Hamlin v. Warren

• Decision Date: 03 November 1981
• Docket Number: No. 79-6769,79-6769
• Citation: 664 F.2d 29
• Parties: William T. HAMLIN, Appellant, v. E. C. WARREN, Sheriff, Halifax County, Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

Page 29

664 F.2d 29

William T. HAMLIN, Appellant, v. E. C. WARREN, Sheriff, Halifax County, Appellee.

No. 79-6769.

United States Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit.

Argued June 4, 1981.

Decided Nov. 3, 1981.

Frank Laney, Third Year Law Student (Barry Nakell, University of North Carolina School of Law, Chapel Hill, N. C., on brief), for appellant.

Gilbert W. Chichester, Littleton, N. C. (Chichester & Harris, P. A., Littleton, N. C., on brief), for appellee.

Before WINTER, Chief Judge, HAYNSWORTH, Senior Circuit Judge, and PHILLIPS, Circuit Judge.

HAYNSWORTH, Senior Circuit Judge:

The question is whether a state prisoner may challenge the validity of his conviction in a district court without having exhausted available state remedies upon the expedient of confining himself to a § 1983 claim for monetary damages, a declaratory judgment, and prospective injunctive relief, with a seemingly deliberate omission of a request for immediate release from his imprisonment. The question is a difficult one, never addressed by the Supreme Court, though the Supreme Court has decided a closely related question involving a § 1983 damage claim growing out of challenged administrative actions affecting the length of sentence service. In the context in which the question arises in this case, we think the Supreme Court would hold that the explicit exhaustion of state remedies requirement of 28 U.S.C.A. § 2254(b) is applicable.

I.

In 1979, Hamlin was convicted in a North Carolina state court of conspiracy to commit armed robbery of a state liquor store. In an unpublished decision, the North Carolina Court of Appeals found no error in his trial and conviction. See State v. Hamlin, 46 N.C.App. 607, 275 S.E.2d 570 (1980). There is no indication of any further application to the Supreme Court of North Carolina, and the basis of his attack upon his conviction in this case could not have been presented during the appellate process, for it is concerned with matters outside the record.

In September 1979, only a few months after his conviction and while the appeal to the North Carolina Court of Appeals was pending, Hamlin filed this action in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. He alleged that the defendant sheriff had conspired with others to arrest him and to procure his conviction on the basis of perjured testimony. On the basis of 42 U.S.C.A. § 1983 he sought a declaratory judgment that his conviction was in violation of the Constitution of the United States, compensatory and punitive damages, the removal of the sheriff from his office, and prospective injunctive relief for the procurement of materials he thought relevant to his federal law suit.

The district court dismissed the complaint without requiring an answer. It noted that the complaint's attack was upon the conviction, "the very fact of his imprisonment," and that habeas corpus relief would be more appropriate. Nevertheless, it construed the complaint to state a claim for malicious prosecution, a claim the court rejected because the prosecution had not been unsuccessful.

There was some justification for the district court's construction of the pleading as one for habeas relief. There was no stated request for immediate release, but the pleading clearly disclosed a purpose to establish every predicate for it in a federal forum before assertion of any such claim in North Carolina's courts. If his action is allowed to proceed in the district court, resulting in a declaration that his conviction is constitutionally invalid and an award of damages, he would be in a position to assert the judgment as conclusive in any subsequent state habeas proceeding. In a subsequent state habeas proceeding it would be unlikely that relief would be denied; if it was, ultimate victory would still have been assured upon a return to the district court.

A federal court has the inherent power to fashion appropriate relief. It is not constrained by the pleader's request for relief. The question, then, is whether the pleader's deliberate failure to request his immediate release deprived the district court of the power to treat the action as one controlled by 28 U.S.C.A. § 2254, as it did, when the plaintiff himself was flying the banner of 42 U.S.C.A. § 1983.

II.

