Ellingburg v. United States

In December 1995, Holsey Ellingburg, Jr. robbed a bank in Georgia at gunpoint. He was convicted in August 1996, sentenced to roughly 26 years and 10 months in prison, and ordered to pay $7,567.25 in restitution.

Four months before the robbery, Congress passed the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act on April 24, 1996. Ellingburg's sentencing judge applied it anyway.

By 2023, with accumulated interest, Ellingburg's parole officer informed him that his balance had grown to $13,476 and that he owed $100 monthly payments under MVRA-based rules. Ellingburg argued those rules never should have applied to him. His crime happened before the law existed.

The Ex Post Facto Clause, Article I Section 9 of the Constitution, was one of the few individual rights the Framers wrote directly into the original document — before adding the Bill of Rights. Parliament had used retroactive punishment laws to settle political scores, and the Founders wrote the clause to make sure Congress couldn't do the same. Any law that increases punishment for an act committed before it took effect violates the clause.

Courts had long treated restitution orders differently from imprisonment or fines. The prevailing view classified them as compensatory remedies — money for victims, not punishment for defendants. Before the MVRA, judges could weigh a defendant's financial circumstances before ordering restitution. The MVRA stripped that discretion entirely: full restitution became mandatory in cases involving violent crimes, fraud, and other qualifying offenses, regardless of the defendant's ability to pay.

Lower courts, including the Eighth Circuit, used the "civil remedy" classification to hold that the MVRA's mandatory rules could apply to any conduct — even crimes committed before mid-1996. Ellingburg's challenge forced the question directly.

Justice Kavanaugh wrote for a unanimous Court on January 20, 2026. The Court looked at the MVRA's statutory text and structure — its placement in the criminal code, its imposition at sentencing alongside imprisonment, its function as a penalty ordered by a court rather than a civil judgment obtained by a victim — and concluded that MVRA restitution is criminal punishment for Ex Post Facto purposes. The Court applied the same analytical framework from Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez (1963), which asks whether a facially compensatory measure is punitive in constitutional terms.

Decades of circuit court practice treating MVRA orders as civil remedies was wrong.