Transfer for Plea and Sentence

Transfer for Plea and Sentence

A federal charge is filed in one district, but the defendant is not always found there. Someone indicted in one district may be arrested, held, or simply present in another, and the ordinary course would be to send that person back to face the charge where it was filed. Rule 20 offers a shorter route for a defendant who has already decided not to contest the case. The prosecution may be transferred from the district where the charge is pending to the district where the defendant is arrested, held, or present, so that the defendant can plead guilty or nolo contendere and be sentenced there.¹ The saving is practical. The defendant avoids being carried to a distant courthouse for a hearing at which no trial will occur, and the courts and the government avoid the expense and delay of arranging that trip. The plea hearing is simply relocated, so the requirements for a valid plea taught earlier in this chapter, including the Rule 11 colloquy, continue to govern what the receiving court must do before it accepts the plea.

Because the transfer moves the case away from the place where it was brought, Rule 20 conditions it on writings from both sides, and each writing guards against a different risk.² The defendant must state in writing a wish to plead guilty or nolo contendere and to waive trial in the charging district, and must also consent in writing to disposition of the case in the district where the defendant is found.³ Those documents make the defendant the one who chooses to give up trial in the district of the charge, and they put that choice in a form the court can see. The United States attorneys in both districts must also approve the transfer in writing. The approval from the charging district matters because that office decided where and on what terms the case would be prosecuted, and a defendant should not be able to relocate the resolution of its charges without its agreement. The approval from the receiving district matters because that office will have to handle the plea and the sentencing. Students lose this issue when they treat approval from only one district's prosecutor as enough, since the rule asks for both.⁴

The subsections below follow the order in which a transfer unfolds. The first covers the conditions in Rule 20(a) that must be satisfied before any transfer can occur. The second turns to the clerk's duties once those conditions are met, and to the consequence if the defendant, on arriving in the receiving district, pleads not guilty. The third addresses the separate provisions for juveniles, which proceed on different terms. The conditions come first because everything the clerk and the receiving court do depends on their having been met.

Conditions for Transfer

Rule 20(a) first fixes the direction of the move. A prosecution may be transferred 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.⁵ The starting points cover the three forms a federal charge can take at this stage, and the destinations describe one practical fact in three ways: the defendant is physically in the place where the plea would be taken. That definition follows from the purpose of the device, which is to spare the defendant a trip back to the charging district for a hearing at which no trial will occur. The rule then makes the authority conditional, and the conditions fall into two sets. One set consists of acts the defendant must perform, and the other consists of approvals that only the government can give. Transfer is permitted only when both sets are satisfied, because the defendant's paragraph of the rule ends with a conjunction that joins it to the government's paragraph.⁶

The defendant's set, found in Rule 20(a)(1), contains three acts, and each does a different job. The first is a written statement of a wish to plead guilty or nolo contendere and to waive trial in the district where the charge is pending.⁷ That writing is the defendant's own surrender of the trial the charging district would otherwise provide, and putting it on paper means the surrender is documented rather than inferred from a lawyer's remark or a conversation with a prosecutor. The second act is a written consent to the court's disposing of the case in the transferee district, which is the district receiving the case. Waiving trial in one place says nothing about whether the defendant accepts a plea and sentence in another place, so the consent supplies the agreement about forum that the waiver leaves open. The third act is filing the statement in the transferee district.⁸ A filing there places the document in the record of the court that will actually act on the case, which lets that court see for itself that the defendant's conditions were met instead of relying on a file kept in a distant courthouse. The rule asks only for a stated wish to plead, so the plea itself is entered later, in the receiving district.

The government's set is Rule 20(a)(2), which requires the United States attorneys in both districts to approve the transfer in writing.⁹ The defendant cannot supply these approvals, so a defendant's readiness to plead in the district of arrest does not by itself move the case. Each office is asked because each has a stake the other lacks: the charging district's office controls the prosecution being relocated, and the receiving district's office inherits the plea hearing and the sentencing. The written form does for the prosecutors what the writings do for the defendant, since it leaves a record that each office agreed. Taken together, the two sets make the transfer a joint act. The defendant's writings show that the move reflects the defendant's own informed choice, and the approvals show that the prosecution agrees to it, so neither side can impose the transfer on the other.

