Collins v. King

• Decision Date: 24 September 1984
• Docket Number: No. 83-3255,83-3255
• Citation: 743 F.2d 248
• Parties: Michael COLLINS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. John T. KING, Secretary, Department of Corrections, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

Page 248

743 F.2d 248

Michael COLLINS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. John T. KING, Secretary, Department of Corrections, et al Defendants-Appellees.

No. 83-3255.

United States Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit.

Sept. 24, 1984.

Michael Collins, pro se.

Larry Fabacher, court appointed, New Orleans, La., for plaintiff-appellant.

J. Marvin Montgomery, Karen L. Godwin, Kopsa, Joseph Erwin, Asst. Attys. Gen., Baton Rouge, La., for defendants-appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana.

Before GEE, JOLLY and DAVIS, Circuit Judges.

GEE, Circuit Judge:

Collins, a Louisiana state prisoner, appeals to us from the dismissal of his Section 1983 action against various prison officials and guards. ¹

The action had its inception in an incident that occurred when Collins, leaving his job in the prison kitchen, was checked by Defendant Johnson, a guard, and found to be carrying three small packets of sugar. According to the allegations of Collins' complaint, which in the posture of the case we accept as true, Johnson took him to the security office and cuffed him around in the presence of four other guards. ² At a disciplinary hearing on charges of aggravated disobedience, defiance, and attempted theft, Collins was adjudicated guilty and committed to extended lockdown. He did not appeal to Defendant Phelps, then Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Corrections, as authorized by Louisiana Disciplinary Rules and Procedures for Adult Prisoners.

Instead he brought this action, pleading his version of the incident as stated above and denying that he attempted to strike Johnson. In addition, he asserted that Defendant Wall, a Lieutenant Colonel in the prison system, sat as a member of the Disciplinary Board in his case only and remarked after leaving Collins' hearing that he was having Collins locked up for "beating a previous write-up" (disciplinary charge). In addition, Collins asserted that he should have been charged with theft of the sugar only, not with defiance or disobedience, in effect seeking court review of the Disciplinary Board's finding that he was guilty of all charges. The sole relief sought by Collins was reinstatement in his trustee status and job assignment, both lost in consequence of the Board's action. The parties consented to a magistrate's conducting all proceedings in the case.

The defendants moved for summary judgment in the case, pointing out the undisputed fact that Collins had not appealed the Disciplinary Board's decision in his case to Defendant Phelps and hence had not availed himself of the procedure provided by the state to protect his rights. Collins filed no response to the motion. In his consideration of the defendants' motion, the magistrate construed Collins' action as being laid under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 and complaining of violations of his right to procedural due process guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Given the nature of Collins' complaints--of a biased administrative tribunal and of excessive charges made against him--and of the relief that he sought, we think that the magistrate was correct in doing so.

Fairly read, Collins' complaint states that by being placed in extended lockdown he was deprived of a liberty interest. We have recently held to this precise effect. McCrae v. Hankins, 720 F.2d 863, 866-68 (5th Cir.1983) (Louisiana prisoner placed in extended lockdown, liberty interest extended by Louisiana regulations). It then goes on to state that he suffered this deprivation because untrue and excessive charges were made against him and were passed on by a biased tribunal. These are clearly complaints about a want of procedural due process. Finally, he advises that what he wants as the result of his action is restoration of his liberty interest: his job and his trustee status. Necessarily this would entail his release from lockdown.

So construing the complaint, the magistrate concluded that since Collins had failed to avail himself of the state process and procedures provided him, he could not complain that he had been denied due process. He therefore dismissed Collins' complaint. On appeal to us, Collins raises several points, and his appointed counsel adds others by a supplemental brief.

First, Collins complains that the magistrate misconstrued his complaint to allege due process violations only, when it also asserted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. We disagree. As we have already noted, the complaint does aver that he was manhandled by a guard. It does so, however, merely in the course of asserting that the charges of defiance and disobedience laid against him were untrue and excessive. Nowhere does he seek any relief on the basis of that incident, and that which he did seek--reinstatement in his job and status--is scarcely appropriate to redressing such a constitutional violation. Finally, when the defendants sought to have Collins' case dismissed for his failure to pursue the administrative remedies provided him, a defense at least cognate to an appropriate one against a due process claim but entirely inappropriate to an Eighth Amendment one, Collins made no response. See Augustine v. Doe, 740 F.2d 322 (5th Cir.1984). We find no merit in this contention.

