Opinion ID: 1118521
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: D. #47-91, promulgated in January of 1991 and prominently displayed in all prison libraries, provides in relevant part:

Text: The Supreme Court has held that under Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(1), a pro se inmate's Notice of Appeal is filed at the moment of delivery to prison authorities for forwarding to the district court. Therefore, the following procedure will be strictly adhered to regarding Notice of Appeals [sic] only. .. . The Supreme Court referred to in the regulation is the United States Supreme Court, but the regulation does not so state. Thus, the notice is clearly misleading to prisoners. More importantly, a prisoner acting in proper person cannot personally deliver his notice of appeal to the clerk of the district court, nor can he monitor the process by which the notice is transmitted to the clerk of the district court. After he delivers the notice of appeal to prison officials, as he is constrained to do, he must rely on the vagaries of the prison mail system to deliver his notice in a timely fashion. Further, if his notice of appeal is not file stamped by the clerk of the district court, he has no means of determining who is to blame for delay, or of proving when the notice was actually received by the court clerk. The proper person litigant who is incarcerated stands in a position very different from all other litigants, whether represented by counsel or acting in proper person. The United States Supreme Court, construing federal rules identical in all relevant respects to NRAP 4, held that a notice of appeal submitted by a prisoner acting in proper person must be deemed filed for purposes of determining timeliness on the date it is delivered into the hand of a prison official. Houston v. Lack, 487 U.S. 266 (1988). Although this ruling is not binding on this court in our interpretation of the requirements of our rules of appellate procedure, we find the reasoning of the United States Supreme Court to be sound, and the arguments of appellants in this and similar cases to be compelling. Further, because the prisons already keep logs of when notices of appeal are received from prisoners, it would not create any additional burden on the prisons, nor would it create any significant burden on the courts, to conclude, as did the United States Supreme Court, that a proper person notice of appeal is filed on the date of delivery to a prison official. We therefore adopt the holding and reasoning of the United States Supreme Court. Accordingly, we conclude that appellants' notices of appeal were timely under NRAP 4. We grant appellants' petitions for rehearing, and we reinstate these appeals. [3]