Procup v. Strickland
| Decision Date | 02 July 1986 |
| Docket Number | No. 83-3430,83-3430 |
| Parties | Robert PROCUP, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. C. STRICKLAND, et al., Defendants-Appellees. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit |
Lamar B. Winegeart, III, Arnold, Stratford & Booth, Jacksonville, Fla., for plaintiff-appellant.
Dean C. Kowalchyk, Asst. Atty. Gen., Tallahassee, Fla., for defendants-appellees.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida.
Before GODBOLD, Chief Judge, RONEY, TJOFLAT, HILL, FAY, VANCE, KRAVITCH, JOHNSON, HATCHETT, ANDERSON and CLARK, Circuit Judges, * and TUTTLE **, Senior Circuit Judge.
CORRECTED
We took this case en banc to consider the propriety of an injunction restricting Robert Procup, a Florida prisoner, from filing any case with the district court unless submitted by an attorney admitted to practice before the court. Procup v. Strickland, 567 F.Supp. 146 (M.D.Fla.1983), rev'd, 760 F.2d 1107 (11th Cir.1985), vacated, 760 F.2d 1116 (11th Cir.1985). The proceedings that brought the issue before this Court are set forth fully in those opinions. 1 We hold that the district court's injunction was overbroad, but that the district court has authority to impose serious restrictions on Procup's bringing matters before the court without an attorney.
Procup, who is serving a life sentence for murder in the first degree, has engaged in ridiculously extensive litigation in the District Court for the Middle District of Florida, fully set out in the district court's opinion. 567 F.Supp. at 148-51. As of June 1983, Procup had filed 176 cases in the Jacksonville Division of the Middle District of Florida alone, not counting suits filed in other federal and state courts. Most of Procup's suits have been pro se, in forma pauperis civil rights actions under 42 U.S.C.A. Sec. 1983. None has reached the stage of trial on the merits; most have been frivolous. Procup often has filed repeated claims and failed to comply with court rules and procedures. His pleadings are long and rambling. He has ignored repeated warnings and admonitions from the district court.
There is no question that Procup's activities call for some curtailment. The district court injunction against his filing any complaint with the court without the aid of an attorney is an attempt to reduce the number of frivolous lawsuits without foreclosing truly meritorious claims. The injunction was based on the premise that if Procup had an arguably meritorious claim, he would be able to obtain an attorney to handle it for him. The district court noted that because "virtually every action" filed by Procup had been brought pursuant to 42 U.S.C.A. Sec. 1983, the provision for an attorney's fees award in 42 U.S.C.A. Sec. 1988 would provide "ample incentive for members of the increasingly large private bar to handle a claim which appears to be meritorious." 567 F.Supp. at 160. The district court also noted the availability of legal assistance to indigent inmates from Florida Institutional Legal Services, Inc. From these, the district court concluded [T]he attorney's duties under Rule 11, Fed.R.Civ.P. and the Code of Ethics--to file suit only where there are good grounds to support the pleading--will serve as an invaluable preliminary screening mechanism which will shield the Court from Procup's well-documented proclivity to barrage the Court with frivolous and ill-conceived lawsuits.
... Additionally, the Court will be ensured that claims brought before it on behalf of Procup have been conscientiously scrutinized before being filed. This has obviously not occurred in the past.
Id. at 161 (footnote omitted).
In this Court's judgment, however, the requirement that Procup file suits only through an attorney may well foreclose him from filing any suits at all. A private attorney, knowing Procup's track record, might well be unwilling to devote the time and effort necessary to sift through Procup's generally frivolous claims to see if there is one of sufficient merit to undertake legal representation. A legitimate claim could well go undiscovered. Moreover, due to Procup's shotgun litigation techniques, attorneys in the legal services office already have found themselves as defendants in Procup's rambling pleadings. This not only would deter an attorney from representing such a difficult client, but also raises the possibility that, due to intra-office conflicts of interest, the legal services attorneys would be unavailable to represent Procup. With the premise that Procup would simply be unable to get any attorney to represent him, the injunction then effectively enjoins Procup from filing any suit. The district court neither intended this result nor indicated in any way that such an absolute injunction would be appropriate. An absolute bar against a prisoner filing any suit in federal court would be patently unconstitutional. We, therefore, vacate the injunction and remand for consideration of such modification as will, as much as possible, achieve the desired purposes without encroaching on Procup's constitutional right to court access.
