Bryant v. Muth

• Decision Date: 24 May 1993
• Docket Number: No. 91-6672,91-6672
• Citation: 994 F.2d 1082
• Parties: Victor George BRYANT, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. William R. MUTH; Gregg Robbins, Defendants-Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

Page 1082

994 F.2d 1082

Victor George BRYANT, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. William R. MUTH; Gregg Robbins, Defendants-Appellants.

No. 91-6672.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued March 30, 1993.

Decided May 24, 1993.

Rudolf A. Renfer, Jr., Asst. U.S. Attorney/Chief, Civ. Div., Raleigh, NC, argued (Margaret Person Currin, U.S. Atty., on brief), for defendants-appellants.

Genevieve M. Kelly, Student Counsel, Appellate Litigation Clinical Program, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, DC, argued (Steven H. Goldblatt, David B. Goodhand, Supervising Atty., on brief), for plaintiff-appellee.

Before RUSSELL and NIEMEYER, Circuit Judges, and CHAPMAN, Senior Circuit Judge.

OPINION

CHAPMAN, Senior Circuit Judge:

Prison officials William R. Muth ("Muth") and Gregg Robbins ("Robbins") are appealing the district court's order denying their motion for summary judgment and finding that they were not entitled to qualified immunity for the confiscation of inmate Victor George Bryant's legal materials created with the unauthorized use of prison computers and stored on contraband computer disks. We disagree, reverse, and grant the defendants' motion for summary judgment finding that they are entitled to qualified immunity.

I

On November 13, 1987, prison officials at the Federal Correctional Institute in Butner, North Carolina ("FCI Butner") confiscated three computer disks from inmate Victor George Bryant ("Bryant"). The disks were confiscated because prison officials believed they were contraband, as their possession was not authorized, and that Bryant had stolen them from the prison's Education Department. ¹ Officials also believed that the disks contained legal work obtained through unauthorized use of the Education Department's computers in violation of the prison's computer policy.

It is undisputed that Bryant was not authorized to use the prison computers. As a result, Bryant was in "possession of anything not authorized" in violation of Bureau of Prison ("BOP") Policy Statement 1237.6. ² It should be noted that, pursuant to BOP Policy Statement 1237.6, Bryant could have applied for written permission from the prison's Chief Executive Officer to use the computers to create his legal work.

A few days after the disks were confiscated, Bryant was given a hearing at the prison during which he claimed that the disks were a gift from fellow inmate Richard Lopez. Lopez stated that he had gotten them from an instructor who had brought them from home. Whether the disks were government property or a gift from inmate Lopez, Bryant was not authorized to possess the disks. ³ The BOP regulations specifically state:

A claim of ownership may not be accepted for an item made from the unauthorized use of government property. Items obtained from another inmate ... without staff authorization may be considered nuisance contraband for which a claim of ownership is ordinarily not accepted.

28 C.F.R. § 553.13(b)(2)(ii). Therefore, under BOP regulations the disks were "contraband" ⁴ and subject to seizure and confiscation by prison officials. ⁵

Two of the three confiscated disks were used by Bryant to create and store legal materials for his appeals. The third disk contained a program used by Bryant to circumvent the access restrictions on the prison computers. ⁶ Because he could not access the prison computers without this third disk, Bryant was fully aware that his use of the computers was unauthorized.

Bryant alleges that the two disks were used to store his legal materials and contained a year's work he had done in preparation of various post-conviction appeals. Specifically, the disks contained Bryant's memories and recollections of court transcripts, the circumstances surrounding his arrest and a draft of his Motion to Vacate Conviction under Title 28 U.S.C. § 2255.

At the time the disks were confiscated, appellant Muth was the Supervisor of Education and appellant Robbins was a computer instructor at the prison. The day after the disks were seized, they were turned over to appellant Muth. In conformity with BOP regulations Muth treated the disks as contraband and ordered appellant Robbins to reformat them. ⁷ The disks were not reformatted, however, and none of Bryant's legal materials stored on the disks were destroyed.

