Crawford-El v. Britton, Civ. No. 89-3076 (RCL).
| Decision Date | 15 February 1994 |
| Docket Number | Civ. No. 89-3076 (RCL). |
| Citation | 844 F. Supp. 795 |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Columbia |
| Parties | Leonard Rollon CRAWFORD-EL, Plaintiff, v. Patricia BRITTON and District of Columbia, Defendants. |
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED
Daniel McCrea Schember, Gaffney & Schember, Washington, DC, for plaintiff.
Kenneth Marty, Office of Corp. Counsel, D.C., Washington, DC, for defendants.
This case comes before this court on defendants' motion to dismiss plaintiff's fourth amended complaint. Having considered defendants' motion and plaintiff's opposition, this court hereby dismisses plaintiff's fourth amended complaint.
Plaintiff Leonard Rollon Crawford-El is a District of Columbia prisoner who was transferred out of the District's prisons in 1988 and shuffled from facility to facility due to overcrowding in the District's prison system. At the start of one of those facility-to-facility transfers — a two-month-long move from the McNeil Island Correctional Center in Steilcoom, Washington on July 28, 1989, to a federal correctional institution in Marianna, Florida, on September 22, 1989, via correctional facilities in Cameron, Missouri; Lorton, Virginia; and Petersburg, Virginia — Crawford-El had to surrender his property to prison officials for shipping. His property consisted of his papers in federal pro se and in forma pauperis civil actions, papers recording facts relevant to contemplated federal actions for damages, and a photograph he believed necessary for a post-conviction motion in his criminal case, as well as some clothing and other articles. (Fourth Amended Complaint, at ¶ 44.)
The District of Columbia corrections official who was responsible for shipping Crawford-El's property to him during this transfer was defendant Patricia Britton. She directed Washington state authorities to ship his property (and the property of all other prisoners who were being similarly transferred) to her in Washington, D.C. (Pl.'s Opp'n to Motion to Dismiss, at 2.) She received his property in mid-September, 1993. (Defs.' Motion to Dismiss, at 5.) Yet instead of shipping his property to him in Marianna, Britton asked Crawford-El's brother-in-law, Department of Corrections employee Jesse Carter to pick up Crawford-El's property. (Crawford-El never authorized such a release.) Carter picked up the property, but at Crawford-El's request, he attempted to return it to Britton so that it could be shipped to Crawford-El through prison channels. (Fourth Amended Complaint, at ¶ 29.) Britton refused to accept the property from Carter. Carter then delivered the property to Crawford-El's mother, who mailed it to Crawford-El at his request and at his expense on January 24, 1990. (Defs.' Motion to Dismiss, at 6; Pl.'s Opp'n to Motion to Dismiss, at 7.)
At first, Marianna officials would not permit Crawford-El to receive his boxes because they had been mailed to him outside prison channels. (Pl.'s Opp'n to Motion to Dismiss, at 7.) Crawford-El had to submit an administrative complaint in order to get his property back. In February 1990, he finally did receive his property, about six months after he had surrendered his property to prison officials in Washington state. (Pl.'s Opp'n to Motion to Dismiss, at 8.)
As a result of defendants' actions, he alleges, he had to incur the first class mail delivery costs of shipping his property from the District of Columbia to Marianna, Florida; the cost of replacing underwear, tennis shoes, soft shoes, and other items in his delayed packages; and suffered mental distress. (Fourth Amended Complaint, at ¶ 45.) For these injuries, Crawford-El seeks declaratory, injunctive, and monetary relief.
In response, defendants have filed a motion to dismiss. The issue before this court now is whether to grant this dispositive motion.
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has provided direct guidance for the resolution of this motion to dismiss. In this case's first phase of life, Britton filed a motion to dismiss plaintiff's complaint,2 which alleged that Britton had intentionally interfered with Crawford-El's constitutional right of access to the courts. On December 21, 1990, this court denied that motion to dismiss. She appealed and won a reversal and a remand to this court for repleading. See Crawford-El v. Britton, 951 F.2d 1314 (D.C.Cir.1991), cert. denied, ___ U.S. ___, 113 S.Ct. 62, 121 L.Ed.2d 29 (1992).3
The Court of Appeals held that Crawford-El's complaint did not satisfy the heightened pleading standard for damages suits against government officials alleged to have acted on unconstitutional motives. To survive the motion to dismiss, Crawford-El had to satisfy the heightened pleading standard by making "specific nonconclusory allegations showing that Britton knew his property contained legal materials relating to pending cases and that she diverted his property with the intention of interfering with his litigation." Crawford-El, 951 F.2d at 1319 (emphasis in original).4 The complaint that the Court of Appeals reviewed met this heightened pleading standard. See Crawford-El, 951 F.2d at 1320.
