Glover v. Johnson
| Decision Date | 08 June 1998 |
| Docket Number | 96-1931 and 96-1948,96-1852,Nos. 95-1521,s. 95-1521 |
| Citation | 138 F.3d 229 |
| Parties | Mary GLOVER; Lynda Gates; Jimmie Ann Brown; Manetta Gant; Jacalyn M. Settles; and several Jane Does, on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. Perry JOHNSON, Director, Michigan Department of Corrections; Florence R. Crane; G. Robert Cotton; Thomas K. Eardley, Jr.; B. James George, Jr.; Duane L. Waters; The Michigan Corrections Commissions; William Kime, Director, Bureau of Programs; Robert Brown, Jr., Director, Bureau of Correctional Facilities; Frank Beetham, Director, Bureau of Prison Industries; Richard Nelson, Director, Bureau of Field Services; Gloria Richardson, Superintendent, Huron Valley Women's Facility; Dorothy Costen, Director of Treatment, Huron Valley Women's Facility; and Clyde Graven, Sheriff, Kalamazoo County; individually and in their official capacities, Defendants-Appellants. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit |
Deborah A. LaBelle (argued and briefed), Law Offices of Deborah LaBelle, Ann Arbor, MI, Michael Barnhart (argued), Detroit Michigan, for Plaintiffs-Appellees in No. 95-1521.
Deborah A. LaBelle (argued and briefed), Law Offices of Deborah LaBelle, Ann Arbor, MI, Michael Barnhart (argued), Detroit Michigan, for Mary Glover in Nos. 96-1852, 96-1931 and 96-1948.
Susan Przekop-Shaw (argued), Leo H. Friedman (briefed), Kim G. Harris (briefed), Office of the Attorney General, Corrections Division, Lansing, MI, for Defendants-Appellants in No. 95-1521.
Leo H. Friedman, Lisa C. Ward (argued and briefed), Office of the Attorney General, Corrections Division, Lansing, MI, for Perry Johnson in No. 96-1852.
Lisa C. Ward (argued and briefed), Susan Przekop-Shaw, Leo H. Friedman (briefed), Office of the Attorney General, Corrections Division, Lansing, MI, for Perry Johnson in No. 96-1931.
Leo H. Friedman, Lisa C. Ward (argued and briefed), Susan Przekop-Shaw (briefed), Office of the Attorney General, Corrections Division, Lansing, MI, for Perry Johnson in No. 96-1948.
Before: WELLFORD, RYAN, and DAUGHTREY, Circuit Judges.
RYAN, J., delivered the opinion of the court, in which DAUGHTREY, J., joined. WELLFORD, J. (pp. 254-256), delivered a separate opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part.
More than 20 years ago, two separate groups of plaintiffs brought class actions under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 on behalf of all female prison inmates in Michigan. Since then, almost all of the principal players, plaintiffs and defendants alike, have departed the scene through retirement, death, or release from prison. But the two cases live on, and judging from the arguments of the parties and the extensive opinions of the district court, we are not appreciably closer to a resolution than we were two decades ago--and the end does not appear to be in sight.
In one of the two suits, which were consolidated by the district court, the plaintiffs challenged "the entire range of treatment programs for female prisoners including educational opportunities, vocational and apprenticeship training, prison industry and work pass programs, wage rates, and library facilities as compared to those offered to male prisoners," as violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Glover v. Johnson, 478 F.Supp. 1075, 1077 (E.D.Mich.1979). In the second case, the plaintiffs "claimed that their rights to equal protection and their right to access to the courts ha[d] been violated by [the State of Michigan's] failure to provide the female prisoners ... an adequate law library comparable to those provided for male prisoners." Id. at 1094. After a lengthy trial, the district court found for the plaintiffs in both cases, entered a remedial "Final Order," and has been supervising these aspects of the Michigan women's correctional system ever since. During the course of the district court's supervision, we have entertained more than a dozen appeals; now, the case is before us once again. This time we are presented with three separate appeals which we have consolidated for decision. We are asked to review the district court's judgments (1) denying the defendants' motion to terminate the district court's oversight of the female inmates' educational and vocational opportunities and their access to the courts; (2) granting, in part, the plaintiffs' motion to impose contempt sanctions against the defendants and (3) granting the plaintiffs' motion for attorney fees.
