Opinion ID: 184384
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Did Brown Have a Liberty Interest?

Text: 19 In Sandin v. Conner, 515 U.S. 472, 115 S.Ct. 2293, 132 L.Ed.2d 418 (1995), the Supreme Court reworked the framework for analyzing whether a prisoner has a state-created liberty interest in avoiding a particular deprivation. Before Sandin, this question was answered in much the same way as were questions about the existence of other liberty or property interests: if state laws or regulations contained language constraining the discretion of state officials, a liberty interest existed. See, e.g., Hewitt, 459 U.S. at 471-72, 103 S.Ct. at 871-72. The Sandin Court found that this approach had given states disincentives to ... codify prison management procedures and led to the inappropriate involvement of federal courts in the day-to-day management of prisons. 515 U.S. at 482, 115 S.Ct. at 2299. It therefore found that, although States may under certain circumstances create liberty interests which are protected by the Due Process Clause, these interests will generally be limited to freedom from restraint which ... imposes atypical and significant hardship on the inmate in relation to the ordinary incidents of prison life. Id. at 484, 115 S.Ct. at 2300. 20 Applying Sandin to this case presents a number of difficulties. First, although Sandin clearly dictates that we compare the hardship experienced by the inmate to the ordinary incidents of prison life, it is not clear which prison or part of a prison is to provide the standard of comparison. At various points in Sandin, the Court compared the prisoner's conditions in disciplinary segregation in Hawaii's Halawa Correctional Facility to administrative segregation and protective custody in that prison, to the general population of that prison, and to an undefined range of confinement to be normally expected for one serving an indeterminate term of 30 years to life. See Sandin, 515 U.S. at 486-87, 115 S.Ct. at 2301-02. 21 The District suggests that, because the Attorney General has authority to transfer persons convicted in the District to any other prison nationwide, the appropriate baseline for our analysis is in fact the most rigorous prison in the nation. 6 The parties have not addressed, however, what may be a prerequisite to such an argument: evidence that such transfers are totally discretionary, a point the Sandin Court found important in determining that it was appropriate to use conditions in administrative segregation and protective custody at Halawa as a baseline for comparison. See 515 U.S. at 486, 115 S.Ct. at 2301. At least one court has accepted a variant of this argument: the Seventh Circuit has found that, because inmates may be transferred within the Indiana prison system, the test of whether a deprivation is atypical and significant turns on a comparison with conditions in the state's most rigorous prison. Wagner v. Hanks, 128 F.3d 1173 (7th Cir.1997). 7 The Wagner court also noted that, [327 U.S.App.D.C. 320] because Indiana can transfer its prisoners out of state, the proper standard of comparison may in fact be the most rigorous prison in the nation; it declined, however, to decide whether logic should be pressed so far, and remanded the case for further fact-finding. Id. at 1176. 22 Even were we to reject the District's transfer argument, we would still face a number of unsettled questions about how to apply Sandin to this case. Caselaw from the Second and Ninth Circuits suggests that whether a term in segregation amounts to an atypical and significant deprivation turns on its length and on a comparison of conditions in segregation and in the prison's general population. See, e.g., Brooks v. DiFasi, 112 F.3d 46, 48-49 (2d Cir.1997); Keenan v. Hall, 83 F.3d 1083, 1089 (9th Cir.1996). Other courts have not adopted so structured an analysis; for instance, the Fifth Circuit has concluded that a term in administrative segregation was not atypical and significant without discussing conditions in the segregation unit or the length of the segregation at all. See Luken v. Scott, 71 F.3d 192, 193 (5th Cir.1995), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 116 S.Ct. 1690, 134 L.Ed.2d 791 (1996). Were we to follow the approach of the Second and Ninth Circuits, we would then need to decide whether the length and severity of the deprivation Brown experienced sufficed to render that deprivation atypical and significant, a close and difficult question. Compare Sealey v. Giltner, 116 F.3d 47, 51-52 (2d Cir.1997) (remanding for specific findings on conditions of confinement in the case of an inmate held in administrative segregation for six months) with Mackey v. Dyke, 111 F.3d 460, 463 (6th Cir.), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 118 S.Ct. 136, --- L.Ed.2d ---- (1997) (finding that a six-month term in administrative segregation was not atypical and significant, with no discussion of conditions in segregation). And, finally, we would need to decide whether Sandin's atypical and significant test merely supplements Hewitt's test for the existence of a liberty interest, or supersedes it altogether. See The Supreme Court, 1994 Term--Leading Cases, 109 HARV. L.REV. 111, 147-50 (1995) (discussing this question). We do not think it necessary or even useful to resolve so many complex and fact-specific issues in the context of this case which it may be possible to decide on far narrower grounds. 23