Smith v. Bounds

• Decision Date: 18 March 1987
• Docket Number: No. 86-7579,86-7579
• Citation: 813 F.2d 1299
• Parties: Robert (Bobby) SMITH; Ronald D. Carnes; Bradford Mizell Lilley; Donald W. Morgan; Franklin D. Strader; John H. Russell; John Harrington; Alonzo Watts; Clifton Speight; William Ryder; Ronney McBride; Ray Forbes, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. Vernon Lee BOUNDS, Commissioner, State Department of Corrections; Stanley Blackledge, Warden, Central State Prison; R.L. Turner, Superintendent of Odom Correctional Institution of the North Carolina Department of Corrections; James Holshouser, Governor, State of North Carolina; F.R. Moore, Sergeant, Central Prison; Franklin Mahan, Regional Superintendent; M.S. Lee, Captain, Washington County Unit 3560, Defendants-Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

Page 1299

813 F.2d 1299

Robert (Bobby) SMITH; Ronald D. Carnes; Bradford Mizell Lilley; Donald W. Morgan; Franklin D. Strader; John H Russell; John Harrington; Alonzo Watts; Clifton Speight William Ryder; Ronney McBride; Ray Forbes, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. Vernon Lee BOUNDS, Commissioner, State Department of Corrections; Stanley Blackledge, Warden, Central State Prison; R.L. Turner, Superintendent of Odom Correctional Institution of the North Carolina Department of Corrections James Holshouser, Governor, State of North Carolina; F.R Moore, Sergeant, Central Prison; Franklin Mahan, Regional Superintendent; M.S. Lee, Captain, Washington County Unit 3560, Defendants-Appellants.

No. 86-7579.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued Dec. 11, 1986.

Decided March 18, 1987.

Andrew Albert Vanore, Jr., Chief Deputy Atty. Gen. (Lacy H. Thornburg, Atty. Gen., Sylvia Thibaut, Asst. Atty. Gen. on brief), for appellants.

Barry Nakell, School of Law, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C., on brief for appellees.

Before WINTER, Chief Judge, SPROUSE, Circuit Judge, and BUTZNER, Senior Circuit Judge.

HARRISON L. WINTER, Chief Judge:

At the time of argument, this litigation had been in progress for over 13 years. We have had three previous appeals ¹, and the underlying principles which govern the litigation have been decided by the Supreme Court. Bounds v. Smith, 430 U.S. 817, 97 S.Ct. 1491, 52 L.Ed.2d 72 (1977). It was held that the fundamental constitutional right of access to the courts possessed by prisoners in custody under state process required state prison authorities to assist inmates in the preparation and filing of meaningful legal papers by providing prisoners with adequate law libraries or adequate assistance from persons trained in the law. ²

Since the Supreme Court spoke in 1977, the thrust of this litigation has been to require North Carolina to meet these minimum standards. North Carolina, as was its option, sought to bring itself into compliance by the establishment of "adequate law libraries," but it never succeeded in establishing a program that would survive scrutiny by the district court and by us. As we observed in 1984 "seven years after the Supreme Court decision on Bounds v. Smith, the same legal action remains still unresolved on this appeal despite [plaintiff's] efforts, through a series of petitions and motions to ensure compliance with the Supreme Court's mandate." Harrington II, 741 F.2d at 67.

After we last remanded the case in 1984, the district court by order entered on December 21, 1984 required defendants to submit materials, within thirty days, to show that "they are or shortly will be in compliance with their plan [to provide adequate law libraries]." When defendants failed to respond, the district court made a careful analysis of North Carolina's proposals then before it and concluded that they were constitutionally deficient in at least three respects: (a) the absence of facilities for indigent inmates to photocopy without charge materials required to be filed with a court; (b) the omission of programs to train inmates as paralegals; and (c) the unavailability of prison law libraries for all inmates. Having found the "state's inability or an unwillingness to implement its plan," the district court concluded that it must decree some form of assistance from trained attorneys, and on May 14, 1985 it filed its opinion indicating that it would grant such relief. 610 F.Supp. 597. It also ordered the state to devise a plan to provide inmates with some form of attorney assistance.

After the state submitted a plan for attorney assistance and a hearing was held, the district court, on April 10, 1986, issued a second order which directed the state to provide such assistance through attorneys who were to be hired and administered by Prison Legal Services of North Carolina. 657 F.Supp. 1327 (E.D.N.C.1986).

Three times defendants sought reconsideration of the May 14, 1985 order requiring the state to present a plan for attorney assistance. They sought reconsideration primarily on the ground that defendants' lawyer, Assistant Attorney General Jacob L. Safron who had represented them throughout the over ten-year period of this litigation, had inexcusably neglected to present evidence to the district court that the state's law libraries plan was in compliance with constitutional standards. The district court denied reconsideration, 657 F.Supp. 1322, and after entry of the April 10, 1986 order, defendants appealed.