However, because Crawford-El did not offer evidence of actual injury, the Court of Appeals held that his complaint did not withstand the motion to dismiss. Crawford-El alleged that the delay in receiving his property disorganized his legal proceedings, prevented him from helping his attorneys because he did not have his records and notes, and delayed his filing of several small claims, but the Court of Appeals held that these were not sufficiently concrete injuries. His only concrete injury — his allegation that the delay caused the dismissal of one of his claims — was found not to flow from Britton's acts. The Court of Appeals held that his other claimed losses — the cost of clothing to replace what was in the delayed packages, the cost of shipping his property to Florida, and the emotional distress — were not caused by a deprivation of his right of access to the courts.
The Court of Appeals remanded this case for repleading, offering Crawford-El a second chance to state an injury to support his claim of denial of access to the courts. Crawford-El, 951 F.2d at 1322.
The question now before this court is whether Crawford-El's fourth amended complaint, pled by very able court-appointed counsel, survives defendants' motion to dismiss. Specifically, this court must determine, first, whether on remand Crawford-El has supported his court access claim — the sole claim reviewed by the Court of Appeals — with a showing of injury; and second, whether the four new claims that Crawford-El has raised in this fourth amended complaint withstand defendants' motion to dismiss.
In his fourth amended complaint, Crawford-El pleads again the three injuries he alleged in the complaint the Court of Appeals reviewed. He restates his two pecuniary injuries — the cost of shipping his packages to himself, and the cost of replacing some clothing — and elaborates upon a third injury of "mental distress" caused by "the stressful communications with officials and family members, the deprivation of pictures of loved ones, worry that his property might permanently or indefinitely be withheld from him, worry that his pending legal proceedings would be prejudiced, and worry that his pursuit of the administrative complaint in FCI Marianna to be allowed to receive the packages as mailed from his mother would adversely affect his relationships with FCI Marianna staff." (Fourth Amended Complaint, at ¶ 45.)
The Court of Appeals has explicitly held that these three injuries do not flow from any deprivation of Crawford-El's court access right (see Crawford-El, 951 F.2d at 1322), and that they do not support a claim seeking relief "for an isolated episode of interference with the right of access to ... legal materials." Crawford-El, 951 F.2d at 1321.
Yet instead of alleging merely a single, isolated episode of a violation of the right to court access, Crawford-El's fourth amended complaint alleges that defendants systematically deprived him and prisoners like him of their of legal materials out of pervasive ignorance or indifference to court access rights. (Pl.s' Opp'n to Motion to Dismiss, at 21.) He argues that an allegation of a failure of the entire system need not be supported by a showing of actual injury. The systemic failure itself is injury enough. See, e.g., Chandler v. Baird, 926 F.2d 1057, 1063 (11th Cir.1991); Sowell v. Vose, 941 F.2d 32, 34 (1st Cir.1991).
To avoid the usual requirement of demonstrating actual injury, Crawford-El must allege systemic deprivation, challenging, for example, "the basic adequacy of materials and legal assistance made available to all or subgroups of the prison population.... or conditions that obviously go to the heart of any meaningful access to libraries, counsel, or courts." Chandler, 926 F.2d at 1063. Deprivations "of a minor and short-lived nature" that do not "implicate general policies" are not enough. Id. at 1063.
However, Crawford-El's allegations of injury simply do not show that defendants habitually frustrated prisoners' court access rights.5 His strongest allegation of systemic injury states that defendants have a policy of seizing prisoner property during prisoner transfers without regard for whether such property contains active legal files,6 pursuant to which he will soon suffer another lengthy separation from his legal materials when he is returned to federal custody upon termination of this case.7
Yet even this allegation does not implicate a general policy that deprives prisoners from access to the courts. Most prisoners were not separated from their materials (legal or otherwise) for very long; as Crawford-El concedes, other prisoners had received their property by August or September 1989, shortly after they...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Garcia v. District of Columbia
...intimidation; ... unjustified denials of privileges or services." (Ex. 20, p. 2). 7. Judge Williams quoted Crawford-El v. Britton, 844 F.Supp. 795, 801 (D.D.C.1994), which in turn quoted Bart v. Telford, 677 F.2d 622 (7th 8. Plaintiffs Caldwell and Tirado allege that they were transferred t......
-
Crawford-El v. Britton
...1789, 1792-93, 114 L.Ed.2d 277 (1991), our court's most emphatic statement of the "direct" evidence requirement. Crawford-El v. Britton, 844 F.Supp. 795, 802 (D.D.C.1994). After affirming dismissal of the first two claims, the panel suggested, and the court en banc agreed, that the dismissa......
-
Thaddeus-X v. Blatter
...of ordinary firmness' from future First Amendment activities." Crawford-El v. Britton, 93 F.3d 813, 826 (D.C.Cir.1996) (quoting 844 F.Supp. 795, 801 (D.D.C.1994) (quoting Bart )). The Supreme Court left this standard undisturbed. We agree with the reasoning in these cases and conclude that ......
-
Crawford-El v. Britton
...insufficient, and because the First Amendment retaliation claim did not allege "direct evidence of unconstitutional motive.'' 844 F.Supp. 795, 802 (D.D.C.1994). The dismissal was, in effect, mandated by prior decisions of the Court of Appeals holding that allegations of circumstantial evide......