Baskins v. Moore

• Decision Date: 19 June 1973
• Docket Number: 73-268 and 73-356.,Civ. A. No. 72-877
• Citation: 362 F. Supp. 187
• Parties: Ruben BASKINS, Plaintiff, v. J. C. MOORE, Director, South Carolina Probation, Parole and Pardon Board, et al., Defendants. George Albert WATT, Plaintiff, v. Messrs. Walter D. TYLER, Jr., et al., Defendants. Levi JENKINS, on behalf of himself and all others similarly situated, Plaintiff, v. Walter D. TYLER et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of South Carolina

362 F. Supp. 187

Ruben BASKINS, Plaintiff, v. J. C. MOORE, Director, South Carolina Probation, Parole and Pardon Board, et al., Defendants.

George Albert WATT, Plaintiff, v. Messrs. Walter D. TYLER, Jr., et al., Defendants.

Levi JENKINS, on behalf of himself and all others similarly situated, Plaintiff, v. Walter D. TYLER et al., Defendants.

Civ. A. Nos. 72-877, 73-268 and 73-356.

United States District Court, D. South Carolina, Columbia Division.

June 19, 1973.

Ruben Baskins, pro se.

George Albert Watt, pro se.

Robert R. Madama, Jr., Carolina Community Law Firm, Columbia, S.C., for plaintiffs Levi Jenkins, on behalf of himself and all others similarly situated.

Emmet H. Clair, Asst. Atty. Gen., Columbia, S.C., for defendants.

ORDER

BLATT, District Judge.

In these consolidated complaints, the plaintiffs are state prisoners who have had parole applications denied by the South Carolina Probation, Parole and Pardon Board, the individual board members being the defendants in these several actions. The complaints all assail the constitutionality of various Parole Board procedures. The defendants have moved in each case for summary judgment pursuant to Rule 56(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure relying on a recent United States Supreme Court decision in which the Court held that suits by prisoners seeking early release from confinement should be characterized as petitions for habeas corpus relief and not civil suits cognizable under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the former requiring initial resort to state procedures, the latter not. Preiser v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 475, 93 S.Ct. 1827, 36 L.Ed.2d 439. The Court cited considerations of federal-state comity as undergirding their decision requiring prisoners who seek premature release from confinement to avail themselves of orderly state procedures for the vindication of their constitutional claim prior to seeking federal relief.

"It is difficult to imagine an activity in which a State has a stronger interest, or one that is more intricately bound up with state laws, regulations, and procedures, than the administration of its prisons. The relationship of state prisoners and the state officers who supervise their confinement is far more intimate than that of a State and a private citizen. For state prisoners, eating, sleeping, dressing, washing, working, and playing are all done under the watchful eye of the State, and so the possibilities for litigation under the Fourteenth Amendment are boundless. What for a private citizen would be a dispute with his landlord, with his employer, with his tailor, with his neighbor, or with his banker becomes, for the prisoner, a dispute with the State. Since these internal problems of state prisons involve issues so peculiarly within state authority and expertise, the States have an important interest in not being bypassed in the correction of these problems. Moreover, because most potential litigation involving state prisoners arises on a day-to-day basis, it is most efficiently and properly handled by the state administrative bodies and state courts, which are, for the most part, familiar with the grievances of state prisoners and in a better physical and practical position to deal with those grievances. . . . The strong considerations of comity that require giving a state court system that has convicted a defendant the first opportunity to correct its own errors thus also require giving the States the first opportunity to correct the errors made in the internal administration of their prisons." Id. 411 U.S. at 491, 93 S.Ct. at 1837-1838.

The petitioner, Levi Jenkins, is represented by counsel¹ who resists the State's motion for summary judgment and asks this court to vacate its earlier Order, dated May 31, 1973, granting summary judgment, advancing the following reasons:

1) The petitioner has not sought immediate release from confinement and, therefore, Preiser is not applicable.

2) Even if Preiser is applicable to petitioner's suit, its requirement that he exhaust state remedies prior to seeking federal relief is effective only if there exists an avenue in the state courts for vindication of petitioner's allegedly repressed constitutional rights.

With regard to the first contention, petitioner's theory is based, in this court's opinion, on an overly constrictive interpretation of Preiser. Preiser involved a suit by three New York state prisoners attacking a prison procedure by which their "good time" credits were taken from them as a result of certain prison disciplinary proceedings. On the merits of this suit, the district court in which it was instituted held that the assailed procedures in fact deprived the prisoners of due process of the law and directed the defendants to restore the appropriated good time credits. Petitioner narrowly reads Preiser as restricted to situations where the remedy sought, if granted, would invariably result in immediate release from confinement. However, as the Court in Preiser itself observed:

"In the case before us, the respondents' suits in the District Court fell squarely within this traditional scope of habeas corpus. They alleged that the deprivation of their good conduct time credits was causing or would cause them to be in illegal physical confinement, i. e., that once their conditional release date had passed, any further detention of them in prison was unlawful; and they sought restoration of those good time credits, which, by the time the District Court ruled on their petitions, meant their immediate release from physical custody.

