Holguin-Hernandez v. United States
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a defendant who argues at sentencing for a shorter prison term automatically preserves his right to appeal the sentence as too long — without needing to separately object or invoke any magic words like 'unreasonable.'
The decision resolves a split among federal appeals courts and protects defendants who clearly communicated their sentencing position to the trial judge from losing their appeal rights on a technicality.
“Nothing more is needed to preserve the claim that a longer sentence is unreasonable.”
The Court's bottom-line rule: arguing for a shorter sentence is enough to keep a length challenge alive on appeal.
How it got here: The Fifth Circuit found Holguin-Hernandez forfeited his appeal for not explicitly objecting to the sentence's reasonableness; the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case because federal appeals courts disagreed on the issue.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Gonzalo Holguin-Hernandez was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to 60 months in prison. Because he was also serving supervised release from an earlier conviction, the government asked for an additional 12–18 months of consecutive prison time. His lawyer argued that the sentencing factors supported no additional time at all, or at most less than 12 months. The judge imposed the 12-month minimum anyway, and Holguin-Hernandez appealed, arguing the sentence was longer than necessary.
The question before the Court
Must a criminal defendant use the word "unreasonable" at sentencing — or make any separate formal objection — to preserve his right to appeal that his sentence was too long?
The Court's answer
No — a defendant who asks the sentencing judge for a shorter prison term has automatically preserved his right to argue on appeal that the longer sentence actually imposed was too long. No magic words, separate formal objection, or use of the word "unreasonable" is required.
The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure say a defendant preserves an issue for appeal simply by informing the judge of the action he wants taken. When a defendant argues for less prison time than the judge imposes, the judge is already on notice that the defendant believes a longer sentence would be more than necessary — which is precisely the objection underlying any appeal that a sentence is too long. Requiring defendants to also say the word "unreasonable" would confuse things further: "reasonableness" is the standard courts of appeal use to review sentences, not the standard trial judges apply when they decide how long a sentence should be.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Criminal defendants sentenced to more prison time than they requested no longer need to recite the word "unreasonable" or make a separate formal objection to keep their appeal rights intact. Trial lawyers can simply argue for the shorter sentence they want, and that argument itself will be enough to preserve a challenge to the judge's decision on appeal.
What changes now
The case goes back to the Fifth Circuit to decide two questions the Supreme Court left open: whether Holguin-Hernandez's specific arguments — that he posed no danger to the public and that 12 months would not serve deterrence — were individually preserved, and whether the 12-month sentence was in fact unreasonably long. Broader questions about how to preserve challenges to a judge's sentencing procedures (as opposed to sentence length) also remain for lower courts to work out.
What this does not decide
The Court explicitly did not decide what a defendant must do to preserve a challenge to the judge's sentencing procedures (such as a miscalculated guidelines range), or whether a general plea for leniency is enough to preserve every specific argument about sentence length. Those questions remain open for lower courts.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Alito
Justice Alito agreed that a defendant who requests a specific shorter sentence need not separately object to preserve a length-based appeal. He wrote separately to flag three things the majority was not deciding: the rule for preserving procedural sentencing errors, whether a general plea for leniency preserves every specific argument about sentence length, and whether this particular defendant preserved his specific arguments about public danger and deterrence. He stressed that on remand, the Fifth Circuit should assess those questions individually.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 51(b) provides two ways to preserve a claim for appeal: telling the court what action you want, or objecting to what the court did and explaining why. Rule 51 was specifically designed to eliminate the old requirement of making formal 'exceptions' to a court's rulings — no particular words or formulas are needed.
- When a defendant argues at sentencing for less prison time than the judge ultimately imposes, the defendant is necessarily communicating — in the language of the sentencing statute (18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)) — that the shorter sentence would be 'sufficient' and any longer sentence 'greater than necessary' to serve the goals of punishment. A judge hearing that argument is already on notice of the claimed error.
- This communication satisfies Rule 51(b) because the claimed error has been 'brought to the court's attention.' The whole point of the preservation requirement is to give the trial judge a chance to correct herself before an appeal becomes necessary — a defendant who argues for a specific shorter sentence does exactly that.
- The Fifth Circuit required defendants to also invoke the word 'reasonableness,' but the Court rejected that rule. 'Reasonableness' is the label the Court has given to the abuse-of-discretion standard that courts of appeal use to review sentencing decisions — it is not the substantive standard that trial judges apply. Trial courts apply the 'parsimony principle' of § 3553(a): impose a sentence sufficient but not greater than necessary.
- Because Holguin-Hernandez's lawyer argued at sentencing that no additional time, or at most less than 12 months, was warranted under the § 3553(a) factors, she brought the relevant error to the judge's attention. That was enough to preserve the substantive-reasonableness challenge for appeal without any additional objection.