Skinner v. Cunningham

• Decision Date: 23 November 2005
• Docket Number: No. 05-1046.,05-1046.
• Citation: 430 F.3d 483
• Parties: James SKINNER, Plaintiff, Appellant, v. Michael CUNNINGHAM, Warden, New Hampshire State Prison, et al., Defendants, Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

430 F.3d 483

James SKINNER, Plaintiff, Appellant, v. Michael CUNNINGHAM, Warden, New Hampshire State Prison, et al., Defendants, Appellees.

No. 05-1046.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Heard August 1, 2005.

Decided November 23, 2005.

Michael J. Sheehan, for appellant.

Nancy J. Smith, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Civil Bureau, with whom Kelly A. Ayotte, Attorney General, was on brief for appellees Michael J. Cunningham, Arthur Locke, John Kovacs, Timothy Kenney, Sean McLeod, Neil Smith, Scott Dodge and Raymond Guimond.

Before BOUDIN, Chief Judge, TORRUELLA and DYK,^* Circuit Judges.

BOUDIN, Chief Judge.

James Skinner, currently serving a life sentence, appeals from the district court's grant of summary judgment against him on two constitutional claims in his civil suit against prison authorities. We recite the facts in the light most favorable to Skinner, the nonmovant here. Landrau-Romero v. Banco Popular De Puerto Rico, 212 F.3d 607, 611 (1st Cir.2000).

Skinner, a Massachusetts inmate serving a sentence for murder, was transferred to the New Hampshire State Prison on May 27, 1998, after being involved in a series of violent incidents in the Massachusetts penal system. Classified as a high-security prisoner, Skinner was housed in the prison's Special Housing Unit. On July 24, 1998, Skinner was involved in a fight started by another inmate, Eric Balagot, which resulted in Balagot's death. Skinner was immediately transferred to N-Tier, a restricted area of the prison reserved for "special circumstances."

Skinner was held in N-Tier for forty days. In N-Tier, he was isolated from the other inmates; his only human contact was when the staff opened the door for hourly checks or to deliver food. According to Skinner, the staff intentionally slammed his metal cell door during such checks, depriving him of sleep. The lights were on at all hours of the day. Skinner had nothing in his cell besides clothes and bedding, and he was permitted to leave his cell only to shower.

On August 5, 1998, a disciplinary charge was filed against Skinner for the incident leading to Balagot's death. Although a disciplinary hearing was set for August 19, a prison hearings officer (Ray Guimond) suspended the proceeding because the state intended to charge Skinner with murder. In early September, Skinner was returned to normal confinement. Because Skinner was eventually acquitted of murdering Balagot after a jury trial, the disciplinary proceeding never occurred, and Skinner was eventually transferred back to Massachusetts in 2000.

On May 15, 2000, Skinner brought the present suit in the federal district court in New Hampshire, charging a number of the prison officials there with violating his civil rights. 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (2000). The charges fell into three categories:

(1) that the authorities had violated Skinner's rights under the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause by exposing him to an attack by Balagot, who was a white supremacist (Skinner is black);

(2) that Skinner's right to due process had been violated by confining him in N-Tier for forty days without a hearing; and

(3) that he had been subject to cruel and unusual punishment by abusive treatment during three forcible "cell extractions" and by other acts of harassment.

On the first claim, a trial was later conducted and the jury held for the defendants. On the second and third claims, the district judge granted summary judgment for the defendants, and it is these latter rulings that Skinner now appeals. Our review of a district court's order of summary judgment is de novo, and we "constru[e] the record in the light most favorable to the nonmovant and resolv[e] all reasonable inferences in that party's favor." Landrau-Romero, 212 F.3d at 611.

Skinner's due process claim, which we consider first, raises a difficult issue, but one entirely legal in character. That Skinner was moved immediately to N-Tier after Balagot's death, with no hearing or other process whatsoever, gives rise to no claim under the due process clause. Skinner had just killed another inmate, and whoever might prove to be at fault, the authorities were entitled to isolate Skinner on a summary basis — for his own sake and for the protection of others — while investigating the circumstances.

Due process, even where it is due, does not invariably mean process before the fact. A warrantless arrest for a felony is a classic example. Skinner was already in custody; the circumstances were exigent; and his immediate transfer to N-Tier was proper. Cf. Reardon v. United States, 947 F.2d 1509, 1522 (1st Cir.1991) (en banc) ("The absence of notice and a hearing may be justified by exigent circumstances."). Skinner's main, and more colorable, due process grievance is that he was kept in N-Tier for forty days while his disciplinary hearing was indefinitely deferred.