The first two defendants differ only in whether the charging district's prosecutor approved, and that single fact decides the result because Rule 20(a)(2) names both offices.¹⁰ The third differs from the first only in the defendant's consent, and that fact decides the result because Rule 20(a)(1) lists consent to disposition in the transferee district as an act separate from the wish to plead.¹¹ In each variation the missing item sits in one set, and the completeness of the other set does not repair it. Students lose this issue when they treat a defendant's willingness to plead as enough, because willingness satisfies only part of the defendant's own set and leaves the government's set untouched.¹² When every condition is met, the case passes to the clerk's duties, which the next subsection addresses.

Clerk's Duties and Not-Guilty Pleas

Satisfying the conditions in Rule 20(a) authorizes the transfer, but the case does not actually move until someone sends the papers. Rule 20(b) gives that task to the clerk of the court where the indictment, information, or complaint is pending: after receiving the defendant's statement and the required approvals, the clerk must send the file, or a certified copy, to the clerk in the transferee district.¹⁹ The trigger is the completed set of Rule 20(a) items, so the file does not leave the charging district on the strength of the defendant's willingness alone, and the clerk's routine act cannot run ahead of the writings and approvals that justify it. The reason the file travels is functional. The receiving court is asked to take a plea and impose a sentence on a charge it did not originate, and it cannot explain that charge to the defendant, test the factual basis for the plea, or sentence without the charging papers and the record already made. A certified copy serves as well as the original because the receiving court needs an authentic record of the case, not a particular piece of paper.

The second duty arises only if the transfer fails to produce a guilty plea. If the defendant pleads not guilty after the case has been transferred under Rule 20(a), the clerk must return the papers to the court where the prosecution began, and that court must restore the proceeding to its docket.²⁰ The return follows from the purpose of the device. Rule 20 exists so that a case can be resolved by plea in a convenient place, and a not-guilty plea removes the reason for the receiving district to keep the case, so the prosecution goes back to where it was brought. The same rule then adds a protection that matters more to the defendant: the statement that the defendant wished to plead guilty or nolo contendere is not, in any civil or criminal proceeding, admissible against the defendant.²¹

The exclusion does subtler work than the return of the papers, and it is easiest to see through the incentive it removes. The statement is a signed writing, filed in a court, announcing that the defendant wants to plead guilty. If a prosecutor could offer it at trial after a not-guilty plea, a defendant who started the transfer process and then reconsidered would have handed the government evidence against himself. A defendant who foresaw that risk would decline to use Rule 20 at all, and the savings in travel and delay that the transfer procedure was built to produce would go unclaimed. Making the statement inadmissible removes the risk at the source, so a defendant can offer to plead and later retreat without penalty for having made the offer.

The same protective idea runs through the general treatment of plea-related statements. Rule 11(f) provides that the admissibility of a plea, a plea discussion, and any related statement is governed by Federal Rule of Evidence 410.²² Rule 20(c) states its own exclusion instead of leaving the question to Rule 410, but the two work toward the same end, and United States v. Mezzanatto shows how such protections behave. The defendant there had agreed to allow his plea-discussion statements to be used for impeachment, and the prosecutor later cross-examined him about them and called an agent to recount them after he testified at trial.²³ The Ninth Circuit held the agreement unenforceable because the plea-statement rules list no waiver exception, but the Supreme Court found that reasoning contrary to its settled approach, under which a defendant may knowingly and voluntarily waive protections absent an affirmative indication that waiver was meant to be precluded.²⁴ Mezzanatto turned on the defendant's own bargain to permit use, and nothing in the text of Rule 20(c) creates an exception, so in an ordinary transfer the exclusion applies on its terms.

