United States of America v. Matthew Cargo

In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 24-3067
U NITED S TATES OF A MERICA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
M ATTHEW C ARGO,
Defendant-Appellant.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for
the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 1:19-cr-00212-1 — Matthew F. Kennelly, Judge.
____________________
S UBMITTED F EBRUARY 27, 2025 — DECIDED A PRIL 18, 2025
____________________
Before S CUDDER , PRYOR , and M ALDONADO, Circuit Judges.
S CUDDER , Circuit Judge. Innocent mistakes happen, and
federal prisoner Matthew Cargo made an unfortunate one
here that leaves us no choice but to dismiss his appeal as un-
timely. Cargo addressed the envelope containing his notice of
appeal this way: “Federal Court/Northern Illinois, 219
S. Street, Room 500, Chicago, Illinois 60604.” He had every-
thing right but the street name, as the district court in Chicago
is on “S. Dearborn Street”—not “S. Street.”

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2 No. 24-3067
Yet Cargo’s being close on the address was not close
enough, resulting in the U.S. Postal Service marking the mail-
ing “not deliverable as addressed” and returning it. By the
time Cargo learned of and sought to correct his mistake, the
appeal window had long expired, owing by his account to his
moving prisons and not learning of the error in time to correct
it. That leaves Cargo to argue that he got enough right at the
time of the original mailing to satisfy the so-called prison-
mailbox rule: he gave the notice of appeal mailing to prison
officials before the deadline with the clear intent that it reach
the district court. On these facts, we cannot agree, for the ad-
dressing error mattered and precludes us from concluding
that Cargo satisfied the prison-mailbox rule to submit a timely
appeal.
I
Only few additional facts require mention. The district
court entered its judgment sentencing Cargo on his federal
convictions on July 20, 2020. That gave Cargo fourteen days,
or until August 3, 2020, to file a timely notice of appeal. See
Fed. R. App. P. 4(b)(1)(A). He may have been able to obtain
an extension of that deadline to as late as September 2, 2020.
See id. 4(b)(4). At the very least, following sentencing and the
finality of the criminal case against him, Cargo could have in-
structed his counsel to file a notice of appeal—a direction
counsel would have had to follow. See Roe v. Flores-Ortega,
528 U.S. 470, 477 (2000).
In our court Cargo has submitted a detailed handwritten
declaration and supporting evidence telling us the alternative
path he tried to follow. By his own account, on July 22, 2020,
he was temporarily held in an Oklahoma jail awaiting transfer
to the federal prison where he would start serving his

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No. 24-3067 3
sentence. Early that morning, Cargo says he prepared a notice
of appeal and envelope to mail it and gave the envelope to a
correctional officer. We can see from a copy of the envelope
that it bears a postmark of the same date. Unfortunately, we
can also see Cargo’s addressing mistake, the postal service’s
instructions to return the envelope to its sender, and the jail’s
stamp reflecting that Cargo had already been transferred out
by the time the envelope arrived back at the Oklahoma jail.
Cargo insists he did not learn of his notice of appeal going
undelivered until he finally received the forwarded envelope
in early November 2024, at which point he promptly repack-
aged the notice of appeal—still dated July 22, 2020—in a new,
properly addressed envelope that resulted in this appeal.
Seeing that the notice of appeal was postmarked four
years after final judgment, the government moved to dismiss
it as untimely. Although not jurisdictional, we must enforce
this deadline where, as here, the government invokes its pro-
tections. See United States v. Townsend, 762 F.3d 641, 644 (7th
Cir. 2014). Cargo responded with a declaration and memoran-
dum insisting that he satisfied the prison-mailbox rule as es-
tablished in Houston v. Lack, 487 U.S. 266 (1988), and so his
appeal should be deemed timely.
II
The government urges us to reject Cargo’s argument be-
cause he waited too long to make it—he had made no effort
to alert anyone to his attempted appeal these past four years,
despite contacting the district court regarding sentence-re-
duction matters in the meantime. But we have squarely de-
nied the suggestion that a document timely filed under the
prison-mailbox rule can be rendered late by the prisoner’s
lack of diligence in following up on the mailing when it does

