United States v. Matos, No. 22-1561 (2d Cir. Aug. 13, 2026) (Cabranes, Livingston, Nardini), is the Second Circuit’s first published application of Hunter v. United States, 146 S. Ct. 1702 (2026). The result of Judge Livingston’s opinion is unremarkable: Matos’s challenges to his criminal history calculation under the Guidelines and to the substantive reasonableness of his sentence are barred by the plain language of the appeal waiver in his plea agreement, as they would have been before Hunter.
But the opinion carries three pieces of good news for practitioners. Matos confirms that defense-favorable contract-law principles survive Hunter; that exceptions to waiver enforceability now extend beyond the Circuit’s oft-cited five categories; and that caselaw from other circuits applying the miscarriage-of-justice standard informs what counts as a miscarriage of justice here.
The Gist
Matos pled guilty to drug conspiracy charges under a plea agreement waiving his right to appeal “[a]ny sentence to a term of imprisonment of 135 months or less.” The agreement contained no Guidelines calculation, but at the plea hearing the Government estimated that he fell in Criminal History Category II and faced a range of 78 to 97 months with acceptance. Slip op. at 6–7.
The PSR instead placed Matos in Category VI (and facing a range of 100 to 125 months). He objected, arguing that Probation mis-scored four prior indeterminate sentences under U.S.S.G. § 4A1.2(b)(1) & (2). The district court adopted the PSR’s calculation and sentenced Matos to 100 months.
On appeal, Matos argued that the district court erred in placing him in Category VI and that his sentence was substantively unreasonable. Recognizing that both claims fell within the waiver, he asked the Court to apply Hunter’s miscarriage-of-justice exception and hold the waiver unenforceable as to them.
The panel applied Hunter but said it didn’t help Matos. Slip op. at 12. Guidelines calculation disputes are “precisely the sort of ‘standard-fare errors’ contemplated in the plea agreements that contain appeal waivers.” Id. at 16. And because Matos identified no sentence exceeding the statutory maximum, no absence of “some minimum of civilized procedure,” and no “blatant constitutional error” — Hunter’s three illustrative categories — the panel enforced the waiver and dismissed those claims. Id. at 20.
1. Contract-Law Principles Survive Hunter
As we noted in our post on Hunter, Kagan’s majority opinion grounded the miscarriage-of-justice exception in judicial integrity rather than contract law (as the defendant had principally argued), raising the question whether the Second Circuit’s contract-based waiver doctrine survived. Matos answers directly. Before reaching Hunter, the panel restated that defendant-protecting framework in full:
“We review plea agreements, including waivers of the right to appeal, de novo and in accordance with general principles of the law of contract.” Slip op. at 13 (quoting Green, 897 F.3d 443, 447 (2d Cir. 2018)). Because plea agreements are not typical contracts, the Court “temper[s] the application of ordinary contract principles with ‘special due process concerns for fairness and the adequacy of procedural safeguards.’” Id. (quoting Granik, 386 F.3d 404, 413 (2d Cir. 2004)). And “recognizing the government’s awesome advantages in bargaining power in construing such agreements, we tend to favor the defendants in cases of doubt.” Id. (quoting Lajeunesse, 85 F.4th 679, 692 (2d Cir. 2023)).
The narrow-construction canon — ambiguities in waiver language are resolved against the Government — thus lives on. It operates at the scope stage, before the enforceability question is ever reached, and remains the cleanest path around a waiver.
Footnote 2 shows it working. The waiver covered any challenge “to a term of supervised release within the maximum permitted by law” but said nothing about conditions of supervised release. That silence meant Matos “did not waive his right to appeal the conditions of supervised release.” Slip op. at 4 n.2 (quoting Arguedas, 134 F.4th 54, 66 (2d Cir. 2025)). He litigated those conditions on the merits. No Hunter analysis required.
