Williams v. Lesiak, 86-2109

• Decision Date: 07 July 1987
• Docket Number: No. 86-2109,86-2109
• Citation: 822 F.2d 1223
• Parties: Harold WILLIAMS, et al., Plaintiffs, Appellees, v. William LESIAK, et al., Defendants, Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 1223

822 F.2d 1223

Harold WILLIAMS, et al., Plaintiffs, Appellees, v. William LESIAK, et al., Defendants, Appellants.

No. 86-2109.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Argued May 5, 1987.

Decided July 7, 1987.

Alexander G. Gray, Jr., Sp. Asst. Atty. Gen., with whom James M. Shannon, Atty. Gen., Boston, Mass., was on brief, for defendants, appellants.

David P. Novello with whom Victor Bass, Steven L. Schreckinger and Palmer & Dodge, Boston, Mass., were on brief, for plaintiffs, appellees.

Before BOWNES, BREYER and TORRUELLA, Circuit Judges.

BOWNES, Circuit Judge.

This action is the latest stage in a fifteen-year old lawsuit concerned with the remedying of conditions at Massachusetts' Treatment Center for Sexually Dangerous Persons. Defendants-appellants are the Massachusetts Commissioner of Correction, the Superintendent of the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater, the Assistant Deputy Superintendent, the Senior Correctional Officer and the Massachusetts Commissioner of Mental Health. Plaintiffs-appellees are residents at the Center. Defendants brought this action as a Rule 60(b) motion for relief from a January, 1978, order of the district court. The order required defendants to administer an Authorized Absence Program (AAP) at the Center in accordance with a set of regulations known as Part 408. Defendants now seek to administer the AAP in accordance with a recently adopted Massachusetts statute, Mass.Gen.L. ch. 123A, Sec. 8 (1986). We remand to the district court because the record provides an insufficient basis for us to decide whether the district court's denial of the Rule 60(b) motion was proper.

I.

The Amended Complaint in this case was filed in November, 1972. It alleged, inter alia, that "work, job training programs and educational facilities (both inside and outside the institution) are almost non-existent for 'patients' at the Treatment Center.... The programs at the Treatment Center are substantially inferior to those existing at correctional institutions of the Commonwealth." The complaint claimed that these conditions violated the fifth, eighth and fourteenth amendments to the United States Constitution.

Consent decrees were entered in the district court in 1974 and 1975. The first decree, entered in June, 1974, provided, in general outline, for the division of responsibilities between the Departments of Correction and Mental Health, for the implementation of vocational and other programs, and for the drafting of rules and regulations to apply to patients at the Center. The second consent decree, entered in January, 1975, ordered the submission of a plan including

a detailed description of the therapeutic, educational, vocational, and avocational programs to be provided by the Department of Mental Health to patients of the Treatment Center and a provision for the day or other short-term release programs outside the Treatment Center where such release is deemed appropriate by the Department of Mental Health.

In March, 1976, the district court ordered the implementation of regulations that had been drafted pursuant to this provision of the 1975 decree:

[D]efendant Commissioner of Mental Health ... [shall] make effective immediately Part 408, the provisions for authorized visits and absences, contained in the proposed regulations for the Treatment Center as filed in this action pursuant to the requirement of paragraph 2 of the partial consent decree dated January 2, 1975.

Several court hearings followed this order. The hearings resulted in various changes to Part 408, some stipulated by the parties, others ordered by the court. In January, 1978, the district court entered a "Memorandum and Order Establishing Regulations for Authorized Absences," in which the court stated that it finds that the draft of October 11, 1977, accurately sets forth the parties' stipulations and orders of the court and complies with the provision of the [1975] partial consent decree ... and ORDERS that its provisions be implemented forthwith by the several parties defendant, their agents and employees.

The AAP is governed to this day by this 1978 court order that required the implementation of Part 408.

In May, 1980, defendants filed a Rule 60(b) motion for relief from the 1978 order. Defendants sought to administer the AAP under new regulations drafted by the Department of Mental Health. They moved that the court permit the filing of the proposed regulations with the Secretary of the Commonwealth so that they could eventually be enacted in accordance with the state Administrative Procedure Act, Mass.Gen.L. ch. 30A (1978). In short, defendants requested "to be relieved from the [1978] Court Order ... and allowed to promulgate regulations according to the terms and provisions of state law."

