By David Rangaviz
In
re Russo,
2013
VT 35
Prisoners file
a lot of cases.
This is both
self-evident and a little confusing. For
most criminal cases, the process starts with an arraignment where the charges
are heard followed by a courtroom trial (unless the Defendant accepted a plea
agreement—which most do). If found
guilty the Defendant then appeals to the SCOV.
If the SCOV affirms, the appeal is over.
The end,
right?
Wrong.
Criminal cases
rarely end with the direct appeal from conviction. In Vermont state court, prisoners who lose on
appeal can file petitions for post-conviction relief (“PCR”). And, if all else fails, any prisoner (both
state and federal) can file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal
court. In 2012, prisoner petitions made
up about 20% of all civil cases filed in federal courts—54,300 petitions in
total.
This wasn’t
always the case. In 1966, prisoners
filed only 218 civil rights lawsuits in federal courts. A broadening of criminal laws, with a
corresponding increase in incarcerative sentences, has led to a boom in the
prison population. Although other factors undoubtedly
play a role, more prisoners with longer prison terms generally mean more
prisoner lawsuits.
These cases
are almost always filed pro se
(without a lawyer) and are dismissed. Given
the overwhelming volume, courts have to work hard to separate the wheat of
meritorious cases from the chaff of frivolous ones. This is a delicate balancing act. Give prisoners too much leeway and they will
consume increasingly finite judicial resources (I’m talking to you,
sequestration). Construe their claims
too harshly, however, and you risk imprisoning the innocent or permitting the
continuation of unconstitutional prison conditions or practices. There are needles in this haystack.
At the federal
level, Congress responded to the glut of prisoner litigation by the passage of
the Prison Litigation Reform Act (“PLRA”) and the Antiterrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act (“AEDPA”) in 1996. Those
acts, along with subsequent court decisions, have imposed a number of
procedural and substantive hurdles that prisoners must traverse before being
allowed to present their claims in court.
For example, under
the PLRA prisoners who file civil rights lawsuits must now “exhaust” their
administrative remedies in prison—meaning that if they have a complaint about
prison conditions, they must first file an internal grievance within the prison
(and appeal that grievance to the highest level allowed) before filing a
federal lawsuit. [The Supreme Court has
interpreted the PLRA exhaustion requirement particularly
harshly.]
AEDPA imposed
a similar requirement on habeas petitions from state prisoners. To “exhaust” their remedies under AEDPA,
state prisoners must first present their federal claims in state court before
proceeding to federal court. But even if
the prisoner exhausts his state remedies and
the state court gets it wrong, the federal court cannot necessarily reverse the
judgment. Under AEDPA, the state court’s
application of federal law must be both wrong and “unreasonable” (that is,
pretty obviously wrong).
In addition, these
laws limit the number of cases that prisoners can file. The PLRA includes a “three strikes”
limitation on prison civil rights lawsuits: if three prior cases filed by the
prisoner are dismissed, the fourth must be accompanied by payment of the full
filing fee (a prohibitive cost for most indigent prisoners). In the area of habeas corpus, AEDPA bars
prisoners from filing second and successive petitions unless they get specific
court permission to do so.
Even if they
surmount all of these (and other) hurdles, however, prisoners are almost always
met by a motion to dismiss. They file a
complaint in court pro se, and a
government lawyer immediately responds by claiming that the prisoner’s petition
is, in some sense, legally defective, effectively arguing that the case should
be kicked out of court before the defendants need to answer or any discovery
takes place.
Fortunately
for prisoners (and other plaintiffs), petitions at the motion to dismiss stage
are read liberally in favor of the plaintiff.
The allegations are assumed to be true, and the court will then assess
whether those allegations state a legally-valid claim. The theory behind this standard of review is
that, when no evidence has yet been submitted, there is no basis to rebut a
plaintiff’s factual allegations. As a
result, we must assume their veracity and assess whether they support the legal
claim the plaintiff asserts.
Today’s case
involves a 3-2 split among SCOV about how to read prisoner submissions in the
face of one such government motion to dismiss.
The facts are
relatively straightforward.
In November
2002, Petitioner was arrested after an altercation with his former mortgage
holder in which he allegedly shot at him during a car chase. Petitioner pled guilty to several violations
of conditions of release, and a jury found him guilty of aggravated assault,
driving while intoxicated, unlawful trespass, and driving with a suspended
license.
He later
successfully challenged his aggravated assault conviction by PCR petition and
was granted a new trial. Awaiting this
new trial, Petitioner was held without bail because he was considered a danger
to the community (specifically, to the mortgage holder).
In December
2010, Petitioner filed a pro se PCR
petition, attacking the earlier convictions for driving with a suspended
license and violating conditions of release.
But Petitioner
had already served the sentences on these convictions. The Vermont PCR statute requires that a
petitioner be “in custody under sentence” at the time of the filing of the
petition. How could Petitioner challenge
convictions whose sentences he had already served?
