Hensley v. Wilson
| Decision Date | 20 June 1988 |
| Docket Number | No. 86-5547,86-5547 |
| Citation | 850 F.2d 269 |
| Parties | Ronald HENSLEY, Scott Payne, Jeff Keithly, and Rodney Stevens, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. George WILSON, Al C. Parke, Tim Barnes, J.W. Travis, Bobby Burchett, and Harry Barnett, Defendants-Appellants. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit |
Barbara W. Jones, Linda G. Cooper, David A. Sexton (argued), Corrections Cabinet, Office of General Counsel, Frankfort, Ky., for defendants-appellants.
Tod D. Megibow (argued), Freeland, Glanville and Megibow, Paducah, Ky., for plaintiffs-appellees.
Before KENNEDY, RYAN and NORRIS, Circuit Judges.
This is an appeal from a summary judgment and an award of injunctive relief in favor of prison inmates who brought a 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 civil rights action against Kentucky correction officials. The prisoners complain that the manner in which prison disciplinary hearings were conducted, in which they lost good time credits, did not afford them procedural due process. The prisoners' principal complaint is that their request to know the substance of the evidence that was considered by the committee in support of the charges against the prisoners, and the identity of the confidential informants who supplied the evidence, was refused.
The trial court agreed with some but not all of the plaintiffs' complaints. It set aside the findings of the disciplinary committee finding a denial of due process, ordered that the prisoners' disciplinary records be expunged of matters relating to the proceedings reviewed, directed that new hearings be held, and determined that the defendant state correction officials did not enjoy qualified immunity.
We affirm a portion of the injunctive relief ordered by the district court but reverse the court's finding of other constitutional inadequacies in the disciplinary hearing procedures, and reverse its holding that the defendants are not entitled to qualified immunity.
Although the plaintiffs make a number of claims and the defendants respond to each, we are able to dispose of all of them by addressing two issues:
1. Whether the defendant state corrections officials are entitled to qualified immunity, and
2. Whether, as the district court found, a prison disciplinary committee, relying substantially upon information supplied by confidential informants when ordering the forfeiture of an accused prisoner's good time, must make an independent assessment of the informant's reliability and a contemporaneous record of that assessment.
Our answer to both questions is yes, although, with respect to the informant reliability issue, we hasten to add that the contemporaneous record of the committee's findings concerning informant reliability need not be a public record accessible to the charged inmates when prison security interests are involved.
All four plaintiffs are inmates of the Kentucky State Penitentiary who were charged with disciplinary violations of the prison involving extortion, blackmail, assault by stabbing, and conspiracy to assault. Each plaintiff received notice of the charges against him in the form of a brief and an unelaborated description of the relevant offense. All four were found guilty almost entirely on the strength of information provided to prison investigators, in confidence, by inmate informants. The informants did not testify before the disciplinary committee. Rather, the committee received and considered the unsworn written report of the investigators, the contents of which has not been revealed to the plaintiffs, their counsel, the district court, or this court, and which apparently contains the investigators' conclusions, based on the information supplied by the informants, that plaintiffs are guilty of the misconduct charges against them. No details about the identity, reliability or credibility of the informants was provided to the inmates, and all of the plaintiffs' inquiries to the committee, seeking information about the offenses charged such as dates or times of alleged violations or the names of supposed victims, were answered with the statement by the committee chairman that the information was confidential.
The only reference in the disciplinary committee findings as to the reliability of the informants is that the investigating officers "testified" that the confidential "information given them is reliable," or that "their source of information is reliable." In the case of plaintiff Stevens, the committee findings do not contain even the general statement that the investigators represented that the confidential informants were reliable.
