Hunter v. United States · ¶24

For that reason, neither the Government's nor the Fifth Circuit's proposed rule can be the right one. The Government's maximalist position first runs into the scenario that even the Fifth Circuit will not tolerate: when a judge imposes on a defendant who has signed an appeal waiver a sentence beyond what the relevant statute allows. See United States v. Kim, 988 F. 3d 803, 810, n. 1 (CA5 2021) (declining to enforce an appeal waiver in such a case because of “the legal truism that a court must not impose a sentence” that is “unauthorized by law”). Suppose, for example, that a judge sentences a misdemeanant to life in prison, when the applicable law caps a prison term at one year. If an appellate court had to dismiss the resulting appeal, it would call into doubt the judicial system's very attachment to law. But so too would a dismissal in certain other situations, which fall outside both…

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