Before us defendants argue that the district court abused its discretion both in ordering that a lawyer assistance plan be formulated and in denying reconsideration of the order. Subsidiary contentions are that the district court violated the law of the case in ordering the plan to be established and that the district court abused its discretion by certifying the action as a class action. We are not persuaded that there was any error and we affirm.

I.

We perceive no abuse of discretion on the part of the district court in requiring the establishment of a legal assistance program.

A district court enjoys wide discretionary authority in formulating remedies for constitutional violations. After a finding of systemic constitutional violations, a court may order necessary changes in the structures or procedures of a state institution to alleviate those violations, Hutto v. Finney, 437 U.S. 678, 98 S.Ct. 2565, 57 L.Ed.2d 522 (1978); Milliken v. Bradley (Milliken II ), 433 U.S. 267, 97 S.Ct. 2749, 53 L.Ed.2d 745 (1977), and its formulation of relief is reversible only for an abuse of discretion. Milliken II, 433 U.S. at 288, 97 S.Ct. at 2761; Vaughns v. Bd. of Education of Prince George's County, 758 F.2d 983, 993 (4 Cir.1985); Harper v. Kloster, 486 F.2d 1134, 1137 (4 Cir.1973).

The district court's remedy was a reasonable choice among its alternatives to deal with the constitutional violation that it found. See Milliken II, 433 U.S. at 281-82, 97 S.Ct. at 2757-58 (the nature and scope of the remedy are to be determined by the violation). "It is now established beyond doubt that prisoners have a constitutional right of access to the courts." Bounds v. Smith, 430 U.S. at 821, 97 S.Ct. at 1494. The district court evaluated the program of the Department of Corrections "as a whole, to ascertain its compliance with constitutional standards." Id., 430 U.S. at 832, 97 S.Ct. at 1500. The burden of proving compliance with constitutional standards was on the Department of Corrections. Harrington II, supra. The defendants failed to meet this burden when they did not file any materials showing compliance with constitutional standards following both an order from the district court requiring that the state demonstrate compliance and a motion for summary judgment. Consequently, the district court entered summary judgment for the plaintiffs.

The district court made several findings, based on the record before it, which indicated the state was not in compliance with constitutional standards. First, the court found that the state had not demonstrated that it provides indigent inmates with facilities to photocopy free of charge all materials required to be filed with a court. Second, the state had not demonstrated that it had provided for the training and placement of any inmate paralegals. Finally, the record indicated that a large number of law library requests had been denied without explanation. Accordingly, the district court concluded that, after ten years, the state was still not in compliance with its constitutional obligation to provide inmates in North Carolina with meaningful access to the courts. Based on the record that was before the district court, these findings are not contested by the parties.

The district court did not conclude, as the defendants contend, that prisoners have a constitutional right to access to an attorney. The district court ordered a remedy of attorney assistance because the state's program of law libraries had failed to meet the defendants' constitutional obligation of providing meaningful access to the courts. The district court's remedy flowed logically from Bounds. Bounds held that either remedy, law libraries or attorney assistance, could fulfill the constitutional requirement of access. Once the state foreclosed the remedy of law libraries, the remaining choice was obvious. The alternative to a system of libraries was some form of assistance to prisoners from trained attorneys. See Hutto v. Finney, 437 U.S. at 687, 98 S.Ct. at 2572 ("[t]aking the long and unhappy history of the litigation into account, the court was justified in entering a comprehensive order to insure against the risk of inadequate compliance").

It is too late in the day to argue that the presence of attorney assistance for prisoners would be a burden on the state. The Supreme Court stated in Bounds v. Smith that legal assistance would have several advantages over libraries alone, including mediation and resolution of complaints that would otherwise burden officials and the courts. 430 U.S. at 830-32, 97 S.Ct. at 1499-1500. The Court noted that nearly half the states already provide some type of legal assistance to prisoners. Id., 430 U.S. at 830-31, 97 S.Ct. at 1499-1500. The district court's order requiring that the state devise an appropriate plan of attorney assistance simply does not constitute the type of restructuring of local government entities which implicates principles of federalism. Milliken II, 433 U.S. at 291, 97 S.Ct. at 2762.

The district court also properly exercised its discretion when it ordered that attorneys provided by the State be hired by Prison Legal Services of North Carolina. The state's plan, as the district court found, failed to guarantee that attorneys would be independent, as well as perceived as independent, of the Department of Corrections. Without such independence, the plan could not succeed in providing meaningful...