Cooper v. Brookshire

• Decision Date: 22 November 1995
• Docket Number: No. 94-50782,94-50782
• Parties: Christopher Columbus COOPER, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. O.A. BROOKSHIRE, Sheriff of Ector County, Texas, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

Page 377

70 F.3d 377

33 Fed.R.Serv.3d 616

Christopher Columbus COOPER, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. O.A. BROOKSHIRE, Sheriff of Ector County, Texas, et al Defendants-Appellees.

No. 94-50782.

United States Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit.

Nov. 22, 1995.

Rehearing and Suggestion for Rehearing En Banc Denied Dec. 19, 1995.

Nicholas Cowenhoven Taylor (Court-appointed--Not under the act), Midland, TX, for appellant.

Denis C. Dennis, McMahon, Tidwell, Hansen, Atkins & Peacock, P.C., Odessa, TX, for appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas.

Before SMITH, WIENER and DeMOSS, Circuit Judges.

WIENER, Circuit Judge:

The sole issue presented by this appeal is whether, for purposes of FED.R.CIV.P. 5(e), a prisoner's pro se complaint is "filed" on the date it is properly delivered to prison officials pursuant to the prison's established procedure for prisoners' mail, ¹ rather than the date it is received by the clerk of court. Agreeing with the conclusions uniformly reached by all four circuit courts that have considered this question, ² we hold that Plaintiff-Appellant Christopher Columbus Cooper's complaint against prison officials in Ector County, Texas (Ector County officials) should be deemed filed as of the date that he duly submitted it to prison authorities for forwarding to the clerk of court. We therefore reverse the magistrate judge's order granting the Ector County officials' motion to dismiss, and remand for further proceedings.

I FACTS AND PROCEEDINGS

While incarcerated in a federal prison in El Reno, Oklahoma, Cooper drafted a pro se complaint pursuant to 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 (Sec. 1983). On July 11, 1994, a Monday, Cooper signed the complaint before a notary public and deposited it in the prison's legal mail system. ³ Prison authorities forwarded Cooper's complaint to the district court clerk, who received it on July 15, 1994, a Friday.

This case hinges on that date of receipt, as Cooper's cause of action accrued exactly two years and one day earlier. ⁴ The magistrate judge who heard the case found that a two-year statute of limitations applied, and recommended dismissing Cooper's claim as untimely. Cooper objected, arguing that, under the Supreme Court's holding in Houston v. Lack, ⁵ his complaint should be considered filed as of the date he placed it in the prison's mail system. The district court agreed with Cooper and returned the case to the original magistrate judge for further proceedings. The Ector County officials then moved to dismiss on the grounds that the complaint was time-barred. After both parties consented to have the magistrate judge order the entry of a final judgment pursuant to 28 U.S.C. Sec. 636(c)--and despite the prior opinion of the district judge to the contrary--the magistrate judge granted the Ector County officials' motion and dismissed the complaint as untimely. ⁶ Cooper appealed the magistrate judge's order directly to this court. ⁷

II. ANALYSIS

In Houston v. Lack, a state prisoner drafted a pro se notice of appeal from the dismissal of a habeas corpus petition. He deposited the notice into the prison mail system three days before the thirty-day filing deadline set by FED.R.APP. P. 4(a)(1); but the district court clerk did not receive the notice of appeal until one day after the expiration of the filing period. ⁸ The Supreme Court held that the notice of appeal had been filed as of the moment it was delivered to prison officials. ⁹

A bright-line "mailbox rule" for pro se prisoners was thereby established. The Supreme Court recognized that without a mailbox rule, prisoners acting pro se would be unduly prejudiced in their attempts to exercise their rights under the law:

Unskilled in law, unaided by counsel, and unable to leave the prison, [a prisoner's] control over the processing of his notice necessarily ceases as soon as he hands it over to the only public officials to whom he has access--the prison authorities--and the only information he will likely have is the date he delivered the notice to those prison authorities and the date ultimately stamped on his notice. ¹⁰

The Houston Court reasoned that the mailbox rule also pretermits time-consuming examinations of the circumstances behind any delay in the delivery of prisoners' documents to the court clerk. ¹¹ The Court emphasized the inevitable complexity of such examinations, as "the pro se prisoner has no choice but to entrust the forwarding of his notice of appeal to prison authorities whom he cannot control ... and who may have every reason to delay." ¹²

The concerns underlying the Houston decision clearly apply to instant case. Prisoners filing pro se complaints face the same limitations as prisoners filing pro se notices of appeal: They cannot visit the courthouse to ensure that their pleadings are stamped "filed"; and they can neither place their complaints personally in the hands of United States postal workers nor phone the district court to ascertain whether the papers have been delivered. ¹³ Moreover, by definition they have no attorney to institute and monitor the process.