This does not mean that the district court was incorrect in employing injunctive relief. The district court was fully justified and within its authority in entering injunctive restrictions against Procup. Such action is necessary and prudent to protect the rights of all litigants in the federal system.
Recent years have witnessed an explosion of prisoner litigation in the federal courts. From 218 civil rights petitions of prisoners to federal courts in 1966, there were 18,034 such suits in 1984. Annual Report of the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts for the Twelve Month Period Ended June 30, 1984, at 142-43. According to a 1979 study, 80% to 95% of prisoner filings are brought in forma pauperis. Turner, When Prisoners Sue: A Study of Prisoner Section 1983 Suits in the Federal Courts, 92 Harv.L.Rev. 610, 617 (1979).
The prisoner litigant may possess several distinct advantages over the ordinary litigant: time to draft multiple and prolonged pleadings; ability to proceed in forma pauperis and thus escape any financial obstacles confronting the usual litigant; and availability of free materials which the state must provide the prisoner, including paper and postage. As a result, there is virtually no cost to a prisoner's filing repeated, frivolous lawsuits.
In order to more adequately handle this upsurge of cases, the federal courts have adopted various administrative procedures designed to streamline the process. Some of these procedures are found in the in forma pauperis statute itself, 28 U.S.C.A. Sec. 1915. Others have been adopted from recommendations contained in the so-called Aldisert Report. See Federal Judicial Center, Recommended Procedures for Handling Prisoner Civil Rights Cases in the Federal Courts (1980). Many courts have developed sophisticated procedures involving the court, staff attorneys, magistrates, law clerks, and judges to try to sort out from the mass of frivolous suits, the meritorious ones.
Occasionally a particularly abusive prisoner, taking advantage of his unique situation In devising methods to attain the objective of curtailing the activity of such a prisoner, however, courts must carefully observe the fine line between legitimate restraints and an impermissible restriction on a prisoner's constitutional right of access to the courts. Various courts have employed and approved a variety of injunctive devices.
will come along with a flood of claims designed to either harass those in positions of authority or to grind the wheels of the judicial system to a halt. No matter how efficient a court's administrative procedures may be, when one litigant files upwards of a lawsuit a day, the claims of other litigants necessarily suffer. Every lawsuit filed, no matter how frivolous or repetitious, requires the investment of court time, whether the complaint is reviewed initially by a law clerk, a staff attorney, a magistrate, or the judge.
As to prisoners who bring frequent or repetitious claims, courts have:
--enjoined prisoner litigants from relitigating specific claims or claims arising from the same set of factual circumstances; 2
--required litigants to accompany all future pleadings with affidavits certifying that the claims being raised are novel, subject to contempt for false swearing; 3
--directed the litigant to attach to future complaints a list of all cases previously filed involving the same, similar, or related cause of action, and to send an extra copy of each pleading filed to the law clerk of the chief judge of the district; 4
--directed the litigant to seek leave of court before filing pleadings in any new or pending lawsuit; 5
--permitted abusive prisoner litigants to file in forma pauperis only claims alleging actual or threatened physical harm; and requiring payment of a filing fee to bring other claims; 6
-- --entered injunctions prohibiting the abusive prisoner from acting as a writ writer or jailhouse lawyer for other inmates. 8
limited the number of filings by a particular inmate; and 7
We do not here intend to indicate how this Court would treat any of the above injunctions in a particular case, but cite them as examples of how other courts have handled the problem. Other restrictions which might be considered by a court attempting to deal with the problems created by a litigant such as Procup include:
--limitation of the number of pages to a complaint and other pleadings;
--requiring a plaintiff to file an affidavit setting forth what attempts he has made to obtain an attorney to represent him;
--limitation of further pleadings without order of court, after the complaint has been filed.
This list is intended to be neither exhaustive nor limiting. As new ideas develop and old devices prove ineffective, the judiciary must respond with imaginative new techniques designed to protect the...
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