Palmer v. Richards

• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit
• Writing for the Court: Katzmann
• Citation: Palmer v. Richards, 364 F.3d 60 (2nd Cir. 2004)
• Decision Date: 06 April 2004
• Docket Number: Docket No. 03-290.
• Parties: Anthony PALMER, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Paul RICHARDS, Defendant-Appellant, Ronald Goss, Defendant.

364 F.3d 60

Anthony PALMER, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Paul RICHARDS, Defendant-Appellant Ronald Goss, Defendant.

Docket No. 03-290.

United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.

Argued: February 17, 2004.

Decided: April 6, 2004.

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Caroline Mala Corbin (Michael A. Cheah, of counsel) New York, N.Y., for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Anthony C. Gould, Assistant Attorney General (Deon J. Nossel, Senior Assistant Solicitor General, and Michael J. Keane, Assistant Attorney General, of counsel) for Eliot Spitzer, Attorney General of the State of New York, for Defendant-Appellant.

Before: KEARSE, CABRANES, and KATZMANN, Circuit Judges.

KATZMANN, Circuit Judge.

This is yet another in a long line of cases evaluating when the procedural protections of the Due Process Clause attach to disciplinary hearings in New York State prisons. Because the plaintiff put forward sufficient evidence in resisting the defendants' motion for summary judgment that would allow a reasonable jury to find that the punishment imposed as a result of his disciplinary hearing violated his liberty interests, and because the defendant failed to show that those liberty interests were not clearly established, we conclude that the district court (Baer, J.) properly denied the defendant's motion for summary judgment on the basis of qualified immunity.

BACKGROUND

This case arises from a dispute between a New York State prisoner, plaintiff-appellee Anthony Palmer, and a corrections officer, defendant Ronald Goss. Following a physical altercation between Palmer and Goss at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility — the substance of which is not before us, but the conflicting accounts of which can be found in the opinion and order of the district court, Palmer v. Goss, No. 02 Civ. 5804(HB), 2003 WL 22327110, 2003 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 18103 (S.D.N.Y. Oct.10, 2003) — Goss charged Palmer with various infractions including harassment, refusing a direct order, and violent conduct. The defendant-appellant, Deputy Superintendent Paul Richards, presided over a disciplinary hearing on those charges and found Palmer guilty. As a penalty, Richards sentenced Palmer to 90 days of confinement in "keeplock" and denied him access to packages, the commissary, and the telephone for 90 days. Thereafter, Palmer served 77 days in the Special Housing Unit ("SHU") of a different prison, where he was not permitted any personal property (including his personal food, clothing, and grooming and hygiene products), and he was placed in restraints whenever he was escorted outside his cell. Also as an apparent consequence of his confinement in SHU, the prison terminated Palmer's participation in the Family Reunion Program, through which he had enjoyed extended visits with his wife and children in a trailer outside the prison cellblocks.

In the process of appealing Richards's decision, Palmer realized that a portion of the tape of the hearing — containing the purportedly exculpatory testimony of a corrections officer named Wyllie — is inaudible, although the testimony immediately before and after Wyllie's is clear. From this, Palmer inferred that Richards, realizing that Palmer could not be convicted in light of Wyllie's testimony, intentionally erased Wyllie's testimony so that his verdict would sustain review. Ultimately, because of the defective hearing tape, the state reversed Richards's findings and expunged the hearing's outcome from Palmer's record. Palmer, proceeding pro se, then brought suit in the district court pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against Goss, Richards, and other defendants alleging, inter alia, that Richards violated his due process rights by intentionally erasing the tape of the hearing.

The defendants moved for summary judgment. Richards argued that he was entitled to qualified immunity because Palmer's confinement in SHU for 77 days was too brief to implicate a liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause and could not, therefore, trigger concomitant due process rights, and that in any event, Palmer "received all the process he was due." The district court denied Richards's motion, finding that the length of Palmer's sentence, when combined with his expulsion from the Family Reunion Program, could amount to an "atypical and significant hardship" within the meaning of Sandin v. Conner, 515 U.S. 472, 484, 115 S.Ct. 2293, 132 L.Ed.2d 418 (1995), and that Palmer should be given a further opportunity to develop the record of the conditions in SHU relative to those in the general prison population. Palmer, 2003 WL 22327110, at *6. The district court also found that a reasonable jury could conclude that Richards intentionally erased the hearing tape, an act, the court stated, that would foreclose qualified immunity. Id. at *7. The district court then appointed counsel to represent Palmer, and Richards appealed the district court's decision. Although the district court denied Richards's requests to stay proceedings pending his appeal, relying on the factual question of whether Richards intentionally erased the hearing tape, see Palmer v. Goss, No. 02 Civ. 5804(HB), 2003 WL 22519454, 2003 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 19895 (S.D.N.Y. Nov.5, 2003), a panel of this Court granted Richards's motion for a stay of proceedings in the district court and expedited Richards's appeal.