2. The “List of Five” Is No Longer Exhaustive
The Circuit has long recited a list of five exceptions to the general enforceability of appellate waivers. Matos repeats the list, with the exclusive version of the framing: “Waivers have been held unenforceable by this Court only: (1) where the waiver was not made knowingly, voluntarily, and competently; (2) where the sentence was based on constitutionally impermissible factors, such as ethnic, racial, or other prohibited biases; (3) where the government breached the agreement containing the waiver; (4) where the district court failed to enunciate any rationale for the defendant’s sentence; [or] (5) where the waiver was unsupported by consideration.” Slip op. at 14 (quoting Cook, 84 F.4th 118, 122 (2d Cir. 2023)) (emphasis added).
Matos conceded his case “suffers from none of the five deficiencies this Court has previously recognized.” Id. Under pre-Hunter law that concession would likely have ended the analysis. No longer. The panel agreed with Matos that “[f]ollowing the Supreme Court’s decision in Hunter, . . . when a miscarriage of justice would result, ‘an appeal waiver is unenforceable,’” id. (quoting Hunter, 146 S. Ct. at 1713), even if none of the five exceptions is implicated.
Hunter thus functions as a sixth ground for unenforceability, but one categorically different from the others. Grounds (1) through (5) are discrete defects. The miscarriage-of-justice exception is an open-ended standard the Supreme Court itself declined to cabin. The practical consequence: a claim fitting none of the five Cook categories is no longer automatically barred by an otherwise valid waiver. That is a meaningful expansion of the space in which waiver arguments can be made.
3. Out-of-Circuit Miscarriage-of-Justice Caselaw Informs Second Circuit Law
This may be the most useful part of the opinion — not for its result, but for the panel’s methodology.
Matos argued that in circuits that had adopted the miscarriage-of-justice exception before Hunter, his Guidelines claim would have been heard. Slip op. at 16. The panel disagreed. But note how it disagreed. It did not say those cases were irrelevant to a Second Circuit appeal. It canvassed them at length and treated their collective judgment as effectively dispositive. Slip op. at 16–18 (surveying the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and D.C. Circuits). Unfortunately for Matos, those courts uniformly held that enforcing a valid waiver against Guidelines-based claims works no miscarriage of justice. The panel’s conclusion: “This is a convincing national consensus, and we agree with our sister circuits.” Id. at 18.
This is the argument we flagged in our Hunter post: because the Supreme Court adopted the miscarriage-of-justice standard “as many appellate courts have properly applied it,” the accumulated body of out-of-circuit decisions applying that standard now functions as persuasive authority here. Matos adopts that methodology, if only implicitly, and applies it without hesitation.
The method didn’t help Matos, but decades of miscarriage-of-justice caselaw from other circuits await mining. Where those courts have declined to enforce waivers — unauthorized restitution (Yung, 37 F.4th 70, 82 (3d Cir. 2022)), conditions “wholly unrelated to legitimate sentencing purposes” (Boudreau, 58 F.4th 26, 33 (1st Cir. 2023)), invalid § 924(c) predicates (McKinney, 60 F.4th 188, 192–93 (4th Cir. 2023)), failure to address non-frivolous arguments (Smith, 134 F.4th 248, 261–63 (4th Cir. 2025)) — practitioners now have a live argument that those results follow here.
Coda: A Small Loss
Footnote 5 is a minor defeat. Matos invoked Gorsuch’s suggestion, in his Hunter concurrence, that “the failure to correct a plain and nonharmless error in calculating an advisory guidelines range” would qualify for the exception. The panel rejected it by adopting Kavanaugh’s framing: “[A]s Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence notes, such a rule ‘would set a lower bar for the miscarriage-of-justice exception than the Court’s opinion does.’ We are bound by the opinion of the Court, and ‘the Court’s opinion of course speaks for itself.’” Slip op. at 16 n.5 (quoting Hunter, 146 S. Ct. at 1724 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring)).