In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 19-3137

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.

LINDA NULF,

Defendant-Appellant.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

No. 1:17-CR-00436-2 — Charles R. Norgle, Judge.

____________________

ARGUED JUNE 4, 2020 — DECIDED OCTOBER 15, 2020

____________________

Before SYKES, Chief Judge, and EASTERBROOK, Circuit 

Judge.1

SYKES, Chief Judge. Linda Nulf participated in a mortgagefraud scheme that caused in excess of $2 million in losses. 

1 Circuit Judge Barrett was a member of the panel when this case was 

submitted but did not participate in the decision and judgment. The 

appeal is resolved by a quorum of the panel pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 

§ 46(d).
2 No. 19-3137

She was initially indicted on three felony counts and faced 

up to 30 years in prison, but the government later superseded those charges and substituted a single misdemeanor 

count. Nulf pleaded guilty under a written plea agreement 

that included an appeal waiver. The judge imposed a 

12-month sentence, the statutory maximum.

Nulf appealed, notwithstanding the appeal waiver. She

argues that the judge interfered with her allocution, wrongly 

denied credit for acceptance of responsibility, and committed other assorted mistakes at sentencing. These errors, she 

contends, add up to a miscarriage of justice, making the 

appeal waiver unenforceable.

This argument relies on United States v. Litos, 847 F.3d 

906, 910–11 (7th Cir. 2017), but our decision in that case did 

not announce a general “miscarriage of justice” exception to 

the enforcement of appeal waivers. Rather, Litos fell within 

an established line of cases recognizing a narrow set of 

extraordinary circumstances that justify displacing an 

otherwise valid appeal waiver. 

Nulf’s case is far from extraordinary, so the normal rule 

applies: the appeal waiver is enforceable unless the underlying guilty plea was invalid. Because Nulf does not claim that 

her plea was unknowing or involuntary, we enforce the 

waiver and dismiss this appeal.

I. Background

Linda Nulf worked as a licensed loan originator in 

Illinois. For approximately three years, she and two codefendants participated in a mortgage-fraud scheme in which 

they submitted loan applications containing false information about the applicant’s income and assets. Nulf pre-
No. 19-3137 3

pared and submitted the fraudulent paperwork to financial 

institutions and the Department of Housing and Urban 

Development (“HUD”), causing approximately $2.2 million 

in losses.

A grand jury indicted Nulf on three felony charges: two 

counts of bank fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1344 and one 

count of making a false statement to a financial institution in 

violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1014. Each of these crimes carries a 

30-year maximum prison term. The government later filed a 

superseding information charging Nulf with a single count 

of making a false statement to HUD, a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison. 18 U.S.C. § 1012.

Nulf pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor pursuant to a 

written agreement in which the government agreed to 

dismiss the original felony charges. The parties further 

stipulated that the anticipated offense level was 23, which 

when combined with Nulf’s nonexistent criminal history 

would result in the one-year statutory maximum as the 

recommended sentence under the Sentencing Guidelines. 

The plea agreement also included an appeal waiver: 

[D]efendant knowingly waives the right to appeal her conviction, any pre-trial rulings by the 

Court, and any part of the sentence (or the 

manner in which that sentence was determined), including any term of imprisonment 

and fine within the maximums provided by 

law, and including any order of restitution, in 

exchange for the concessions made by the 

United States in this Agreement.
4 No. 19-3137

The judge confirmed Nulf’s understanding of the appeal 

waiver at the change-of-plea hearing. As anticipated, the

presentence report (“PSR”) recommended an offense level of 

23, which included a 3-level reduction for acceptance of 

responsibility, and a criminal-history category of I. These 

calculations yielded an advisory Guidelines range of 46–

57 months in prison, but the sentence was capped at the 

statutory maximum of 12 months. Nulf’s only objection to 

the PSR concerned a recommended condition permitting a 

probation officer to visit her at work during supervised 

release. 

Sentencing proceeded uneventfully until Nulf’s allocution. She explained at length that the criminal case had been 

financially and personally devastating for her and her family

and expressed a desire to be “a good person.” Eventually the

judge interjected, leading to the following exchange:

THE COURT: It seems to me that you have yet

to acknowledge what you did.

THE DEFENDANT: I have acknowledged.

THE COURT: What did you do?

THE DEFENDANT: I didn’t pay attention to 

what was going on and allowed—I was very 

sloppy about what went in, didn’t pay attention, and incorrect information went in, and 

that is my responsibility. 

