Today, commonsense won the argument in Parrish v. United States, No. 24-275 (June 12, 2025), holding that a civil litigant who files a notice of appeal after the original appeal deadline but before the court grants reopening need not file a second notice after reopening. The original notice relates forward to the date reopening is granted.
Justice Sotomayor delivered the opinion of the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts, and justices Alito, Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Justice Jackson filed an opinion concurring the judgment, joined by Justice Thomas. Justice Gorsuch dissented.
Petitioner Donte Parrish, while a federal inmate at Hazelton, was placed in restrictive/segregated confinement for 23 months based on his alleged involvement in a prison killing. He was later cleared by prison officials after his segregated confinement ended. He filed a civil suit seeking damages for his time in segregated custody, which was dismissed by the district court. Because Parrish was transferred from federal to state custody, he did not receive notice of the district court’s judgment until three months after it was entered, long after the 60-day jurisdictional requirement to file a notice of appeal in suites against the United States had expired. Parrish promptly filed a notice of appeal with the Fourth Circuit explaining why his notice of appeal was untimely. The Fourth Circuit construed his notice of appeal as a motion to reopen the time to file an appeal. On remand, the district granted reopening for fourteen days and retransmitted the case back to the court of appeals. Parrish did not file a second notice of appeal.
Back on appeal, the government indicated Parrish’s initial notice of appeal adequately communicated his intent to appeal. The Fourth Circuit disagreed, holding Parrish should have filed a second notice of appeal and concluded it lacked jurisdiction.
Leaving no room for impractical reasoning or results, Justice Sotomayor’s majority opinion explained why Parrish didn’t need to file another notice of appeal:
The purpose of a notice of appeal (as its moniker suggests) is to provide opposing parties and the court with notice of one’s intent to appeal. That is why “the notice afforded by a document . . . determines the document’s sufficiency as a notice of ap[1]peal.” Smith, 502 U. S., at 248. So long as “no genuine doubt exists about who is appealing, from what judgment, to which appellate court,” Becker, 532 U. S., at 767–768, there is little value and significant harm in dismissing ap[p]peals on the basis of prematurity alone.
This case illustrates the point. As the Government admits, it was perfectly clear after Parrish’s first notice that he intended to appeal his case’s dismissal. Sending anothernotice would amount to nothing more than “‘empty paper shuffling.’” Hinton v. Elwood, 997 F. 2d 774, 778 (CA10 1993).