UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff—Appellee, versus ZAIRA FRANCO, Defendant—Appellant.
No. 20-60473
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
September 3, 2020
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi USDC No. 3:17-CR-33-1
Before BARKSDALE, ELROD, and HO, Circuit Judges.
Zaira Franco appeals the denial of her motion for reduction of sentence (commonly known as a motion for compassionate release), filed pursuant to the First Step Act. The question on appeal is whether Franco is excused from that statute‘s textual requirement that she file a request with the Bureau of Prisons before filing her motion in federal court. We conclude that she is not so excused, and we affirm the district court‘s denial of her motion.
I.
In January 2018, Zaira Franco was sentenced to serve 37 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Franco resides at the Residential Reentry Management Facility (colloquially known
In April 2020, pursuant to
II.
As a general rule, federal courts “may not modify a term of imprisonment once it has been imposed.”
upon motion of the defendant after the defendant has fully exhausted all administrative rights to appeal a failure of the Bureau of Prisons to bring a motion on the defendant‘s behalf or the lapse of 30 days from the receipt of such a request by the warden of the defendant‘s facility, whichever is earlier . . . .
The text therefore outlines two routes a defendant‘s motion can follow to be properly before the court. Both routes begin with the defendant requesting that “the Bureau of Prisons” “bring a motion on the defendant‘s behalf.”
Franco concedes that she did not request that “the Bureau of Prisons” “bring a motion on [her] behalf.” See
III.
The Supreme Court distinguishes “between jurisdictional prescriptions and nonjurisdictional claim-processing rules.” Fort Bend Cnty. v. Davis, 139 S. Ct. 1843, 1849 (2019). The former limit the circumstances in which Article III courts may exercise judicial power; the latter “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). Provisions are only considered jurisdictional when “the Legislature clearly states that [the] prescription counts as jurisdictional.” Fort Bend Cnty., 139 S. Ct. at 1850.
Nothing in the text of this provision indicates that the procedural requirements are jurisdictional. Instead, the provision instructs a defendant to either “fully exhaust[] all administrative rights to appeal” the BOP‘s failure to bring a motion or wait for thirty days after the warden‘s receipt of the request before filing a motion in federal court.
IV.
Next, we must determine whether that statutory requirement is mandatory. We join the other three circuits that have faced the question and conclude that it is. See Alam, 960 F.3d at 832; United States v. Raia, 954 F.3d 594, 597 (3d Cir. 2020); United States v. Springer, No. 20-5000, 2020 WL 3989451, at *3 (10th Cir. July 15, 2020).
The First Step Act, in clear language, specifies what a defendant must do before she files a motion for compassionate release in federal court. Specifically a defendant must submit a request to “the Bureau of Prisons to bring a motion on the defendant‘s behalf.”
The statute‘s language is mandatory. Congress has commanded that a “court may not modify a term of imprisonment” if a defendant has not filed a request with the BOP. See
Franco‘s arguments to the contrary are unavailing. First, she argues that the requirement cannot be mandatory because the statute permits two different routes a defendant may take before filing a motion in court. But both of those routes (filing a motion after the BOP‘s denial or filing a motion 30 days after receipt by the warden) require the defendant to first file a request with the BOP. And Franco concedes she never filed such a request.
Nor are we inclined to deviate from this clear text in pursuit of the statute‘s broader “purpose” or “intent.” We need not dive “inside Congress‘s mind” to determine the statutory intent here. Cf. John F. Manning, Inside Congress‘s Mind, 115 Colum. L. Rev. 1911, 1919 (2015) (noting that textualists, legal realists, modern pragmatists, and legal process scholars share doubts about “an actual subjective congressional decision about the litigated issue“). Congress used clear language: all requests for compassionate release must be presented to the Bureau of Prisons before they are litigated in the federal courts. When the text is clear, that is “the end of the construction.” Hightower v. Tex. Hosp. Ass‘n, 65 F.3d 443, 450 (5th Cir. 1995). We need go no further.
Finally, Franco maintains that the statutory requirement does not apply to her because she resides in a halfway house. The statute refers to “receipt of such a request by the warden of the defendant‘s facility.”
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This opinion will, at the least, provide clarity about this important relief. Definite legal rules are knowable ex ante, evenhanded in application, and favor certainty and predictability. Cf. Lon Fuller, Morality of Law 39 (1969) (identifying, inter alia, generality, public accessibility, clarity, and constancy as requirements of a legal system). In this case, the district judge denied Franco‘s motion without prejudice, and allowed her to “re-file her motion once she achieve[d] one of the two avenues for exhaustion under