THE COURT: What did you do?

THE DEFENDANT: I did not pay attention on 

the loan applications and so there was incorrect information on the loan applications that 
No. 19-3137 5

were processed and closed. That is my responsibility.

Based on these responses, the judge determined that Nulf 

had not really accepted responsibility for her crime and 

removed the 3-level reduction for acceptance of responsibility from the Guidelines calculation. The new offense level 

was 26, increasing the advisory Sentencing Guidelines range

to 63–78 months. This was all academic, of course; the 

sentence was limited by the one-year statutory maximum. 

The judge imposed the one-year sentence as contemplated 

by the plea agreement. 

II. Discussion

Nulf asks us to ignore her appeal waiver because the 

judge interfered with her right of allocution and wrongly 

deprived her of credit for accepting responsibility. She also 

seeks review of several other claimed errors at sentencing.

But this case does not fit within the narrow set of circumstances in which we’ve recognized an equitable exception to 

an otherwise enforceable appeal waiver. 

As a general matter, an appeal waiver must be enforced

if its “terms are express and unambiguous, and the record 

shows that the defendant knowingly and voluntarily entered 

into the [plea] agreement.” United States v. Haslam, 833 F.3d 

840, 844 (7th Cir. 2016) (alteration in original) (quotation 

marks omitted). In other words, an appeal waiver stands or 

falls with the underlying agreement and plea. If the agreement and guilty plea are valid, so too is the appeal waiver. 

Id. We have declined to enforce an otherwise valid appeal 

waiver only in a few limited circumstances—for example,

“when the sentence exceeds the statutory maximum, when 
6 No. 19-3137

the plea or court relies on a constitutionally impermissible 

factor like race, or when counsel is ineffective in the negotiation of the plea agreement.” Dowell v. United States, 694 F.3d 

898, 902 (7th Cir. 2012).

Nulf concedes that her appeal waiver was express and 

unambiguous, and that she knowingly and voluntarily 

entered into it. She does not challenge the validity of her 

guilty plea. That is the end of the matter. The waiver must be 

enforced unless one of the narrow exceptions applies, and 

Nulf does not argue—nor could she—that her case falls 

within any of the exceptions we’ve just listed. She argues 

instead that our decision in Litos recognized a general “miscarriage of justice” exception and that her case qualifies

under it.

This argument misreads Litos. That case involved a bankfraud scheme by three coconspirators. Two were found 

guilty by a jury, but the third, Minas Litos, pleaded guilty 

and waived his right to appeal. 847 F.3d at 910. The three 

defendants appealed, challenging (among other things) the 

judge’s imposition of approximately $900,000 in restitution,

for which the three were jointly and severally liable. We 

agreed that the restitution order could not stand because the 

victim, a large bank, had been reckless and therefore did 

“not have clean hands.” Id. at 907–08. That ruling, of course, 

lifted the restitution obligation from the defendants who 

were convicted at trial. But because Litos pleaded guilty and 

waived his right to appeal, he remained on the hook and 

solely responsible for the entire amount. Id. at 910. In that

unusual situation, we declined to enforce the appeal waiver 

and relieved Litos of his obligation to pay under the invalid 

restitution order. Id. at 910–11.
No. 19-3137 7

Along the way to that holding, we noted that some circuits decline to enforce appeal waivers if doing so would 

result in a “miscarriage of justice.” Id. at 910. But we did not 

adopt a general miscarriage-of-justice exception for this 

circuit. To the contrary, we reiterated our circuit’s longstanding recognition of only a limited set of 

exceptional situations in which waiver does 

not foreclose appellate review—for example[,] 

if an appeal waiver is part of a plea agreement 

that was involuntary, or if the district court relied on a constitutionally impermissible factor, 

or if the defendant received ineffective assistance of counsel in regard to the negotiation of 

the plea agreement, or if the sentence exceeded 

the statutory maximum.

Id. And we emphasized that these exceptions “are narrow.” 

Id. at 911.

In short, Litos addressed a unique situation and did not 

announce a new and amorphous miscarriage-of-justice 

standard for setting aside an otherwise enforceable appeal 

waiver. See Oliver v. United States, 951 F.3d 841, 847 (7th Cir. 

2020) (explaining the limits of Litos); United States v. Carson, 

855 F.3d 828, 831 (7th Cir. 2017) (same). Because Nulf’s 

appeal waiver is valid and enforceable, this appeal is

DISMISSED.