Barnes v. Dist. of D.C.

• Citation: 793 F.Supp.2d 260
• Decision Date: 24 June 2011
• Docket Number: Civil Action No. 06–315(RCL).
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Columbia
• Parties: Carl BARNES, et al., Plaintiffs,v.DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, Defendant.

793 F.Supp.2d 260

Carl BARNES, et al., Plaintiffs,

v.DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, Defendant.

Civil Action No. 06–315(RCL).

United States District Court, District of Columbia.

June 24, 2011.

William Charles Cole Claiborne, III, Washington, DC, Ralph Douglas Robinson, Ralph D. Robinson, PC, Falls Church, VA, for Plaintiffs.Ellen A. Efros, Grace Graham, Andrew J. Saindon, Office of the Attorney General, Washington, DC, for Defendant.

MEMORANDUM OPINION

ROYCE C. LAMBERTH, Chief Judge.

Before the Court are Plaintiffs' Motion [217] for Summary Judgment and Defendant's Motion [211] for Summary Judgment. Also before the Court are two motions to strike: Plaintiffs' Non–Consent Motion [271] to Strike “Defendant's Notice Regarding Correction in Defendant's Response to Plaintiffs' Statement of Material Facts Not in Dispute, Document Number 228–7,” ¹ and Plaintiffs' Non–Consent Motion [292] to Strike “Defendant's Notice Regarding Filing Analysis of Late Releases, Document Number 244.” Finally, plaintiffs recently filed a document titled “Notice [sic] Plaintiffs' Response to Discrepancy Reports Submitted by the District (docket # 301).” ² Pls.' Notice [306], Jun. 21, 2011. Having carefully considered the Motions, the Oppositions, the Replies, oral argument of counsel, the entire record in this case, and the applicable law, the Court will grant in part and deny in part Plaintiffs' Motion for Summary Judgment, and grant in part and deny in part Defendant's Motion for Summary Judgment. The Court will also deny both of plaintiffs' motions to strike. A review of the background of the case, the governing law, the parties' arguments, and the Court's reasoning in resolving those arguments follows.

I. BACKGROUND

This case involves overdetentions and strip searches at the District of Columbia's jails. The District's Department of Corrections has custody over thousands of prisoners serving time for various offenses, with jail sentences of varying lengths. To maintain security within its jails, the DOC strip searches inmates upon admission or commitment to its jail facilities. D.'s SMF [211–1] ¶ 3. Each day the DOC shuttles some of its inmates to courts in the District so they can be present at court appearances. At some of those court appearances inmates receive court orders from judges for their release from the DOC's custody. At that point the DOC begins an administrative release process that results in the prisoner's actual release from the DOC's custody. The same release process is begun upon the expiration of an inmate's prison sentence.

While there is no set definition for an “overdetention,” it generally means that once a prisoner was entitled to release—because of a court order, the expiration of a sentence, or otherwise—the authority having custody over that person held them too long. This case involves a group of plaintiffs representing a class of prisoners who allege, in essence, that the DOC held them too long after they were ordered released by a court or their sentences expired. In addition, since inmates with release orders from courts in the District were often returned to the DOC's jails while the administrative processing of their releases was undertaken by DOC staff, those inmates were strip searched again pursuant to the DOC's policy. Therefore the overdetention problem and the strip search problem are interrelated, the one leading to the other.

Since this case involves the DOC's release process and whether it leads to overdetentions or is administered so poorly as to achieve the same result, the Court will first summarize that process. A 2008 report commissioned by the District's Criminal Justice Coordinating Council supplies a helpful breakdown of the flow of paperwork between the various entities involved in the release of DOC inmates and a description of the steps taken by the DOC's Records Office to process releases. Pls.' Ex. 408 (“Schneider Report”).

The Schneider Report notes that when a release order issues in a courtroom, “it travels through seven hands ... before reaching the DC Jail Records office where it is processed.” Id. at 1. Judges sign two original copies of release orders. Id. at 4. One copy is retained by the courtroom clerk and scanned sometime that day into a docket management program used by the Superior Court called “Court View.” Id. at 4–5. The other signed copy of the release order is given to the staff of the “Jail Board” at the courthouse, which holds onto all the inmates' paperwork and coordinates with the DOC transportation staff to arrange the van or bus transport of inmates and their paperwork to the appropriate places. Id. at 5.

