Longval v. Commissioner of Correction

• Decision Date: 23 February 2007
• Parties: Norman L. LONGVAL v. COMMISSIONER OF CORRECTION & others<SMALL><SUP>1</SUP></SMALL> (and a companion case<SMALL><SUP>2</SUP></SMALL>).
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

861 N.E.2d 760

448 Mass. 412

Norman L. LONGVAL v. COMMISSIONER OF CORRECTION & others¹ (and a companion case²).

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Suffolk.

Argued January 3, 2007.

Decided February 23, 2007.

Stephen B. Hrones, Boston (Michael Tumposky with him) for Norman L. Longval & another.

Julie E. Daniele (Wendy Weber with her) for Commissioner of Correction & another.

James R. Pingeon, Boston, for Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, amicus curiae, submitted a brief.

Present: GREANEY, IRELAND, SPINA, COWIN, SOSMAN, & CORDY, JJ.

GREANEY, J.

The plaintiffs in these cases were members of the certified plaintiff class in Haverty v. Commissioner of Correction, 437 Mass. 737, 776 N.E.2d 973 (2002) (Haverty), an action for declaratory and injunctive relief, in which we held that inmates at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Cedar Junction (Cedar Junction) must be afforded the due process procedures set forth in the regulatory scheme governing the former departmental segregation unit (DSU), 103 Code Mass. Regs. §§ 421.00 (1994) (DSU regulations), before being segregated in restrictive conditions in the so-called East Wing of the prison for non-disciplinary reasons. Id. at 762-763, 776 N.E.2d 973. In separate actions filed in the Superior Court, the plaintiffs sought compensatory and punitive damages for the time they spent confined in the East Wing alleging that they had been deprived of the procedural safeguards to which they were entitled. The defendants raised, by means of motions to dismiss filed pursuant to Mass. R. Civ. P. 12(b), 365 Mass. 754 (1974), the affirmative defenses of res judicata and qualified immunity. After hearing arguments on both motions, a judge in the Superior Court concluded that the plaintiffs' claims for damages were not barred by their prior class action for declaratory and injunctive relief. The judge, however, allowed the defendants' motions on the ground of qualified immunity, concluding that the defendants had not violated "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights" when they assigned prisoners to the East Wing in disregard of the DSU regulations. The parties filed cross appeals, and the appeals were consolidated in the Appeals Court. We transferred the cases here on our own motion and now affirm the judgments of dismissal.

1. A description of the background events precipitating these appeals is recited in full in Haverty. See id. at 741-747. We summarize the material facts. Litigation challenging conditions in the State correctional system, in which inmates were held in near solitary confinement in the DSU at Cedar Junction and at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk, for indeterminate periods of time and for reasons other than disciplinary sanctions, resulted in a single justice of this court directing the department to promulgate new regulations, applicable to all State correctional facilities, governing the transfer of inmates from the general prison population to any DSU unit. See Hoffer vs. Fair, No. SJ-85-0071 (Mar. 3, 1988). In 1993, those regulations were enacted and are now codified at 103 Code Mass. Regs. §§ 421.00.³

In 1995, in response to escalating levels of gang-related incidents, and an increasingly violent prison population throughout the department, the commissioner decided to eliminate use of the DSU and to divide Cedar Junction (at that time the Commonwealth's only maximum security prison) into two "wings," the East Wing and the West Wing.⁴ The East Wing consists of eight units, each with forty-five one-man cells; the West Wing has three units, each with seventy-two one-man cells. Conditions are materially more restrictive in the East Wing. There, inmates are held in virtual solitary confinement for twenty-two and one-half hours each day; have only limited recreational time and few job opportunities; and eat all meals in their cells.⁵ Inmates housed in the West Wing, by contrast, are allowed out of their cells for as much as fifteen hours each day (all day on weekends) and interact with other prisoners throughout those times. They eat meals in a communal dining hall and enjoy greater visitor privileges than those in the East Wing. Assignment to the East Wing generally is not imposed for a specific disciplinary offense, but rather to allow prison officials to maintain control of the prison population and to secure the safety of prisoners and staff. Until the time of our decision in Haverty, no procedural protections were provided before a prisoner was placed in the East Wing, or during the time he remained there, beyond the six-month classification review received by all prisoners in the system pursuant to 103 Code Mass. Regs. § 420.09 (1995) (entitling all prisoners housed in any correctional facility in Commonwealth, no matter the level of security, to receive review of their status every six months). Placement in the East Wing, and the amount of time a prisoner remained there, was solely at the discretion of the superintendent of Cedar Junction. See Haverty, supra at 746, 776 N.E.2d 973.

