Garry Lebron Hayes v. United States

Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 52(b) allows a court of appeals to correct an unpreserved error when the error is “plain.” An error is “plain” when it is “clear” or “obvious” under current law, meaning it is not “subject to reasonable dispute.” United States v. Olano, 507 U.S. 725, 734 (1993); Puckett v. United States, 556 U.S. 129, 135 (2009). Congress likewise limits supervised-release conditions. Under 18 U.S.C. § 3583(d)(2), a condition may impose “no greater deprivation of liberty than is reasonably necessary” to serve the purposes of sentencing. The court of appeals held that the condition here—a one-year ban on any contact with any member of Congress for any reason—violated that limit and burdened Mr. Hayes’s First Amendment right to petition. But the court still refused to correct the error. In the court’s view, the violation was not “plain” because no prior case involved a materially similar condition and because the violation was not severe enough. The question presented is: Whether a court of appeals may hold that a condition squarely violated a statutory limit but still say the error was not “plain” because the violation was not severe enough.