Two weeks after his disks were seized, Bryant requested a hardcopy of the legal work stored on the disks. Bryant told Muth that the disks contained a year's legal work and that retrieving the data was critical to contest his threatened extradition to England and to pursue other post-conviction remedies. Although Robbins believed that the disks were contraband, that the prison computers were used in violation of prison rules, and that Bryant was not entitled to a printout of any of the contents of the computer disks, at Muth's direction, Robbins gave Bryant an edited hard-copy totalling approximately one-third of the disks' contents.

On March 16, 1988, Bryant filed a pro se request for an injunction and temporary restraining order ("TRO") to prohibit the reformatting of his disks. On March 25, 1988, the district court entered an ex parte injunction preventing the disposal or alteration of the contraband disks.

On April 1, 1988, prison officials presented Bryant with what they believed to be a complete printout of his legal materials. The task of retrieving the materials from Bryant's confiscated computer disks was difficult and time consuming for several reasons. First, Bryant's disks were not formatted for use on the IBM-compatible disks used for computer instruction at the prison. Instead, Bryant had formatted them for use on TRS-80 computers which were located at the back of the prison computer classrooms. This meant that Robbins could only attempt to retrieve data when he was actually in the FCI Butner computer classrooms. Robbins held two other jobs in addition to his job as a computer instructor at the prison. Therefore, he could only retrieve data from Bryant's disks during classroom teaching hours.

Second, Bryant had stored the materials on his disks in such a way that even Robbins, an experienced computer instructor, could not retrieve them without Bryant's assistance. According to Robbins, in addition to formatting the disks for use on TRS-80 computers, Bryant had also placed "an entirely different set of initialization programs on the data disks themselves, which made it possible to read the disks." In addition, Bryant had created directories on his disks in such a way that it appeared the data on both disks was identical. Therefore, when the complete contents of one of the disks was given to Bryant on April 1, 1988, prison officials believed that Bryant had received a printout of all his legal materials.

Finally, the volume of materials stored on Bryant's disks was enormous. It took more than three hours of continuous printing to provide Bryant with a hard-copy of the materials stored on all the contraband computer disks.

On April 6, 1988, the district court held that, because it was written on a form used by prisoners for civil rights complaints, Bryant's request for an injunction constituted a complaint against Muth and Robbins individually. On July 18, 1988, the defendants filed motions to dismiss and for summary judgment.

On November 29, 1988, the district court granted the defendants' motion to dismiss and for summary judgment. The court held that Bryant's "constitutional right of reasonable access to court entitles him to the complete printout of his legal material. Carter v. Hutto, 781 F.2d 1028 (4th Cir.1986)." The court found, however, that because Bryant had received a complete printout of his legal materials on April 1, he had no further constitutional claim.

On December 22, 1988, Bryant filed a motion for reconsideration claiming that the printout he received on April 1 was not a complete printout of all of his legal materials. On February 13, 1989, the district court held that, because the prison officials had mistakenly believed the two disks were duplicate copies of each other, the printout Bryant received on April 1, only represented the contents of one disk. On March 6, 1989, the court struck its December 1, 1988 order, which had dismissed Bryant's earlier claims, and reinstated Bryant's complaint.

Bryant received a complete copy of all the legal materials contained on all of the contraband disks on July 19, 1989. On August 1, 1989, Muth and Robbins again moved to dismiss Bryant's complaint.

On August 14, 1989, Bryant moved to amend his complaint to include claims for monetary damages from Muth and Robbins on the grounds that they illegally confiscated, reformatted, and mutilated the contents of the contraband computer disks. Bryant claims that the materials stored on the confiscated computer disks were necessary for him to conduct his post-conviction proceedings and by refusing to provide him with a complete hard-copy of the contents for approximately 21 months, Muth and Robbins denied him access to the courts in violation of his clearly established constitutional right.

By Order dated November 13, 1989, the court allowed Bryant to amend his complaint and denied the defendants' motion to dismiss filed on August 1.

On May 3, 1990, Muth and Robbins moved for summary judgment on the ground that they were entitled to qualified immunity under Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 2738, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982). The district court held that Muth and Robbins were not entitled to qualified immunity and that, even though Bryant had no constitutional right to possess the contraband disks, he did have a clearly established constitutional right to the legal materials on the disks.

Muth and Robbins appeal contending that they are entitled to qualified immunity for two reasons: First, they followed established BOP procedures in confiscating Bryant's contraband computer disks and second, Bryant does not have a constitutional right to the...