250
Opinion of the Court
The appellate courts retain the authority to deal with such cases, or classes of cases,23 as necessary. Here, for instance, petitioner's flight prevented the Court of Appeals from consolidating his appeal with those of his codefendants, which we assume would be its normal practice. See United States v. Mieres-Borges, 919 F. 2d, at 654, n. 1 (noting that petitioner is absent and not party to appeal). If the Eleventh Circuit deems this consequence of petitioner's flight a significant interference with the operation of its appellate process, then, under the reasoning we employ today, a dismissal rule could properly be applied.
As this case reaches us, however, there is no reason to believe that the Eleventh Circuit has made such a judgment. Application of the Holmes rule, as formulated by the Eleventh Circuit thus far, does not require the kind of connection between fugitivity and the appellate process that we hold necessary today; instead, it may rest on nothing more than the faulty premise that any act of judicial defiance, whether or not it affects the appellate process, is punishable by appellate dismissal. See Holmes, 680 F. 2d, at 1374; supra, at 246. Accordingly, that the Eleventh Circuit saw fit to dismiss this case under Holmes does not by itself reflect a determination
23 We cannot agree with petitioner that the courts may only consider whether to dismiss the appeal of a former fugitive on an individual, case-specific basis. Though dismissal of fugitive appeals is always discretionary, in the sense that fugitivity does not "strip the case of its character as an adjudicable case or controversy," Molinaro v. New Jersey, 396 U. S. 365, 366 (1970); see also n. 11, supra, appellate courts may exercise that discretion by developing generally applicable rules to cover specific, recurring situations. Indeed, this Court itself has formulated a general rule allowing for dismissal of petitions that come before it while the petitioner is at large. See Smith v. United States, 94 U. S. 97 (1876). The problem with the Holmes rule is not that the appeals it reaches are subject to automatic dismissal, but that it reaches too many appeals—including those of defendants whose former fugitive status in no way affects the appellate process.
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