Even if the restoration of the respondents' credits would not have resulted in their immediate release, but only in shortening the length of their actual confinement in prison, habeas corpus would have been their appropriate remedy. For recent cases have established that habeas corpus relief is not limited to immediate release from illegal custody, but that the writ is available as well to attack future confinement and obtain future releases." 411 U.S. at 487, 93 S.Ct. at 1835.

Thus, in a succession of decisions, the Supreme Court and lower courts have expatiated the scope of the Writ to make it available to: one who is released on bail or his own recognizance, Hensley v. Municipal Court, 411 U.S. 345, 93 S.Ct. 1571, 36 L.Ed.2d 294 (1973); one who is incarcerated in one state and attacks not that conviction but the detainer of another state which has not tried him, Braden v. 30th Judicial District, 410 U.S. 484, 93 S.Ct. 1123, 35 L.Ed.2d 443 (1973), Word v. N. C., 406 F.2d 352 (4 Cir. 1969); one who is released from confinement prior to adjudication of his habeas claim, Carafas v. LaVallee, 391 U.S. 234, 88 S.Ct. 1556, 20 L.Ed.2d 554 (1968); and one who attacks the second of two consecutive sentences but not the first, Peyton v. Rowe, 391 U.S. 54, 88 S.Ct. 1549, 20 L.Ed.2d 426 (1968). With regard to parole² one whose parole has been revoked causing him to be reincarcerated can invoke habeas corpus jurisdiction to review said revocation, Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U.S. 471, 92 S.Ct. 2593, 33 L.Ed.2d 484 (1972), United States ex rel. Bey v. Connecticut State Board of Parole, 443 F.2d 1079 (2 Cir. 1971), and parole status does not preclude one from assailing by habeas corpus the conviction from which he was paroled. Jones v. Cunningham, 371 U.S. 236, 83 S.Ct. 373, 9 L.Ed.2d 285 (1963). Habeas corpus is also

"available to a prisoner incarcerated under a sentence, the validity of which he did not question, to litigate the validity of other convictions which deferred his eligibility for consideration for parole on the unquestioned sentence. (Martin v. Commonwealth, 349 F.2d 781 (4 Cir. 1965). We now conclude that the same principle is applicable to one who is already eligible for consideration for parole on a sentence which he does not question, but whose chances for parole are manifestly restricted by the fact of other convictions and unserved sentences thereon, allegedly invalid." Williams v. Peyton, 372 F.2d 216, 217 (4 Cir. 1967).

While the above cases concern the expansion of the ambit of "custody", they, nevertheless, reflect the Court's determination to repudiate the notion that the habeas corpus writ is a "static, narrow formalistic remedy" (Jones v. Cunningham, 371 U.S. at 243, 83 S.Ct. 373). "Thus, we have consistently rejected interpretations of the habeas corpus statute that would suffocate the writ in stifling formalisms or hobble its effectiveness with the manacles of arcane and scholastic procedural requirements." Hensley v. Municipal Court, supra, 411 U.S. at 350, 93 S.Ct. at 1574.

In Preiser, the Court reviewed the overlapping federal remedies embodied in 42 U.S.C. § 1983, and 28 U.S.C. § 2254, and held that "when a state prisoner is challenging the very fact or duration of his physical imprisonment, and the relief he seeks is a determination that he is entitled to immediate or more speedy release from that imprisonment, the sole federal remedy is a writ of habeas corpus." 411 U.S. at 500, 93 S.Ct. at 1841. The test fashioned by the Court requires an analysis of the relief sought measured against the "essence" and "core" of habeas corpus. In the instant case, petitioner reasons that as the relief sought in Preiser would have resulted in the immediate release of the prisoners by reinstatement of their accrued good time, thus accelerating their time served past the minimum required for release or, at least, result in a diminution of the unexpired term of sentence, the touchstone of habeas relief is immediacy. Thus, as petitioner here seeks only a declaration that certain procedures are unconstitutional and a new hearing, he does not seek immediate release but only a renewed prospect of release. Prisoners who have had their parole applications denied and then seek a determination that the procedures employed by the reviewing board are constitutionally defective seek new proceedings consonant with their concept of due process; the goal of...