The remaining contentions of Collins and his counsel, however, although somewhat inartfully advanced, are not so easily disposed of. As we understand them, they raise difficult questions of the interplay between recent Supreme Court decisions and a congressional enactment, as well as the effect of recent decisions of our Court. As best we can restate them, the major contention is that the magistrate's decision in this case amounts to nothing less than requiring exhaustion of administrative remedies before entertaining a Section 1983 action, a requirement forbidden by Patsy v. Florida Board of Regents, 457 U.S. 496, 102 S.Ct. 2557, 73 L.Ed.2d 172 (1982). In addition, it is said, the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA), 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1997e, and our decision in Johnson v. King, 696 F.2d 370 (5th Cir.1983), require a remand. Finally, Collins asserts that the disciplinary rules under which he was administratively penalized cannot serve as any basis for requiring limited exhaustion pursuant to CRIPA, because they have not been certified by the Attorney General as "in substantial compliance with ... minimum acceptable standards" as required by CRIPA, adding that the appeal to Defendant Phelps that he failed to pursue was not adequate or meaningful because it "takes practically one year." Before responding to these difficult issues and addressing such as we must, we shall briefly survey pertinent Supreme Court authority, as well as recent decisions of our own Court.

Background of Authority

Patsy v. Florida Board of Regents, supra, was a Section 1983 action by a white female secretary who contended that her right to equal protection of the laws was violated by sex discrimination and by "affirmative action" programs under which other persons were preferred over her on the basis of race. In an exhaustive and careful opinion, a majority of our Court, sitting en banc, held that adequate and appropriate state remedies must be exhausted by a plaintiff before we would entertain such an action. ³ The Supreme Court, numerically inferior but institutionally superior, ⁴ reversed our decision.

It did so primarily on an analysis of the legislative history of two congressional enactments, that of Section 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, 17 Stat. 13, the precursor of Section 1983, and CRIPA. Examining the congressional proceedings in connection with CRIPA, the court ascertained that in that act the Congress enacted a narrow exception to the non-exhaustion doctrines established by the Court, quoting such passages from congressional reports as that "the Supreme Court has held, that in 1983 civil rights suits the litigant need not necessarily fully exhaust State remedies" and remarks such as that of Rep. Drinan that requiring exhaustion of remedies was "something the Supreme Court has consistently refused to do." 457 U.S. at 509, 102 S.Ct. at 2564. Some pages later, it declared that "[i]t is not for us to say whether Congress will or should create a similar scheme for other categories of Sec. 1983 claims or whether Congress will or should adopt an altogether different exhaustion requirement for non-prisoner Sec. 1983 claims." 457 U.S. at 515, 102 S.Ct. at 2567. In view of the original purposes of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, and of the trepidation with which Congress enacted so limited and narrow an exhaustion requirement as CRIPA, the Court concluded that we erred in ascertaining the somewhat broader one that we did in Patsy.

Thus the exhaustion requirement came to rest in a posture of reciprocal deference, first by Congress to what the Court had held Congress meant to say and next by the Court to Congress. And so, having laid it down that exhaustion was not required, the Court appeared to retire from the field, leaving the matter of further inroads on its non-exhaustion rule for Section 1983 actions to the Congress. This was not, however to be quite the case, since a cognate doctrine applicable only to procedural due process cases waited in the wings.

Just over a year before its opinion in Patsy, the Supreme Court had handed down Parratt v. Taylor, 451 U.S. 527, 101 S.Ct. 1908, 68 L.Ed.2d 420 (1981). In that case a Nebraska state prisoner had successfully invoked Section 1983 and the powers both of the federal district court and of the Eighth Circuit to recover the value of a hobby kit, negligently lost when prison employees failed to follow established mail-handling procedures. The Supreme Court reversed, recoiling from an interpretation of Section 1983 that "would almost necessarily result in turning every alleged injury which may have been inflicted by a state official acting under 'color of law' into a violation...