Stevenson v. Koskey
| Decision Date | 26 June 1989 |
| Docket Number | No. 86-4255,86-4255 |
| Citation | 877 F.2d 1435 |
| Parties | Clyde STEVENSON, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Sue KOSKEY, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit |
I. Franklin Hunsaker, Thomas D. Adams, Douglas R. Andres, Bullivant, Houser, Bailey, Pendergrass & Hoffman, Portland, Or., for defendant-appellant.
Spencer M. Neal, Ginsburg, Gomez and Neal, Portland, Or., for plaintiff-appellee.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Oregon.
Before WALLACE and REINHARDT, Circuit Judges, and PRICE, District Judge. *
The relevant facts are as follows:
Defendant worked as an adult probation parole officer for Washington County Department of Community Corrections ("Department") and had been employed in that capacity for six years. Defendant was assigned to supervise plaintiff, who had been paroled from the Oregon State Prison but who was incarcerated in the Washington County Jail awaiting trial on new charges.
While plaintiff was in the Washington County Jail, defendant went there to deliver an envelope to plaintiff containing a divorce decree and a letter that had been directed to defendant on plaintiff's behalf. Defendant knew that the envelope addressed to plaintiff was from "Inmate Legal Service, Inc." but was unaware whether "Inmate Legal Services, Inc." was an attorney-operated or an inmate-operated organization.
Defendant sought permission to deliver the envelope, divorce decree and a letter to plaintiff but was asked by a Washington County corrections officer to first surrender those items for a contraband inspection. Defendant complied with that request and the corrections officer leafed through the documents in the envelope. Plaintiff was not present when that inspection took place.
At the time the inspection occurred, the "Inmate Manual" of the Washington County Jail set forth the Department's policy regarding the examination and inspection of prisoner mail for contraband. The Manual provided in pertinent part:
Official correspondence shall be opened for inspection only in the inmate's presence and mail shall be inspected only for the purpose of insuring that contraband is not present. At no time shall a staff member read any confidential communication.
The envelope, divorce decree and letter were "official correspondence" within the meaning of that provision. Also, when the inspection occurred, the Department's manual on clerical procedures provided, "Be careful not to open mail that is from an attorney and addressed to someone incarcerated in the jail."
Defendant's job responsibilities did not require that she open mail addressed to inmates or that she be familiar with the Department's clerical procedures. Also, although defendant had "thumbed through" the Inmate Manual in the past, she did not recall reading anything regarding the circumstances under which a prisoner's mail may be inspected for contraband.
Prior to the inspection by the corrections officer, defendant had not received training on the constitutional propriety of examining a prisoners official mail. Such training was not included in the course work taken by defendant through the Oregon Board of Police Standards and Training at the National Institute of Training, through defendant's on-the-job training, or through any other source. Furthermore, defendant was unaware of any legal or internal administrative rule that restricted the examination of a prisoner's official mail outside a prisoner's physical presence.
Defendant's counsel perhaps over-generously stipulated that defendant was employed by the Washington County Department of Community Corrections as an adult parole and probation officer. 1 Suffice it to say, defendant Koskey was acting under state law and, hence, would be subject to the liabilities imposed upon such employees by section 1983.
Defendant Koskey interacted at the courthouse with an individual identified only as a "corrections officer". The Oregon statue defines such person as "an officer or member of a law enforcement unit who is employed full time and is charged with and primarily performs the duty of custody, control or supervision of individuals convicted of or arrested for a criminal offense and confined in a place of incarceration or detention other than a place used exclusively for the incarceration or detention of juveniles." See Oregon Revised Statutes section 181.610. 2
The different duties of the actors in this drama come into sharp conflict. The duties of the corrections officer placed him in control of those who proposed to have contact with the prisoners he was mandated to control and supervise, as well as to monitor the contents of printed or written communications that the prisoner might receive. Being placed in this position, it was incumbent upon the corrections officer to be familiar with the rules of the jail governing these activities. Nothing contained in the statutory mandated duties of a probation officer requires probation officers to be intimately acquainted with such rules. 3
Further, the duties of the corrections officer placed him in a position superior to defendant when they met at the Washington County Jail. In order to accomplish her purpose, defendant had no choice but to accede to the "orders", if you will, of the corrections officer in order to realize her purposes. Under this analysis, defendant had no alternative but to deliver the mail to the corrections officer if she desired to have the mail delivered to plaintiff. 4 In giving the order, the corrections officer was clearly acting appropriately in intercepting the mail. The rule in question provides that certain mail must be opened by the custodial officials in the presence of the addressee-prisoner. The inescapable conclusion of this rule is that all mail may be intercepted and read. 5
Clearly, under this analysis, both the corrections officer and defendant acted correctly in the matter. Once the mail was out of defendant's hands, she, of course, was powerless to influence the further conduct of the corrections officer. This conclusion is mandated by the differing statutory duties of the defendant and the corrections officer. The corrections officer's further handling of the mail was beyond defendant's power to control or to even influence.
Based on the foregoing analysis, we find that defendant was completely out of the chain of causation for the alleged constitutional deprivation. It matters not whether plaintiff's constitutional rights were violated by the corrections officer. Defendant did not participate in such violation.
The dissenting opinion bases its conclusions upon the traditional doctrine of proximate cause. A more exacting examination of that doctrine, we feel, compels a different conclusion.
Federal courts turn to the causation factors developed in the common law of torts to supply the necessary causation factor in the civil rights field. This court enunciated the requisite causal nexus required for section 1983 cases in Johnson v. Duffy, 588 F.2d 740, 743-44 (9th Cir.1978):
Section 1983 provides, in pertinent part, that "[e]very person who, under color of any statute of any state ..., subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured...." (42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983). A person "subjects" another to the deprivation of a constitutional right, within the meaning of section 1983, if he does an affirmative act, participates in another's affirmative acts, or omits to perform an act which he is legally required to do that causes the deprivation of which complaint is made. (Sims v. Adams, (5th Cir.1976) 537 F.2d 829). Moreover, personal participation is not the only predicate for section 1983 liability. Anyone who "causes" any citizen to be subjected to a constitutional deprivation is also liable. The requisite causal connection can be established not only by some kind of direct personal participation in the deprivation, but also by setting in motion a series of acts by others which the actor knows or reasonably should know would cause others to inflict the constitutional injury. (Cf. Beverly v. Morris (5th Cir.1972) 470 F.2d 1356.)
It is important to note that Johnson v. Duffy, supra, requires one of three things before liability may be imposed upon a defendant:
1. The defendant must do an affirmative act which results in the plaintiff being deprived of his federally protected rights;
2. The defendant must participate in the affirmative acts of another which, acting concurrently, results in the plaintiff being deprived of his federally protected rights; or
3. The defendant must omit to perform an act which he is legally required to do which causes the deprivation of the plaintiff's federally protected rights. 6
The authors of Prossor and Keeton on Torts, discuss unforeseeable results of unforeseeable causes in the tort context. They observe, "If the defendant can foresee neither any danger of direct injury, nor any risk from an intervening cause, the defendant is simply not negligent." Prossor & Keeton, Prossor and Keeton on Torts, at 311, section 44, (5th Ed.1984). This analogy is particularly apt here. In tort law, the function of the doctrine of proximate cause is to establish the outer limits to which the negligent actors would result in liability to those injured. As we can see from the above quotation from Johnson v. Duffy, supra, proximate cause has served the same purpose in civil rights law.
The dissenting opinion makes much of the fact that counsel at argument stipulated that Koskey's act was intentional. The word "intentional" has many varied meanings that take on different shadings depending upon the context in which the word is used.
Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines the word...
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