Scope of Rule 20 Transfer

Scope of Rule 20 Transfer

Rule 20(a) begins by fixing the geography of a transfer. A prosecution may move from the district where the indictment or information is pending, or from which a warrant on a complaint has been issued, to the district where the defendant is arrested, held, or present, provided the conditions listed in the subparts are met.¹ Two labels keep the districts straight. The district the case leaves is the charging district, also called the transferor, and the district that receives it is the transferee, meaning the court that takes over the case. The rule words the sending side in more than one way because a federal prosecution can begin by indictment, by information, or by a complaint backed by a warrant, and in each version the sending district is the one that holds the charge.

The receiving side follows the defendant. The trigger is physical location: the case may go to the district where the defendant is arrested, held, or present, so the rule works wherever the defendant is found, whether arrested there, in custody there, or simply there. The reason is the purpose of the rule. Under ordinary venue principles an arrested defendant who wants to plead guilty would be shipped back to the charging district, at a cost in hardship to the defendant and in escorts and travel to the government, and Rule 20 spares both by moving the file instead.² Because avoiding transport is the whole point, the defendant's own location is the only fact that selects the transferee district. The place where the crime occurred, the place where a witness lives, and the place where related charges happen to be pending play no part in that choice. The trap is picking a transferee district for any reason other than the defendant's own location.

The rule also operates on one defendant's case at a time. In United States v. Price, a prosecution of several defendants under two indictments, a footnote reports that James E. Jordan had his case transferred under Rule 20 to the Middle District of Georgia, and he was therefore not a party to the appeal brought by the others.³ The footnote does not say what Jordan did in Georgia, so it supports only the narrower point that a transfer lifts one defendant's case out of a multi-defendant prosecution without moving the rest. That is a point about who moves, and a second decision shows why the move is made.

The stated purpose of the transfer is a guilty or nolo contendere plea, and the transferee court disposes of the case, which includes sentencing. In Clanton v. United States, the defendant pleaded guilty in Atlanta to one bank robbery, then pleaded guilty to a Miami bank robbery whose case had been transferred to Atlanta under Rule 20, and was sentenced on both charges.⁴ Sentencing travels with the plea for a functional reason. If only the plea colloquy moved, the defendant would still have to return to the charging district for sentence, and the hardship and expense the rule exists to avoid would simply be postponed. Keeping both steps in one court also lets a single judge take the plea and set the sentence with every pending charge in view, which makes a package resolution possible.⁵ The opening sentence of Rule 20(a) ends by making all of this depend on conditions in the subparts, and the next section begins with the first of them, the defendant's written statement, which is also where the consent to disposition in the transferee district comes from.