None of the cases include a committee finding that either the confidential informants or their information was determined by the committee to be reliable. Plaintiff Payne presented an alibi witness, but the record contains no reference to why the witness' testimony was not credited. All four plaintiffs received the maximum disciplinary sentence for their various offenses: one hundred thirty-five to one hundred eighty days in disciplinary segregation and, in three of the four cases, the loss of six to twenty-four months of "good time" credit. Stevens lost no good time solely because he is serving a life term. All four appealed to the prison warden, who affirmed the disciplinary actions. Plaintiffs then brought this Sec. 1983 suit, claiming, among other things, procedural due process violations, and seeking injunctive relief and monetary damages.
Both sides moved for summary judgment. The district court granted plaintiffs' motion, principally because the disciplinary committee failed to evaluate for itself the reliability of the informant testimony relied upon. The district court also rejected defendants' claim of qualified immunity, but ordered only injunctive relief in conjunction with the summary judgment order: the plaintiffs' records were to be expunged of all references to the disciplinary hearings and the defendants were ordered to provide new hearings "consistent with this opinion and the standards of due process."
Defendants then moved to alter or amend the judgment, citing two recent decisions, Ponte v. Real, 471 U.S. 491, 105 S.Ct. 2192, 85 L.Ed.2d 553 (1985), and Mendoza v. Miller, 779 F.2d 1287 (7th Cir.1985), cert. denied, 476 U.S. 1142, 106 S.Ct. 2251, 90 L.Ed.2d 697 (1986). The motion was denied in an opinion which stated that the newly cited cases did not require a different result than had been ordered previously.
Defendants appealed. Plaintiffs moved to dismiss the appeal on the ground that the order was not appealable. This court rejected plaintiffs' theory that the order was not final, holding that the order was an appealable injunction. However, we deferred consideration, until after oral argument, of plaintiffs' theory that defendants are not entitled to qualified immunity. We therefore begin by addressing the immunity issue.
Defendants' claim of qualified immunity is governed by Mitchell v. Forsyth 472 U.S. 511, 105 S.Ct. 2806, 86 L.Ed.2d 411 (1985). In Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1972), the Supreme Court held that:
[G]overnment officials performing discretionary functions generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.
Id. at 818, 102 S.Ct. at 2738. In Mitchell, the Court decided that the denial of a claim of qualified immunity is "an appealable 'final decision' within the meaning of 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1291," 472 U.S. at 530, 105 S.Ct. at 2817, insofar as the suit is one for damages. Mitchell stated the rule that Unless the plaintiff's allegations state a claim of violation of clearly established law, a defendant pleading qualified immunity is entitled to dismissal before the commencement of discovery.
Id. at 526, 105 S.Ct. at 2815.
Defendants appear to have abandoned their claims of absolute immunity, and injunctive relief has been ordered that would be permissible even if defendants are entitled to qualified immunity under Mitchell and Harlow. The issue of appealability does not depend upon the immunity issue, because the appeal is proper on an independent ground, the injunctive nature of the relief already ordered. Thus, the immunity issue is pertinent only to the question of whether, if this court affirms, plaintiffs may proceed to seek monetary damages from these defendants. Under Mitchell, this issue is resolved by the answer to the question of whether plaintiffs' allegations state a claim of violation of "clearly established law."
The district court thought that the pertinent law here was "clearly established" at the time of the alleged violations. The principal authority on what process is due in prison disciplinary hearings is still Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U.S. 539, 94 S.Ct. 2963, 41 L.Ed.2d 935 (1974), which held that, despite the limits lawful incarceration places upon prisoners' rights, they are nonetheless entitled to advance written notice of charges against them and "a written statement of the factfindings as to the evidence relied upon and the reasons for the disciplinary action taken." Id. at 563, 94 S.Ct. at 2978. While the Court did not explain in detail exactly what must be in the written statement, it did describe the reasons for requiring the statement, and what the Court said is enlightening about what the written statement should contain:
Written records of proceedings will ... protect the inmate against collateral consequences based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the original proceeding. Further, as to the disciplinary action itself, the provision for a written record helps to insure that administrators, faced with possible scrutiny by state officials and the public, and perhaps even the courts, where fundamental constitutional rights may have been abridged, will act fairly. Without written records, the inmate...
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