Chapter 11 Access to Federal Courts

• Jurisdiction: United States

Chapter 11 Access to Federal Courts

As we have previously documented, for years, the federal courts allowed the states to maintain their own correctional systems with very little to no interference (the so-called "hands-off" period). However, as federal courts continued to hear cases filed by state inmates and the federal correctional system grew as well, federal courts became increasingly active in hearing disputes between inmates and various correctional authorities. As a result, the federal government (Congress and the President) began to insert itself into this process as well. This chapter will discuss some of the various laws that have regulated various parts of corrections, as well as various general laws that have affected corrections in some manner.

Limits on Litigation

Even though federal courts will now consider state claims, a person cannot immediately file suit in federal court after being convicted. Instead, a person must exhaust all appeals in state court before seeking the intervention of the higher authority of the federal courts. By their nature, appeals are supposed to examine what legal errors may have occurred in a case. However, many inmates have made use of writs of habeas corpus in federal courts. A power guaranteed by the Constitution, habeas corpus comes from Latin and literally means "you have the body." This means that whenever an inmate files a habeas corpus petition, they are demanding to know why they are being incarcerated or conversely, asking correctional officials (or the state) to justify why they are being held in custody or treated in one way or another. Originally, the writ of habeas corpus was designed so that people would not be incarcerated for long periods without having charges filed against them. As time went on, prisoners began to use these writs to challenge state procedures and the laws that led to their incarceration. Furthermore, unlike other appeals, which only seek to determine if legal errors were made during a defendant's trial, habeas corpus petitions allow federal courts to reconsider almost any part of a trial. As Williamson (1973) notes, the whole purpose of habeas corpus petitions is to ensure that American citizens are receiving due process and fair trials.

In the "hands-off" era, many federal courts simply ignored the bulk of inmate lawsuits. However, after federal courts began to hear these types of lawsuits, many people clamored for reforms. One of the first efforts to do this took place in 1966, when Congress applied the abuse of the writ doctrine to federal habeas corpus petitions. Abuse of writ doctrine is a principle that limits future petitions of writ of habeas corpus that were not raised earlier in the judicial process. Specifically, abuse of the writ doctrine prohibits subsequent consideration of claims not raised, and thus defaulted, in a prior federal habeas proceeding. The doctrine essentially allows inmates to file only a single habeas corpus motion. The exception to this policy is if an inmate alleges a new complaint and can convince a judge that it was not deliberately withheld from the original habeas corpus motion. The Supreme Court considered this issue in McCleskey v. Zant. McCleskey had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death. After his conviction, McCleskey filed a state habeas corpus petition that included a claim that he had been induced to make incriminating statements without the assistance of counsel. According to McCleskey, this violated his rights guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution and as decided in the case of Massiah v. United States, where relying on the Spano rule—confession that is a result of illegal interrogation in the absence of legal counsel (see Spano v. New York)—the justices held that "the defendant's own incriminating statements, obtained by federal agents under [these] circumstances...., could not constitutionally be used by the prosecution as evidence against him at his trial." McCleskey's state claim was unsuccessful. Afterward, McCleskey filed a habeas corpus motion in federal court that was unsuccessful. However, unlike the state motion, McCleskey did not include a Massiah claim, and the federal claim was unsuccessful. McCleskey filed yet again, a second federal habeas corpus petition that this time did include a Massiah claim. McCleskey tried to argue that this was not an abuse of the writ because he had new documentation supporting his Massiah claim that had not been included in the state petition. Yet, the Supreme Court ultimately turned down the second federal petition. The Court noted that the documentation was new, but McCleskey should have made the claim in his first federal petition. The Supreme Court reasoned that since McCleskey seemed to know his rights regarding Massiah in the state petition, he should have made this claim in the first federal petition.

With the federal courts increasingly intervening as guardians of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, ruling the Fourteenth Amendment application of the Bill of Rights to states became more frequent, so did the number of prisoners' rights petitions. While some people just saw this as a long-overdue process through which inmates did not lose all their constitutional rights once they entered a correctional facility, other people framed prisoners' lawsuits as an abuse of the legal system and believed that this needlessly clogged federal courts. Based on the growing perception among many people that bored inmates were abusing the court system in hopeless attempts to overturn their properly decided criminal convictions, in 1995, Congress passed the Prisoners Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), which was signed by President Bill Clinton. This legislation, which took effect a year later, in 1996, has made it much harder for prisoners to gain relief in the federal courts. The act addresses two main concerns: (1) the increasing number of prisoners' lawsuits, and (2) federal judges who intervene in the operation of state prison systems and order extensive and costly reforms. The act requires prisoners to exhaust any remedies available to them through their inmate grievance system and state courts before they file any lawsuit in federal court. In that regard, the PLRA shifts the pendulum once more toward the "hands-off" doctrine. Further, the act imposes limitations on the legal fees awarded to successful prisoner-plaintiffs. While the PLRA did not completely obliterate the right of prisoners to file habeas corpus motions, guaranteed by cases such as Ex parte Hull (a state prison rule abridging or impairing a prisoner's right to apply to the federal courts for a writ of habeas corpus is invalid), federal courts have been essentially stopped from hearing valid constitutional claims of inmates until these inmates have complied with the abuse of writ rule and fully exhausted any state claims or grievance procedures within state correctional systems.

While some people have viewed the PLRA as a way to curtail frivolous lawsuits, others have seen it differently. The most common critique is that the PLRA simply prevents inmates from exercising their access to the courts and does not actually identify when a lawsuit is frivolous. As Schlanger (2003) notes, in 1995, inmates were only successful in 15% of the lawsuits that they filed. Thus, inmates seemed to already be at a disadvantage. However, after the PLRA, not only were inmates unlikely to succeed on the merits of their cases, they were also less likely to be able to file lawsuits. Twelve years later, Schlanger (2015) notes, from 1996 to 2008, prisoner lawsuits decreased from 23.3 per 1,000 prisoners to 10.2 per 1,000 prisoners. Overall, this represented a 60% decrease in lawsuit filings. To some people, this might indicate that the PLRA served its purpose, but Schlanger noted that the number of frivolous lawsuits has not decreased and inmates still have a low rate of success. Inmates, few of whom have legal training, already have a difficult time filing proper lawsuits, but the demands of the PLRA have made prisoner lawsuits even tougher to file, and many lawsuits are simply dismissed for procedural defects rather than substantive ones. Among the most important effects of the PLRA is that it forced inmates to exhaust all grievance procedures in the facilities in which they are incarcerated, it increased filing fees for inmates, decreased the amount of attorney's fees that could be awarded, and limited the damages awards. Furthermore, the PLRA made it more difficult to maintain court control of correctional facilities that did not comply with court orders. One particular topic of contention has been requiring inmates to pay filing fees...