Cite as: 507 U. S. 234 (1993)
Opinion of the Court
that dismissal would be appropriate under the narrower circumstances we now define.
Nor is there any indication in the record below—either in the Government's motion to dismiss, or in the Eleventh Circuit's per curiam order—that petitioner's former fugitivity was deemed to present an obstacle to orderly appellate review. Thus, we have no reason to assume that the Eleventh Circuit would consider the duplication of resources involved in hearing petitioner's appeal separately from those of his codefendants—which can of course be minimized by reliance on the earlier panel decision in United States v. Mieres-Borges, see supra, at 238, and n. 6—sufficiently disruptive of the appellate process that dismissal would be a reasonable response, on the facts of this case and under the standard we announce today. We leave that determination to the Court of Appeals on remand.24
In short, when a defendant's flight and recapture occur before appeal, the defendant's former fugitive status may well lack the kind of connection to the appellate process that would justify an appellate sanction of dismissal. In such cases, fugitivity while a case is pending before a district court, like other contempts of court, is best sanctioned by the district court itself. The contempt for the appellate process manifested by flight while a case is pending on appeal remains subject to the rule of Molinaro.
24 Neither the reasonableness standard of Thomas v. Arn, 474 U. S. 140 (1985), nor Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 47, mandates uniformity among the circuits in their approach to fugitive dismissal rules. See Thomas, 474 U. S., at 157 (Stevens, J., dissenting). In other words, so long as all circuit rules meet the threshold reasonableness requirement, in that they mandate dismissal only when fugitivity has some connection to the appellate process, they may vary considerably in their operation. For this additional reason, we hesitate to decide as a general matter whether and under what circumstances preappeal flight that leads to severance of codefendants' appeals will warrant appellate dismissal, and instead leave that question to the various courts of appeals.
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