The Haverty plaintiffs, certified as a class of "all prisoners who are now confined or may at some point be confined at [Cedar Junction] in any housing unit other than the DDU" (see note 5, supra), sought injunctive relief against the practice of placing prisoners in segregated confinement in the East Wing for nondisciplinary reasons, absent compliance with the DSU regulations. Relying on numerous decisions of this court, and of the Appeals Court, suggesting, in essence, that, where conditions in a segregated unit, however named by correction officials, are substantially similar to those in the DSU, the unit must be dealt with as a DSU, at least for purposes of procedural requirements, the plaintiffs contended that the conditions of isolation in the East Wing were nearly identical to those in the DSU and, therefore that the department's failure fully to comply with DSU regulations before placing or transferring an inmate to the East Wing was unlawful. See, e.g., Longval v. Commissioner of Correction, 404 Mass. 325, 330, 535 N.E.2d 588 (1989) (to prevail on State due process claim, plaintiff required to show substantial similarity between DSU and administrative segregation unit at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord); Kenney v. Commissioner of Correction, 393 Mass. 28, 34, 468 N.E.2d 616 (1984) (inmate may be transferred to DSU only in compliance with departmental regulations); Royce v. Commissioner of Correction, 390 Mass. 425, 429-430, 456 N.E.2d 1127 (1983) (prison officials may not abuse discretion by confining inmates in restrictive housing under "awaiting action status" as means to accomplish punishment immune to procedures set forth in [former] DSU regulations); Gilchrist v. Commissioner of Correction, 48 Mass.App.Ct. 60, 717 N.E.2d 279 (1999); DeLong v. Commissioner of Correction, 46 Mass.App.Ct. 353, 355-358, 706 N.E.2d 707 (1999); Martino v. Hogan, 37 Mass.App.Ct. 710, 721, 643 N.E.2d 53 (1994). We agreed with this position and, in a divided decision, held that the department may not lawfully place prisoners in the East Wing without first affording them the procedural protections required by the DSU regulations. See Haverty, supra at 740, 776 N.E.2d 973.⁶ In order to effectuate our decision in "an orderly and safe manner," we remanded the case to the Superior Court to determine the timing and manner of implementing the procedures required by the regulations. See id. at 764, 776 N.E.2d 973.⁷

2. As the parties moving for dismissal on res judicata grounds the defendants have the burden of establishing the elements of claim preclusion. See Kobrin v. Board of Registration in Med., 444 Mass. 837, 843, 832 N.E.2d 628 (2005). The defendants have not met their burden in this case. Although our cases in this area are few, we see no reason why the doctrine of claim preclusion would not apply to class action litigation, so that a valid, final judgment is conclusive on all of the members of a plaintiff class. See Aspinall v. Philip Morris Cos., 442 Mass. 381, 397 n. 19, 813 N.E.2d 476 (2004). The doctrine only operates, however, to bar further litigation of "all matters that were or should have been adjudicated in the [original class] action." Heacock v. Heacock, 402 Mass. 21, 23, 24, 520 N.E.2d 151 (1988) (explaining doctrine as ramification of policy considerations underlying rule against splitting cause of action). See O'Neill v. City Manager of Cambridge, 428 Mass. 257, 259, 700 N.E.2d 530 (1998). It does not apply in circumstances where a party has neither the incentive, nor the opportunity, to raise the claim in an earlier lawsuit. See id., and cases cited. In Aspinall v. Philip Morris Cos., supra, we suggested that, in circumstances where the unique experiences of potential members of a plaintiff class would defeat the "commonality of interests" requirement for class certification pursuant to G.L. c. 93A, principles of claim preclusion would not operate to bar a class member from future pursuit of claims for personal injury unsuitable for class treatment. The same principles of fairness and judicial efficiency hold true with respect to a class certified, as was the Haverty class, under Mass. R. Civ. P. 23, 365 Mass. 767 (1974), a rule which, like G.L. c. 93A, does not allow a member of a certified class not wishing to be bound by the class litigation to "opt out." See J.W. Smith & H.B. Zobel, Rules Practice § 23.2, at 94 (1975) ("the standard for binding absentees by a class action judgment is simply fundamental fairness").⁸

This position accords with Federal law.⁹ In fact, it appears that "every federal court of appeals that has considered the question has held that a class action seeking only declaratory or injunctive relief does not bar subsequent individual suits for damages." Hiser v. Franklin, 94 F.3d 1287, 1291 (9th Cir.1996), cert. denied, 520 U.S. 1103, 117 S.Ct. 1106, 137...