For reasons we will fully explain, we conclude that the judgment of the district court in the first appeal, concerning termination of judicial oversight, must be vacated, and the matter remanded for further proceedings. We will retain jurisdiction. The district court's judgments imposing contempt sanctions and attorney fees will be affirmed in part and reversed in part, and these matters too will be remanded for further proceedings, but as to these, we will not retain jurisdiction.
Despite the district court's patient, dedicated, and persistent effort over the long history of this lawsuit, it has been unable to accomplish the two tasks before it: (1) achieving compliance on behalf of Michigan's women prisoners with Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection guarantees and with First Amendment access-to-court guarantees, and (2) terminating the federal-court supervision of Michigan's women's prison system. The first of these tasks, of course, is also the plaintiffs' goal in filing this lawsuit; it became the district court's task when the plaintiffs prevailed on the merits in 1979. The second task, on the other hand, is simply a necessary corollary to any extended federal-court oversight of State matters.
With all due respect, we believe the district court's inability to achieve these two tasks stems in large part from the court's loss of proper perception regarding its role. Very substantially because of unfocused and misdirected advocacy by both sides in this litigation, and particularly because of the recalcitrant defendants' foot-dragging, the district court has been preoccupied with attempting to force the defendants to comply with the details, even the minutiae, of the intermediate methodologies the court has devised for remedying the constitutional deficiencies it found in 1979. The court has lost sight of the forest for its long-time attention to the trees.
We write today not only to decide the specific questions presented by these appeals, but also to clarify the district court's dual missions and, in the process, refocus the attention of all concerned on the tasks at hand: remedying the constitutional infirmities the district court found existed in 1979, and terminating this litigation as speedily as possible.
The protracted history of this case has been sketched on many occasions in the published opinions of the district court and this court. In lieu of still another detailed recitation, we will restate only those facts necessary to an understanding of these consolidated appeals, and leave the reader to the multiple other opinions in order to fill the interstices. But that having been said, in order to afford the reader an adequate understanding of the basis for our decision today, we must nevertheless burden this opinion with a rather extensive review of the district court's orders and the parties' efforts at complying with them.
In 1979, the district court conducted a 10-day bench trial, after which it issued a lengthy opinion holding both that "[s]ignificant discrimination against the female prison population occurs in several areas of programming ... in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment," id. at 1083, and that the prisoners' right of access to court was impeded not because there was no law library--one was provided and it was adequate--but by the need for legal training, see id. at 1097. Two years later the court's judgment was supplemented with a "Final Order," which the district court characterized as "the culmination of lengthy negotiations" between the court and the parties, and which set forth in considerable detail the required remedial actions. See Glover v. Johnson, 510 F.Supp. 1019, 1020 (E.D.Mich.1981). The court also stated its intention to "retain[ ] jurisdiction until it is satisfied that the terms of the Orders have been complied with in all respects." Id. The defendants did not file appeals to this court from either the 1979 judgment or the 1981 "Final Order."
For seven or eight years following the issuance of the Final Order, the parties were repeatedly before the district court, and before this court a number of times, debating the efficacy of the district court's order seeking to achieve the constitutionality it found lacking in 1979, and the propriety of several of the district court's enforcement methodologies. With each passing year the district court became increasingly less satisfied with the defendants' compliance.
Ultimately, but certainly not finally, in 1989, the district court issued a lengthy opinion and order, surveying the defendants' "unwillingness or inability to make progress towards implementing the programs ordered" at earlier stages of the case, and noting that the defendants had consistently "met the use, and threatened use, of [the district court's] contempt power with studied indifference." Glover v. Johnson, 721 F.Supp. 808, 812, 811 (E.D.Mich.1989). The court made detailed findings with respect to the defendants' progress in six areas. The first area was access to the courts, and the remainder were five subcategories of rehabilitative programming: educational programming, vocational programming, apprenticeships, prison industry, and work-pass programs. It concluded that the defendants' efforts fell short of the mark. The court stated:
In October 1979, I found the rehabilitative programming then...
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