground that the premature filing was harmless error under
Rule 52(a).
Ibid.
The Court’s holding in
Lemke does not
apply to petitioner’s failure to file a notice of appeal from the
amended judgment.
Lemke has been superseded by the Federal
Rules of Appellate Procedure in two ways. First, the
Lemke
petitioner’s notice of appeal would now be timely under Rule
4(b)(2). As discussed in Part II–B–2,
supra, petitioner here
cannot take advantage of that rule. Second, Rule 3(a)(2) now
provides the consequences for litigant errors associated with
filing a notice of appeal. The court of appeals may, in its
discretion, overlook defects in a notice of appeal
other
than the failure to timely file a notice. It may not overlook the
failure to file a notice of appeal at all. The filing of a notice
of appeal from an amended judgment imposing restitution is at least
a mandatory claim-processing rule, Part II–A,
supra, meaning
that the requirement to file such a notice is unalterable, so long
as the opposing party raises the issue. By definition, mandatory
claim-processing rules, although subject to forfeiture, are not
subject to harmless-error analysis.
Petitioner in this case did not file a defective
notice of appeal from the amended judgment imposing restitution,
but rather failed altogether to file a notice of appeal from the
amended judgment. Courts do not have discretion to overlook such an
error, at least where it is called to their attention.
* * *
We hold that a defendant who wishes to appeal
an order imposing restitution in a deferred restitution case must
file a notice of appeal from that order. Because petitioner failed
to do so, and the Government objected, the Court of Appeals
properly declined to consider his challenge to the amount of
restitution imposed. The judgment of the Court of Appeals,
accordingly, is affirmed.
It is so ordered.
Justice Gorsuch took no part in the
consideration or decision of this case.