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4 No. 24-3067
not arrive. Put most simply, “a prisoner’s lack of diligence
cannot operate to unfile a filed document.” Ray v. Clements,
700 F.3d 993, 1012 (7th Cir. 2012) (citing Allen v. Culliver,
471 F.3d 1196, 1198 (11th Cir. 2006)). Remember the very
premise of the prison-mailbox rule: a notice of appeal is
deemed “filed” when properly tendered to prison officials for
mailing to the district court. Houston, 487 U.S. at 272. The sole
issue before us, then, is whether Cargo complied with the rule
on July 22, 2020, regardless of what happened later.
Cargo maintains that all the prison-mailbox rule requires
is his tendering the notice to prison officials within the dead-
line and with the intent that it reach the district court—two
requirements he satisfied. In his view, Rule 4(c) and Houston
specify nothing about the accuracy of the address on the en-
velope. He is correct that although Rule 4(c) explicitly re-
quires evidence that postage was prepaid, it says nothing
about evidence of proper addressing. This explains why we
have had no difficulty applying the prison-mailbox rule to a
notice of appeal mistakenly addressed to our court (instead of
the district court) by operation of Rule 4(d), see Saxon v. Lash-
brook, 873 F.3d 982, 987 (7th Cir. 2017), and some circuits have
extended this principle to mail sent to other incorrect federal
courts under 28 U.S.C. § 1631, see, e.g., Baeta v. Sonchik, 273
F.3d 1261, 1264 (9th Cir. 2001).
Indeed, Prentiss Houston himself may have wrongly ad-
dressed his notice of appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court,
Houston, 487 U.S. at 268, yet the Supreme Court did not linger
on this possibility when deeming his notice of appeal timely
despite its arriving at the federal district court one day late.
But the Court also cautioned against reading its opinion to
mean that delivery to prison officials alone would suffice. It

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No. 24-3067 5
emphasized that “delivery of a notice of appeal to prison au-
thorities would not under any theory constitute a ‘filing’ un-
less the notice were delivered for forwarding to the district
court.” Id. at 273. So, contrary to Cargo’s argument, Houston
did not deem prison staff the functional equivalent of the
clerk of court, such that handing the notice to a guard is nec-
essarily a timely filing in and of itself. See United States v. Kim-
berlin, 898 F.2d 1262, 1265 (7th Cir. 1990).
Unlike these cases, Cargo’s notice of appeal never reached
the district court (or even some other court) and instead
ended up back where it started, at the Oklahoma jail where
he tendered it for mailing. An envelope inaccurately or in-
completely addressed that somehow, some way arrives at its
destination will not be rejected merely because of the address-
ing imperfection. But a notice of appeal that is, by the pris-
oner’s own mistake, deemed not deliverable as addressed and
returned to the sender, has not been delivered for forwarding
to the district court within the meaning of Houston. In this sit-
uation, at least, the address to which the notice of appeal is
sent matters as much as the time it is sent.
Several courts have held that a prisoner cannot benefit
from the rule when he elects to address his notice of appeal to
somewhere besides the court, even if he does so with the in-
tent that the recipient deliver it to the clerk. See Cook v. Stegall,
295 F.3d 517, 521 (6th Cir. 2002); Knickerbocker v. Artuz, 271
F.3d 35, 37 (2d Cir. 2001); Dison v. Whitley, 20 F.3d 185, 187 (5th
Cir. 1994); Wilder v. Chairman of the Cent. Classification Bd., 926
F.2d 367, 370 (4th Cir. 1991). We see no difference between a
notice of appeal that a prisoner addressed to someone else
and one the postal service concludes has been addressed to
no one at all. Intent alone is not enough if the prisoner has not

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6 No. 24-3067
satisfied Houston’s critical component—the “filing” with the
clerk.
Because Cargo’s July 22, 2020 notice of appeal was not
mailed in compliance with the prison-mailbox rule, the time-
liness of this appeal is instead governed by when he resent his
notice of appeal in November 2024. But that came four years
late, leaving us no alternative but to dismiss Cargo’s appeal
as untimely.
We close with an observation worth doubly underscoring:
this unfortunate outcome could have been avoided by Cargo
instructing his counsel to file a notice of appeal. See Flores-
Ortega, 528 U.S. at 477. It seems that path would have been
much easier than trying to navigate challenges prisoners like
Cargo often face with obtaining writing and mailing supplies,
finding the right address, doing all of this while moving be-
tween institutions, and the like. Relying on counsel should be
the norm, not the exception—a message we can only hope dis-
trict courts will reinforce when advising a criminal defendant
of the right to appeal a conviction and sentence.
DISMISSED

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