Finally, any delay between the submission of a complaint to prison authorities and its arrival at the courthouse, like any delay in the arrival of a notice of appeal, raises difficult issues of possible neglect or even intentional interference. The temptation for willful obstruction recognized in Houston as to notices of appeal is even more compelling in the case of complaints: When prisoners appeal, they have already lost the first round. If prison authorities have an incentive to delay a filing under those circumstances, ¹⁴ then they have an even greater motivation to thwart the timely filing of new claims the merits of which have yet to be determined. ¹⁵

It is true that the Houston holding was based on an interpretation of FED.R.APP. P. 4(a)(1) (Rule 4(a)(1)), whereas the instant case involves FED.R.CIV. P. 5(e) (Rule 5(e)). Regardless, the language of both rules is "so similar that an identical interpretation [is] warranted." ¹⁶ Both rules plainly require that litigation papers be filed with the court clerk, ¹⁷ yet the Supreme Court refused to read the black letter of Rule 4(a)(1) in a vacuum. Instead, the Court viewed the rule's language in the broader context of its dominant purpose and overall equity, and held that the filing requirement is met when a prisoner delivers a pro se notice of appeal to prison authorities. ¹⁸ Noting that the Houston opinion nowhere indicates that it should be limited to habeas appeals, ¹⁹ we join all other circuit courts that have considered this issue and extend the Court's conclusion to the filing of a prisoner's pro se complaint under Rule 5(e).

The Ector County officials argue that we should not extend the Houston analysis to the filing of complaints, as Rule 4(a)(1) allows only thirty days for the filing of a notice of appeal, compared to the two-year period available for the filing of a Sec. 1983 complaint. ²⁰ We decline to credit this argument for two reasons. First, the difference in filing periods fairly reflects the relative degrees of difficulty of the tasks involved. A notice of appeal need only list the name of the appellant, the order or judgment appealed from, and the name of the court to which the appeal is taken. ²¹ The notice typically consists of but one fairly formulaic, easily adaptable paragraph.

A complaint, by contrast, must state the basis for the jurisdiction of the trial court, a description of a claim or claims upon which relief can be granted, and a demand for judgment for relief sought. ²² Frequently complaints contain multiple claims, ²³ and relief "in the alternative or of several different types may be demanded." ²⁴ Thus, even though technical forms of pleadings are no longer required, ²⁵ and pleadings--particularly pro se pleadings--are generally construed liberally, ²⁶ a complaint requires considerably more background research and individual attention than does a notice of appeal. ²⁷ Moreover, a great majority of prisoner pro se filings consist of Sec. 1983 complaints, which in almost every instance must comply with the heightened pleading standard of specificity. ²⁸

The Ector County officials' argument also fails because it is blind to the underlying policy of the Houston opinion:

[Houston ] simply provides that a statute of limitations has the same practical effect on every pro se prisoner litigant it governs. The length of the time restriction involved is irrelevant. Limitations periods themselves make no distinction between those who file early and those who file late. The Houston rule merely serves to create functionally equivalent time bars and provide equal access to the courts for pro se prisoner litigants. ²⁹

We are satisfied that pro se prisoner litigants are at least as needful of a level playing field when filing complaints as are such litigants when filing notices of appeal. Accordingly, we reverse the magistrate judge's order dismissing Cooper's complaint as untimely, and remand for further proceedings.

REVERSED AND REMANDED.

JERRY E. SMITH, Circuit Judge, dissenting:

I respectfully dissent from the conscientious view of the panel majority. Unless and until we are told by a new appellate rule or by the Supreme Court that we should extend the rule of Houston v. Lack, 487 U.S. 266, 108 S.Ct. 2379, 101 L.Ed.2d 245 (1988), to all filings by prisoners, we should enunciate boundaries to the rule's application. The majority, however, announces no such limitations.

In Houston, the prisoner had only thirty days to file a notice of appeal. Here, Cooper had two years to file his civil complaint. There is absolutely no showing that he needed to wait until the eleventh hour to file. Certainly, there is no intimation that the federal prison authorities hampered him in any way from preparing and filing his complaint. Hence, there is no unfairness in requiring Cooper to adhere to the same two-year...