In Preiser v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 475, 93 S.Ct. 1827, 36 L.Ed.2d 439 (1973), there is a dictum to the effect that a § 1983 damage claim might be asserted in a federal court, without exhaustion of state administrative and judicial remedies, by a plaintiff seeking relief from an administrative revocation of good time credits. Id. at 495, 93 S.Ct. at 1839. The plaintiffs in Preiser sought no such damages. They sought an injunction restoring their good time credits, relief which the Supreme Court held was subject to the exhaustion of state remedies requirement of § 2254(b). The plaintiffs contended, however, that if their claim was made subject to the exhaustion requirement, a damages claim in the federal court under § 1983 might be forever lost by the preclusive effect of an adverse judgment in the state court system. The Supreme Court answered by saying that a claim for damages was different, that one asserting such a claim was not seeking immediate or earlier release, and that a writ of habeas corpus was both an inappropriate and unavailable remedy. Thus, it concluded, such a claim could proceed.

In the context of Preiser, the statement was thoroughly justified. The plaintiffs were near the end of their period of sentence service and would have been entitled to immediate release if their good time credits had been restored. There was no practical possibility of a subsequent state court habeas corpus hearing, and no reason for the Supreme Court to have been concerned with the possible preclusive effect of a federal award of damages upon a subsequent state habeas claim. Here, that problem is clearly presented. More particularly, unlike the Preiser dictum, habeas relief would clearly be an available and appropriate remedy if the pleading had only included an allegation of exhaustion of available state court remedies. The substantive claim, if established, would inevitably establish the plaintiff's right to immediate release from confinement.

In Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U.S. 539, 94 S.Ct. 2963, 41 L.Ed.2d 935 (1974), the Supreme Court applied the Preiser dictum. The Supreme Court, in a class action in which prisoners sought both the restoration of revoked good time credits and an award of damages, held that injunctive relief was foreclosed by Preiser but that the damages claim could go forward while the prisoners sought habeas relief in the state court. Thus the Preiser dictum became Wolff 's holding.

Faithful to the Supreme Court's lead, in Pope v. Chew, 521 F.2d 400 (4th Cir. 1975), we held that a prisoner whose pardon had been revoked upon the recommendation of a parole and probation board was entitled to a declaratory judgment that the revocation was invalid since the board had held no hearing. Wolff had held that a declaratory judgment was an appropriate predicate to an award of damages, and we held such relief was available to Pope, notwithstanding the defendant's immunity from an award of damages.

These cases involved attacks upon administrative actions affecting the fact or duration of sentence service. No attack upon the validity of a judgment of conviction was involved. Prison officials and parole board members may wish that their decisions not be subjected to judicial review, but if judicial review is to be had, there is no apparent reason to suppose that such officials would have a strong preference for review by state rather than federal courts. At least, there is no such unbecomingness as that which inheres in lower federal court review of state judicial decisions.

Attacks upon state judgments of conviction are quite different. State judges and justices who readily accept review by superiors within the system and by the United States Supreme Court strongly resent review by a single United States District Judge and by a United States Court of Appeals. The public at large has no perception of the consequences of litigation over good time credits, but may be acutely aware of federal interference with state judgments of conviction. All of the reasons underlying the rule of comity are present in this case while none are present, or at least not highly visible, in controversies over good time credits.

Considerations of comity produced the rule of exhaustion of state remedies in state prisoner habeas cases, later codified in § 2254(b). In 1948, when the requirement was codified, the attention of Congress was undoubtedly focused upon post-conviction attacks upon convictions and not upon post conviction attacks upon some administrative decision. As Preiser clearly stated, codification of the exhaustion requirement in § 2254 amended § 1983 to the extent that it is applicable. The general intention of the Reconstruction Congress is irrelevant if the requirement is applicable, and, in making a determination whether or not it is applicable, consideration of practical consequences is appropriate.

We mentioned this problem in Rimmer v. Fayetteville Police Dept., 567 F.2d 273 (4th Cir. 1977). There were references to Preiser and Wolff and to subsequent cases in the First and Fifth Circuits. Instead of deciding the question there, however, we rested our decision upon an alternative ground. Clearly, however, we considered the question an open one in the context of this case.

Subsequent cases in the courts of appeals have held the exhaustion requirement applicable to a civil rights claim in which the validity of the state court conviction was called into question, notwithstanding the absence of any request for release. See, e. g., Watson v. Briscoe, 554 F.2d 650 (5th Cir. 1977); Meadows v. Evans, 529 F.2d 385 (5th Cir. 1976), aff'd en banc, 550 F.2d 345 (5th Cir. 1977), cert. denied, 434...