The district court rejected the motion. Rather than discussing the more general request to replace the federal court order with state-promulgated regulations, the court based its ruling on an analysis of the four specific ways in which the draft regulations departed from Part 408. It rejected two of the proposed changes unconditionally. It denied the other two proposed changes on the grounds that defendants had failed to show that circumstances had changed sufficiently to warrant relief under Rule 60(b):

We had protracted hearings [prior to the issuance of the 1978 order], and we certainly cannot make changes in the substantive rights that were granted these petitioners after such an investigation of the facts and the needs and the law without a far greater showing than what has been made by the defendants here in connection with their motion filed May 5, 1980.

On August 8, 1986, the district court denied a motion by plaintiffs for an order again requiring defendants to operate the program in accordance with Part 408. The court found that various violations of the regulations had occurred in the past, including unwarranted delays in processing applications for participation in the AAP. The court found, however, that the situation had begun to improve with the appointment of Ian Tink as acting administrator of the Center in March, 1986. The court stated that "[o]ne may hope with reason that progress will continue." The court also found that control of the Treatment Center had not been transferred to the Department of Correction. The court concluded that no additional order was necessary due to Tink's efforts to improve conditions.

On August 14, 1986, defendants filed another Rule 60(b) motion, the denial of which forms the subject of the present appeal. Defendants sought relief from the 1978 court order to allow them to administer the AAP in conformity with a recently enacted Massachusetts statute, St.1985, c. 752, Sec. 1, subsec. 8, codified at Mass.Gen.L. ch. 123A, Sec. 8 (1986). The statute was approved on January 6, 1986, and went into effect ninety days later.

For the first time as a matter of state law, the new statute mandates a program for the "restrictive integration of the patient into a non-custodial environment." It thus overlaps with some of the provisions of Part 408. Unlike Part 408, though, the statute, with a few exceptions, does not itself contain detailed regulations for the program. Rather, the statute describes the program in general terms and states that "said program shall be administered pursuant to the rules and regulations promulgated by the department of mental health."

In their Rule 60(b) motion, defendants noted three ways in which the statute conflicts with the 1978 court order. First, the statute and Part 408 conflict with regard to the status of one member of a board that, according to both, is to be involved in the determination of eligibility for the program. Part 408 calls this board the "Pre-Release Review Board"; the statute calls it the "restrictive integration review board." The statute and Part 408 have identical provisions regarding five of the six members of the board. These five members, all with voting status, include two members of the Center's clinical staff and three other individuals, not employees of the Center, of whom one must be a psychologist, the second a psychiatrist, and the third either a psychologist or a psychiatrist. The sixth member of the board, under both the statute and Part 408, is the head of the Treatment Center Custodial Staff, an office affiliated with the Department of Correction. Under Part 408 this individual is a nonvoting member of the board; the statute, however, grants him voting rights.

The second conflict concerns the length of time a patient must reside at the Center before he may become eligible for the training program outside the institution. The statute provides that patients at the Center shall be eligible for the program of "restrictive integration into a non-custodial environment" after at least two years of custody; Part 408 allows participation in the AAP after only one year.

Finally, defendants claim that the general provision in the statute that rules are to be promulgated by the Department of Mental Health conflicts with the court order as a whole because the order requires that the program be run according to the regulations contained in Part 408. This last "conflict" between the statute and Part 408 is of a more far-reaching nature than the first two differences; it calls into question Part 408 as a whole rather than the detail of its provisions.

Defendants sought two forms of relief from the district court. First, they sought to have the 1978 court order mandating the implementation of Part 408 vacated in order to enable the program to be administered wholly under the state statute and the regulations to be promulgated pursuant to the statute. In the alternative, they sought to have Part 408 modified with regard to the two specific conflicts with the statute: the two-year eligibility requirement and the voting status for the custodial member of the board. Defendants did not ask, in...