Santiago-Lugo v. Warden

• Decision Date: 30 April 2015
• Docket Number: No. 13–14384.,13–14384.
• Parties: Israel SANTIAGO–LUGO, Petitioner–Appellant, v. WARDEN, Respondent–Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

785 F.3d 467

Israel SANTIAGO–LUGO, Petitioner–Appellant

v.WARDEN, Respondent–Appellee.

No. 13–14384.

United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit.

April 30, 2015.

Chase T. Espy, Balch & Bingham, LLP, Birmingham, AL, Israel Santiago–Lugo, Talladega, AL, pro se.

Jenny Lynn Smith, U.S. Attorney's Office, Birmingham, AL, Luther J. Strange, III, Alabama Attorney General's Office, Montgomery, AL, for Respondent–Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. D.C. Docket No. 1:12–cv–04065–WMA–HGD.

Before ED CARNES, Chief Judge, JILL PRYOR and HIGGINBOTHAM,^* Circuit Judges.

Opinion

ED CARNES, Chief Judge:

For obvious reasons, prisons typically prohibit inmates from possessing cell phones. An orphan cell phone was found during a random search in the Federal Correctional Complex at Coleman Medium Prison in Florida. An examination of the phone's call history showed that the son of inmate Israel Santiago–Lugo had called that phone the day before it was found. Santiago–Lugo was charged in a prison incident report with having violated the rule against possession of a cell phone. After a hearing he was instead found to have violated the rule against conduct that disrupts or interferes with the orderly running of the institution. As a result, he lost good time credits and suffered other sanctions.

Santiago–Lugo filed a 28 U.S.C. § 2241 petition claiming that his procedural due process rights had been violated in the disciplinary proceeding. The district court ruled that it lacked subject matter jurisdiction because he had failed to exhaust his administrative remedies. The court alternatively ruled that his due process claim failed on the merits. He challenges the jurisdictional ruling and then the merits ruling. His first challenge succeeds, his second one does not. We affirm.

I.

Santiago–Lugo was imprisoned at the Federal Correctional Complex at Coleman Medium. On February 10, 2012, corrections officers at Coleman found a cell phone during a random prison search.

The phone showed that Santiago–Lugo's son had called it the day before. At the conclusion of the investigation, Santiago–Lugo received an incident report from the investigating officer charging him with violating Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Code 108, “Possession of a Cellular Phone.” The charge was referred to a Unit Disciplinary Committee which, after more investigation, referred it on to a discipline hearing officer.

The discipline hearing officer held a hearing on March 14, 2012. Santiago–Lugo appeared with his staff representative and testified along with another inmate. Santiago–Lugo testified that he had never possessed the cell phone or talked on it. He said that another inmate owned the phone and had used it to talk to Santiago–Lugo's son. That other inmate then testified that he and Santiago–Lugo's son were friends and that they had talked on the phone. The BOP offered into evidence a “kite,” which is prison-speak for an illicit letter smuggled past prison officials. The kite, which was found in Santiago–Lugo's cell, was written by the inmate who testified for him, and it assured him that the inmate would accept responsibility for the cell phone.

The discipline hearing officer considered Santiago–Lugo's denial, but citing the “weight of [the] evidence,” including the kite written to Santiago–Lugo, he concluded that Santiago–Lugo had violated BOP Code 199, “Conduct Which Disrupts or Interferes with the Security or Orderly Running of the Institution (Most like Possession of a Hazardous Tool; Cell Phone, Code 108).” The sanctions imposed on Santiago–Lugo included the loss of 40 days of good-conduct time, disciplinary segregation for 60 days, and the loss of certain privileges for six months. He was advised of his right to appeal, and on April 25, 2012, he received a copy of the discipline hearing officer's report.

On May 3, 2012, Santiago–Lugo timely filed a Regional Administrative Remedy Appeal, which the regional director denied on May 24. From that date, Santiago–Lugo had 30 days to file a Central Office Administrative Remedy Appeal with the BOP's Office of General Counsel. See 28 C.F.R. § 542.15(a). He asserts that he did file an appeal within that time frame, and in support of that assertion he points to a certified mail receipt indicating that the Office of General Counsel received a letter from him on June 15. But the Administrative Remedy Index, the database into which that appeal would have been entered, has no record of it.

Regardless of whether Santiago–Lugo filed a Central Office Administrative Remedy Appeal with the Office of General Counsel on June 15, it is undisputed that he filed (or refiled) one on September 18, 2012. Because that September 18, 2012, appeal was filed more than 30 days after the regional director's May 24 denial, the Central Office rejected it as untimely. The Central Office advised Santiago–Lugo that it might still consider his appeal if he provided written documentation on BOP letterhead indicating that it was not his fault that the appeal was untimely. But a unit manager at the Federal Correctional Institution at Talladega, Alabama—the prison to which Santiago–Lugo had been transferred after the initial discipline decision—would not give him the letterhead. The unit manager explained that he could not do so because Santiago–Lugo had not been a prisoner at Talladega when he first requested an administrative remedy. Santiago–Lugo filed no further appeals with the BOP.

