Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/164

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UNITED STATES v. IBARRA Per Curiam

permit the district court to reconsider matters initially overlooked, the Court of Appeals thought that delaying the appellate process pending resolution of such motions is unlikely to contribute to judicial efficiency. 920 F. 2d, at 706. It also noted that Government motions to reconsider a position conceded during appellate litigation are viewed with disfavor when filed before an appellate tribunal. Ibid. (citing United States v. Smith, 781 F. 2d 184 (CA10 1986)). II We think the Court of Appeals has misread our decisions in Healy, supra, and Dieter, supra. The first of these decisions established that a motion for rehearing in a criminal case, like a motion for rehearing in a civil case, renders an otherwise final decision of a district court not final until it decides the petition for rehearing. In Dieter, we rejected an effort to carve out exceptions to this general rule in the case of petitions for rehearing which do not assert an alleged error of law. We think that the Court of Appeals’ present effort to carve out a different exception to the general rule laid down in Healy must likewise be rejected. It may be that motions to reconsider based on previously abandoned grounds are not apt to fare well either in the district court or on appeal to the court of appeals. But if such a judgment as to the merits were allowed to play a part in deciding the time in which a denial of the motion may be appealed, it is difficult to see why a similar merits analysis should not be undertaken for all motions for reconsideration. The result would be, as the dissenting judge below pointed out, to “graf[t] a merits inquiry onto what should be a brightline jurisdictional inquiry.” 920 F. 2d, at 710 (Baldock, J., dissenting). Undoubtedly some motions for reconsideration are so totally lacking in merit that the virtues of the rule established in Healy are not realized by delaying the 30-day period. If it were possible to pick them out in advance, it would be