Case Information
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BARRON, Circuit Judge. After reaching a plea agreement with the government, Marcos Rojas pled guilty to failing to register as a sex offender as required by the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, or SORNA, 18 U.S.C. § 2250(a). The District Court sentenced Rojas to twelve months in prison. The District Court also sentenced Rojas to ten years of supervised release and imposed a number of special conditions of supervised release. On appeal, Rojas challenges three of those conditions: a requirement that he participate in a sex offender treatment program, a requirement that he participate in a mental health treatment program, and a prohibition on the possession of pornography unless approved by Rojas's probation officer.
We need not reach the substance of Rojas's appeal,
however, because of the "waiver of appeal" provision in Rojas's
plea agreement. Rojas concedes that he agreed knowingly and
voluntarily to accept that provision. See United States v. Teeter,
Rojas grounds that argument in the text of the waiver of appeal as read against the text of the plea agreement. Specifically, the plea agreement stated that the parties were making no recommendation regarding conditions of supervised release. And the waiver then provided:
[I]f [the District] Court accepts this Plea Agreement and sentences the defendant according to its terms, conditions and recommendations, the defendant then waives and permanently surrenders his right to appeal the judgment and sentence in this case.
Rojas accordingly argues that the sentence -- by imposing conditions of supervised release -- could not have been "according to" the plea agreement's "terms, conditions and recommendations." And thus, Rojas argues, the waiver cannot bar him from appealing the conditions of supervised release.
Rojas's proposed construction would appear to render the entirety of the waiver ineffective upon the imposition of any condition of supervised release, as the waiver's text does not appear to permit a defendant to appeal only those aspects of a sentence that are not "according to" the plea agreement. And it is hard to believe that the government, in entering into the plea agreement, intended for the waiver to be contingent in that way.
But Rojas's argument is also unpersuasive for another
reason. He concedes that, if the plea agreement did not
specifically state that it contained no recommendation regarding
conditions of supervised release, then the waiver would apply and
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bar this appeal. And he must concede as much, because, as Rojas
acknowledges, we have held that this exact waiver language
precludes the appeal of conditions of supervised release when a
plea agreement says nothing about them. See, e.g., United States
v. Santiago, 769 F.3d 1, 7 (1st Cir. 2014); United States v.
Rivera-López,
But if that is so, this case is no different. The plea
agreement here merely included a clause that stated expressly what
the silence in those cases made equally clear -- that the plea
agreement made no recommendation regarding terms of supervised
release. In imposing conditions of supervised release, therefore,
the District Court imposed a sentence that was still "according to
the terms, conditions and recommendations" of that agreement. And
because, as Rojas concedes, his appeal of the supervised release
conditions is an appeal of the "judgment and sentence" in his case,
see Santiago,