The two defendants differ only in the plea each enters, and that single fact decides everything that follows. A not-guilty plea triggers the return of the papers and the exclusion of the statement, while a guilty plea keeps the case in the transferee district under the transfer's premise that the defendant wishes to plead.²⁵ The move to a new courthouse also relaxes none of the plea safeguards taught earlier in this chapter, which is why the second defendant still receives the Rule 11 colloquy before the plea is accepted. Students lose this issue when they treat the earlier written statement as usable once the defendant changes course, on the theory that the defendant committed to plead, because the rule bars its use against the defendant in any civil or criminal proceeding.²⁶

Juvenile Transfers

Rule 20(a) lets an adult defendant who wants to plead guilty do so in the district of arrest, and Rule 20(d) supplies a counterpart for juveniles. A juvenile, as defined in 18 U.S.C. § 5031, may be proceeded against as a juvenile delinquent in the district where the juvenile is arrested, held, or present if a set of conditions is met.²⁹ The three locations are the same ones that describe the destination for adults, so the geography needs no new learning. The conditions are what change, and they change because of what the juvenile is being asked to give up: the right to be returned to the district where the offense allegedly occurred. A juvenile is less able than an adult to judge whether that right is worth keeping, so the rule surrounds the decision with protections the adult procedure does not contain. The conditions read most easily as a sequence in three parts: a limit on the offense, the safeguards around the juvenile's own choice, and the approvals that authorize the move.

The first condition is a ceiling on seriousness. The alleged offense that occurred in the other district must not be punishable by death or life imprisonment.³⁰ This condition is a fact about the charge itself, so no consent, advice, or approval can supply it. A juvenile charged with a life-punishable offense is outside the procedure however willing he is to consent and however carefully he has been advised. The reason lies in the stakes. Giving up the right to be returned costs the most when the potential penalty is the most severe, and the rule responds by leaving those cases outside the procedure altogether, so that it reaches only less grave charges.

Three further conditions protect the juvenile's choice, and each does a different job. An attorney must have advised the juvenile.³¹ The court must also have informed the juvenile of the juvenile's rights, including the right to be returned to the district where the offense allegedly occurred, and of the consequences of waiving those rights.³² Only then does the juvenile's own act come into play: after receiving the court's information about rights, the juvenile must consent in writing to be proceeded against in the transferee district and must file that consent there.³³ The lawyer's advice is tailored to this juvenile's interests, while the court's explanation is an official statement of the rights at stake that does not depend on what any one lawyer chose to say. The sequence built into the consent condition is what gives the other two their force. A consent signed before the court's explanation would be an agreement made without knowing what was being waived, so it does not satisfy the rule even if the explanation follows. The filing requirement does here what it does for adults: it places the consent in the record of the court that will act on the case.

The last two conditions are approvals. The United States attorneys for both districts must approve the transfer in writing, as under the adult rule, and the transferee court must approve it as well.³⁴ The court's approval has no counterpart in the adult procedure taught earlier in this chapter, which asks only for the defendant's writings and the prosecutors' approvals. The addition follows from what each approval can accomplish. The prosecutors' approvals show that the government agrees to the move, but they speak for the government's interest in how the case is handled. The court's approval adds a decision-maker with no stake in the outcome, who sits in the district that will actually proceed against the juvenile.

Once the conditions are satisfied, the file has to travel. After receiving the juvenile's written consent and the required approvals, the clerk where the indictment, information, or complaint is pending, or where the alleged offense occurred, must send the file, or a certified copy, to the clerk in the transferee district.³⁵ As in the adult procedure, the clerk's act is triggered by the completed conditions, so the papers do not leave the charging district on the strength of the juvenile's willingness alone. The receiving court needs the record for the same practical reason a receiving court needs it in an adult transfer: it cannot proceed on a charge it did not originate without the charging papers in hand.

The first two juveniles differ only in whether an attorney advised the juvenile, and that single fact decides the result because attorney advice is a condition of its own.³⁶ The third differs from the first only in timing, and timing decides the result because the consent condition is tied to the juvenile's having already received the court's information about rights.³⁷ In each variation the missing item sits in one condition, and the completeness of the others does not repair it. Approvals from both prosecutors and the court cannot stand in for the juvenile's own informed choice. Students lose this issue when they treat a juvenile's signed consent as enough, because the consent counts only when counsel has advised, the court has informed, and the consent came after that information.³⁸