Once an inmate's paperwork has arrived at the DC Jail, it is brought to the Receiving and Discharge office, where jail records staff enter each order into a logbook, post each order in the DOC's inmate-management program JACCS, and then send the orders via dumbwaiter to the DC Jail's Records Office for release processing. Id. at 6.

Records Office staff—unfortunately named “Legal Instrument Examiners” (“LIEs”)—then perform the final round of administrative steps that the DOC requires before releasing inmates. Id. A LIE first reviews the inmate's actual file or “jacket” and confirms that the release orders match the inmate's cases. Id. The DOC will not release an inmate unless it has an actual, signed copy of the release order. The LIE also looks for other pending cases or detainers in the file. Id. Next, the LIE checks the DOC's own databases program, JACCS, to make sure that the JACCS data records coincide with the information in the physical file. Id. The LIE then checks other computer databases to see if there are any warrants out for the inmate's arrest, and checks the Superior Court's database, Court View, to check for any other cases requiring that the inmate be held in custody. Id. Once this first LIE determines that the inmate is eligible for release, a second, “senior” LIE performs all of the same steps—again reviewing the inmate's physical file—and then signs off on the inmate's release. Id. The process takes from 2 to 2.5 hours to complete. Simmons Dep. [228–2] 164:15–22.

That the DOC's release procedures, its implementation of them, or both, might be generating unacceptable numbers of overdetentions is something that the District has been aware of for years. This case is nearly identical to a prior case before this Court, Bynum v. District of Columbia, Civil Action No. 02–956(RCL). Bynum, filed in 2002, involved a class of about 4,000 former DOC prisoners who claimed they'd been detained by the DOC past the point when their releases had been ordered, “for periods ranging from an extra day to many days or even months on end.” Barnes v. District of Columbia, 242 F.R.D. 113, 115 (D.D.C.2007). In addition to this “overdetention” class, this Court in Bynum certified an overlapping “strip search” class. The District moved for summary judgment, the Court denied that motion, and shortly thereafter the parties settled the case.

The class members in Bynum were unable to get through the DOC's release process on the day that their releases were ordered, were held by the DOC past midnight, and overdetained. In addition, because—as stated above—the DOC's policy is to strip search anyone who is returned to the general jail population, Def.'s SMF [211–1] ¶ 3, many of the Bynum class members were strip searched, in some cases multiple times.

The Bynum litigation ended on January 25, 2006 pursuant to a settlement agreement that contained a number of components that were designed to remedy the overdetention and related strip search problems at the District's jails. ³ Bynum v. District of Columbia, 412 F.Supp.2d 73 (D.D.C.2006). Of the $12 million settlement amount agreed to by the parties in Bynum, $3 million was set aside “to build a state of the art Inmate Processing Center (IPC) within the foot print of the DC Jail site, which will be a project totaling $5 Million.” Id. at 83. The remaining $2 million was to be provided by the District government. Id. The purpose of the IPC was to create adequate processing facilities for both intake and release of inmates and for the processing of associated records. Id. Among the reforms associated with the IPC was the requirement that “[c]ourt ordered releases [would] be separated from inmates to be held in custody.” Id. This Court recognized that the settlement promised “significant policy changes in the operation of the Department of Corrections,” and noted that the DOC's “policy of strip searching court returnees subject to release has been stopped as a direct result of this litigation.” Id. at 85.

However, in the aftermath of Bynum, instead of a swift change to the status quo at the DOC, there were years where little if any substantive change was instituted. In fact, there isn't much in the record indicating any significant reforms for well over a year after the close of the Bynum class period. With the exception of a DOC staff “tour” of “mega jail” facilities in October and November 2006, whose relationship to improving the DOC's release process is entirely unclear from the record, the DOC appears to have done nothing concrete in response to the overdetention problems at its jails until 2007.⁴

The Inmate Processing Center, mandated by the Bynum settlement, remains to this very day unbuilt. According to the Interim Director of the DOC, the IPC has been “in the planning stages for several years.” Def.'s Mem. Opp'n Pls.' Mot. Summ. J. [228] Ex. 1 at ¶ 17. As of March 2010, the District had spent only $788,222 on the project, which now has an estimated cost of $15 million, rather than the $5 million specified in the Bynum settlement agreement. The District hasn't provided an explanation for the extended delay in the IPC project or its currently trebled price tag, although it appears that these may in part be due to the DOC's decision to fold the IPC project into a number of others. Pls.' Second Mot. Compel...