Although Skinner's brief focuses on the deferral of the disciplinary hearing, the fact that the Attorney General was investigating with a view toward murder charges was a perfectly good reason for avoiding a duplicative inquiry. The better version of Skinner's claim is an argument that it was constitutionally unfair to keep Skinner for forty days in N-Tier's standard conditions without "some kind of hearing." See Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U.S. 539, 557-58, 94 S.Ct. 2963, 41 L.Ed.2d 935 (1974). More precisely, the question is whether Skinner was deprived of "liberty" without "due process of law."

This in turn poses two different questions: (1) how to define the "liberty" interest, which on a straightforward reading of the due process clause is a condition of due process protection ("nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1); and (2) what kind of process is due, even where "liberty" is at stake, in the peculiar context of prison administration, where dangerous conditions exist and prisoner liberty is already limited.

The history of the Supreme Court's oscillations on both issues is candidly traced in the governing opinion, Sandin v. Conner, 515 U.S. 472, 115 S.Ct. 2293, 132 L.Ed.2d 418 (1995), itself a 5-to-4 decision. There, the Court held that no due process denial could be made out unless the change in conditions imposed on the prisoner "atypical and significant hardship" departing from the ordinary conditions of prison life. Id. at 484, 115 S.Ct. 2293. Of course, such a hardship does not mean a violation: it is merely the precondition for a due process hearing. The Supreme Court's phrase has now (inevitably) become a touchstone for the lower federal courts. In this case, the district court ruled that Skinner's confinement did not meet this test of "atypical and significant hardship."

The hardship test has itself become the source of major disagreement. See Wilkinson v. Austin, ___ U.S. ___, ___, 125 S.Ct. 2384, 2394, 162 L.Ed.2d 174 (2005). Some circuits compare the confinement conditions to those of the general prison population, while others look to the conditions of nondisciplinary administrative segregation.¹ One circuit holds that disciplinary segregation never implicates a liberty interest unless it lengthens a sentence. Carson v. Johnson, 112 F.3d 818, 821 (5th Cir.1997). Whether Sandin should be read as a cookbook recipe for all cases is unclear.

We think it is enough here that Skinner's segregation was rational, that its duration was not excessive, and that the central condition — isolation from other prisoners — was essential to its purpose. Skinner was a prisoner serving a sentence for murder who had just killed another inmate. It made perfect sense to isolate him pending further investigation. Indeed, had he been returned immediately to the general population and had Skinner then attacked some other prisoner, or been attacked himself, a different and far more plausible suit against the authorities would likely have followed. Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 828, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994). The prison was waiting on the Attorney General, and six weeks is hardly an excessive time to conduct a preliminary inquiry into a possible murder.²

As for Skinner's conditions of confinement, isolation from other prisoners was of the essence, and while it was perhaps needless to have denied Skinner amenities such as television or books, these deprivations are largely incidental to Skinner's main complaint, and were in any case short-term. Taking all the circumstances into account, including the prison's need to manage its own administration, see Sandin, 515 U.S. at 482-83, 115 S.Ct. 2293, Skinner's temporary isolation without a formal hearing was not unconstitutional either in its essential character or in its duration.

The contrast with Wilkinson, the Supreme Court's most recent decision, is vivid. The Court there found that due process was required for a prisoner's placement in a super-max prison. It stressed that "[u]nlike the 30-day placement in Sandin, placement [at the super-max prison] is indefinite," Wilkinson, 125 S.Ct. at 2394. The Court also noted "that placement [in the super-max prison] disqualifies an otherwise eligible inmate for parole consideration," id. at 2395, thus potentially extending the length of incarceration. The differences between the present case and Wilkinson could not be clearer.

The district court's dismissal of Skinner's final set of claims would be a close call in the ordinary case. Skinner alleged that the defendants had violated the Eighth Amendment, primarily by excessive force used during the three cell extractions and secondarily by other acts of harassment, like the slamming of his cell door. The district court ruled that there was no case for a jury, that is, that no rational jury could find excessive force. Our review is again de novo. Landrau-Romero, 212 F.3d at 611.

The framework for analyzing such claims was set forth by the Supreme Court in Whitley v....