On December 10, 2012, Santiago–Lugo filed a 28 U.S.C. § 2241 habeas corpus petition in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. The petition, as later amended, sought relief on due process grounds from the disciplinary sanctions that Santiago–Lugo had received because of the cell phone infraction. A magistrate judge issued a report recommending that the amended petition be denied for two reasons. First, Santiago–Lugo had failed to exhaust his administrative remedies, so the district court lacked jurisdiction to hear his petition. Second, even if the court had jurisdiction to hear his petition, Santiago–Lugo's due process claim failed on the merits. The district court adopted the magistrate judge's report and recommendation and denied Santiago–Lugo's petition.

II.

We review de novo the district court's denial of a § 2241 petition, but review its factfindings for clear error. Bowers v. Keller, 651 F.3d 1277, 1291 (11th Cir.2011). We are obligated to determine whether the district court had subject matter jurisdiction to consider Santiago–Lugo's § 2241 petition and whether we have jurisdiction to hear his appeal. See Williams v. Chatman, 510 F.3d 1290, 1293 (11th Cir.2007). This Court and the district court must have subject matter jurisdiction over a claim in order to decide it on the merits. See Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Env't, 523 U.S. 83, 93–102, 118 S.Ct. 1003, 1012–16, 140 L.Ed.2d 210 (1998) (instructing that Article III courts must first ensure that they have subject matter jurisdiction over a cause of action before addressing its merits).

We start with the jurisdiction issue, asking whether a § 2241 petitioner's failure to exhaust administrative remedies is a jurisdictional defect. We conclude that it is not, meaning that even if Santiago–Lugo failed to exhaust his administrative remedies, we and the district court would still have jurisdiction over his claim. The district court reached the opposite conclusion by relying on five decisions from this Court. See Skinner v. Wiley, 355 F.3d 1293, 1295 (11th Cir.2004) ; Winck v. England, 327 F.3d 1296, 1306 (11th Cir.2003) ; Gonzalez v. United States, 959 F.2d 211, 212 (11th Cir.1992) ; United States v. Lucas, 898 F.2d 1554, 1555 (11th Cir.1990) ; United States v. Mitchell, 845 F.2d 951, 952 (11th Cir.1988).¹ Of those five decisions, only our opinion in Gonzalez actually held that failure to exhaust administrative remedies deprives a court of subject matter jurisdiction over a § 2241 petition, and it only ipse dixited that “[e]xhaustion of administrative remedies is jurisdictional.” 959 F.2d at 212.² And Gonzalez reached that conclusion not because § 2241 actually addressed the scope of our jurisdiction over § 2241 petitions, but because we had held in other decisions that exhaustion that was explicitly required by the governing statutes was jurisdictional with respect to the other inmate claims brought under those statutes.³ Id. Regardless of how we got there, a number of recent Supreme Court decisions since Gonzalez have undermined it to the point of abrogation. See United States v. Lopez, 562 F.3d 1309, 1312 (11th Cir.2009) (“We remain bound by the rule of our prior precedent unless and until it is overruled or undermined to the point of abrogation by the Supreme Court or by this court sitting en banc. ”) (quotation marks omitted).

The Supreme Court has noted that courts, including it, “have sometimes mischaracterized claim-processing rules or elements of a cause of action as jurisdictional limitations.”Reed Elsevier, Inc. v. Muchnick, 559 U.S. 154, 161, 130 S.Ct. 1237, 1243–44, 176 L.Ed.2d 18 (2010). As a result, the term “jurisdiction” has become “a word of many, too many, meanings.” Steel Co., 523 U.S. at 90, 118 S.Ct. at 1010 (quotation marks omitted). Used correctly, “ ‘[j]urisdiction’ refers [only] to ‘a court's adjudicatory authority.’ ” Reed Elsevier, 559 U.S. at 160, 130 S.Ct. at 1243 (quoting Kontrick v. Ryan, 540 U.S. 443, 455, 124 S.Ct. 906, 915, 157 L.Ed.2d 867 (2004) ). So “the term ‘jurisdictional’ properly applies only to ‘prescriptions delineating the classes of cases (subject-matter jurisdiction) and the persons (personal jurisdiction)’ implicating that authority.” Id. at 160–61, 130 S.Ct. at 1243 ; see also Steel Co., 523 U.S. at 89, 118 S.Ct. at 1010 (noting that “subject-matter jurisdiction” refers to “the courts' statutory or constitutional power to adjudicate the case”). Examples of non-jurisdictional rules, on the other...