Petitioner claimed
that the judge in his new case had used the prior convictions to hold him
without bail on the pending assault charge.
So even though he is technically no longer under sentence from the
challenged charges, he is effectively so because the judge used those
convictions in making the bail decision.
The trial
court dismissed, concluding that the pretrial detention order did not suffice
to establish that he was “in custody under sentence” of the challenged
convictions.
SCOV affirms. In an opinion by Justice Skoglund, joined by
Chief Justice Reiber and Justice Burgess, the majority fully agrees that
Petitioner failed to meet the jurisdictional requirement for a PCR petition.
According to
the majority, the relevant question is whether the detention is a “direct
result” of the challenged conviction.
Here, in deciding to detain Petitioner, the judge had taken into
consideration a number of factors other than the prior, challenged
convictions. Looking to the
denial-of-bail order and the hearing transcripts, the judge had referenced
Petitioner’s criminal history but did not mention the specific charges that
Petitioner now challenges. Furthermore, Petitioner
had been charged with a crime of violence (felony aggravated assault), and the
court concluded that there was enough evidence to sustain a guilty verdict on
that charge. Given the other factors at
play in the bail determination, the challenged convictions were too remote in
relation to the detention order to support jurisdiction over the PCR petition.
The dissent,
written by Justice Robinson and joined by Justice Dooley, would not have dismissed
the case quite so soon.
As stated, courts
must assume that all of a petitioner’s allegations are true at this early stage
of the proceedings, before any evidence is submitted. According to the dissent, rather than look
solely at the allegations, the majority has expanded the record to incorporate
the denial-of-bail order and hearing transcripts without giving Petitioner an opportunity to present any evidence in
response. In essence, the majority has
allowed the government to submit evidence without giving a reciprocal
opportunity to the Petitioner.
The dissent is
careful to state that it did not necessarily agree with Petitioner’s claim,
noting instead that the dissent merely felt dismissal was premature.
So who’s
right?
Petitioner
claimed in his PCR petition that the judge “used” his earlier, challenged
convictions to hold him without bail. If
we treat all allegations in the petition as true (as we must) I don’t see how
the majority can disregard this allegation, the only one relevant to the issue
of causation. The majority tries to get
around this issue by expanding the record to include transcripts and written
orders from the bail hearings, but this is precisely the one-sided admission of
evidence that requires that a motion to dismiss be transformed into a motion
for summary judgment (which would then allow the Petitioner to respond).
The majority effectively
changed the rules in the middle of the game, expanding the record to rebut
Petitioner’s allegations without giving him a corresponding opportunity to submit
his own evidence. The closeness of the
case reminds us of the applicable standard of review—all ambiguity and
uncertainty as to the factual allegations must be resolved in Petitioner’s
favor at the motion to dismiss stage.
The State itself had conceded that the earlier convictions were a factor
in the bail determination, but the majority disregarded that concession in
favor of its own view of the evidence.
For now, that concession, along with Petitioner’s allegations, should
have been enough.
Prisoners face
many hurdles to having their day in court.
They have to worry about filing fees, exhaustion, restrictive statutes
of limitations, immunity, standards of review, and, above all else, the legal substance
of their claims. Many prisoner claims are
frivolous; but not all of them. Prisoners,
like other litigants, should be able to rely on generally applicable pleading
rules—i.e., that their allegations will be treated as true before discovery
begins—to know that their complaints will survive a motion to dismiss if they
state a legally-valid claim.
Of course, I
hardly blame the majority. Prisoner
filings overwhelm the courts. I’m sure
this is particularly true at SCOV, as there is no intermediate appellate court
in Vermont to shoulder the load. But
courts must not allow the daunting caseload to distort their approach to
prisoner cases. There is not one set of
pleading rules for prisoners and another for plaintiffs (yet). Indeed, once they meet the requirements of
the PLRA and AEDPA (in federal court) and applicable state law rules (in state
court), prisoners are no different than any other class of plaintiffs. Assuming their mendacity rather than veracity
hardly hastens the search for meritorious cases. To the contrary, it buries the needle deeper
in the haystack, eventually tricking us into thinking there was nothing buried
there to begin with, reinforcing the belief that all prisoner petitions are
frivolous and justifying their disparate treatment. But these petitions do not just get dismissed
because they are frivolous; they get dismissed because courts and legislatures
have erected special barriers to the courts in
the belief that prisoners file only frivolous cases. Casebooks are littered with petitions
dismissed only because they were unexhausted or untimely, with no assessment of
the legal merits having taken place.
When prisoners
somehow survive the hurdles uniquely applicable to them and state a valid
claim—all without a lawyer, in most cases—they should not have to meet a higher
standard of pleading than is applicable to any other plaintiff. Courts should not be inherently skeptical of
prisoner cases just because of their volume.
Each petition must be assessed on its merits, at least to the degree
that laws like the PLRA and AEDPA allow.
Of course,
there is one other possible fix for the surfeit of suits: If we want fewer
prisoner petitions, maybe we should consider having fewer prisoners.
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