DISCUSSION

We have jurisdiction pursuant to the collateral order doctrine, under which "a district court's denial of a claim of qualified immunity, to the extent that it turns on an issue of law, is an appealable `final decision' notwithstanding the absence of a final judgment," and we review the district court's decision de novo. Savino v. City of New York, 331 F.3d 63, 71 (2d Cir.2003) (internal quotation marks omitted). For these purposes, we accept Palmer's version of the facts as true and draw all reasonable inferences in his favor. See Behrens v. Pelletier, 516 U.S. 299, 312-13, 116 S.Ct. 834, 133 L.Ed.2d 773 (1996); Johnson v. Jones, 515 U.S. 304, 313-18, 115 S.Ct. 2151, 132 L.Ed.2d 238 (1995); Tellier v. Fields, 280 F.3d 69, 78-79 (2d Cir.2000); Salim v. Proulx, 93 F.3d 86, 89-91 (2d Cir.1996). Therefore, notwithstanding the defendant's argument that certain of Palmer's allegations were too speculative to create jury questions that survive summary judgment, we will not evaluate the sufficiency of the evidence marshaled in support of Palmer's specific factual allegations, see Johnson, 515 U.S. at 313, 115 S.Ct. 2151; Salim, 93 F.3d at 90-91, including Palmer's contention that Richards intentionally erased part of the tape of his disciplinary hearing.¹

The "initial inquiry" of our qualified immunity analysis is to determine whether any right of Palmer's was violated at all. Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 201, 121 S.Ct. 2151, 150 L.Ed.2d 272 (2001). Palmer had "no right to due process [at his hearing] unless a liberty interest" was infringed as a result. Scott v. Albury, 156 F.3d 283, 287 (2d Cir.1998) (per curiam). A prisoner's liberty interest is implicated by prison discipline, such as SHU confinement, only if the discipline "imposes [an] atypical and significant hardship on the inmate in relation to the ordinary incidents of prison life," Sandin v. Conner, 515 U.S. 472, 484, 115 S.Ct. 2293, 132 L.Ed.2d 418 (1995); see Frazier v. Coughlin, 81 F.3d 313, 317 (2d Cir.1996) (per curiam),² "and we read Sandin to require that we look to actual punishment in making this determination," Scott, 156 F.3d at 287. Factors relevant to determining whether the plaintiff endured an "atypical and significant hardship" include "the extent to which the conditions of the disciplinary segregation differ from other routine prison conditions" and "the duration of the disciplinary segregation imposed compared to discretionary confinement." Wright v. Coughlin, 132 F.3d 133, 136 (2d Cir.1998).

Our cases "make clear that duration is not the only relevant factor. The conditions of confinement are a distinct and equally important consideration in determining whether a confinement in SHU rises to the level of `atypical and severe hardship....'" Ortiz v. McBride, 323 F.3d 191, 195 (2d Cir.2003) (per curiam). "Both the conditions and their duration must be considered, since especially harsh conditions endured for a brief interval and somewhat harsh conditions endured for a prolonged interval might both be atypical." Sealey v. Giltner, 197 F.3d 578, 586 (2d Cir.1999) (citation omitted). Accordingly, and contrary to Richards's argument at summary judgment, we have explicitly avoided a bright line rule that a certain period of SHU confinement automatically fails to implicate due process rights. See Sims v. Artuz, 230 F.3d 14, 23 (2d Cir.2000); Colon v. Howard, 215 F.3d 227, 234 (2d Cir.2000). Instead, our cases establish the following guidelines for use by district courts in determining whether a prisoner's liberty interest was infringed. Where the plaintiff was confined for an intermediate duration — between 101 and 305 days — "development of a detailed record" of the conditions of the confinement relative to ordinary prison conditions is required. Colon, 215 F.3d at 232; accord Sims, 230 F.3d at 23 ("[W]e have characterized segregative sentences of 125-288 days as relatively long, and thus necessitating specific articulation of ... factual findings before the district court could properly term the confinement atypical or insignificant." (citations and internal quotation marks omitted)). In those situations, a district court must "make a fact-intensive inquiry," Sims, 230 F.3d at 22, examining "the actual circumstances of SHU confinement" in the case before it without relying on its familiarity with SHU conditions in previous cases, Kalwasinski v. Morse, 201 F.3d 103, 106 (2d Cir.1999) (per curiam). Disputes about conditions may not be resolved on summary judgment, Wright, 132 F.3d at 137-38, but where the conditions are undisputed, the Sandin issue should be resolved by the court as a matter of law, Colon,...