Justices clarify rules for reopened times for appeal

In a case involving a federal inmate’s administrative tort claims alleging a violation of due process and wrongful confinement, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a litigant who files a notice of appeal after the original appeal deadline but before the court grants reopening need not file a second notice after reopening.

The ruling reverses a decision from the 4th Circuit, resolving a circuit split.

Click here to read the full text of the June 12 decision in Parrish v. United States.

• “A notice of appeal filed after the original deadline but before reopening is late with respect to the original appeal period, but merely early with respect to the reopened one. Precedent teaches that a premature notice of appeal, if otherwise adequate, relates forward to the date of the order making the appeal possible. So a notice filed before reopening relates forward to the date reopening is granted, making a second notice unnecessary.”
  — Justice Sonia Sotomayor, majority opinion

• “In short, when a late litigant submits a proposed filing along with a motion that asks the court to accept it, the substantive document does not come ‘too early.’ Rather, it comes contingent upon the court’s granting the accompanying motion, with an understanding that, if the motion is granted, the filing will be docketed.
  “This reasoning, of course, might not apply in other factual circumstances, such as when a would-be appellant files a notice of appeal late and then, days later, submits a separate motion to reopen; in that case, a court may well need to establish whether the earlier filed notice of appeal ‘relates forward’ upon the granting of the separate motion to reopen. But, here, the ‘motion to reopen’ and the notice of appeal were one and the same, making the factual basis for our rule of decision much simpler. [Petitioner Donte] Parrish’s proposed notice of appeal should have been docketed as timely filed upon the District Court’s granting of his ‘motion to reopen.’”
  — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in judgment

• “Respectfully, I would have dismissed this case as improvidently granted. The Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules has already launched a study to consider whether changes to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(6) maybe warranted to treat premature notices of appeal as relating forward to the first day of the 14-day window 28 U.S.C. §2107(c) prescribes. Surely, too, a change to the rules could have solved the problem presented by this case. Even if §2107(c) requires a notice to be filed during a certain window, the Rules Committee could provide that a premature notice shall be treated as filed at a later date. Already, the Committee has done exactly that in other appellate rules, including Rules 4(a)(2) and 4(a)(4). Rather than take up problems the Rules Committee can solve and has announced its interest in solving — and, in doing so, risk the possibility that the Committee (understandably) may suspend its own activities and delay their resolution — I believe the wiser and more efficient course is to let the Committee get on with its work. That body is charged with ‘review[ing] issues of precisely this sort.’”
  — Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, dissenting