Opinion ID: 608193
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Did Swenson Have a Liberty Interest?

Text: 10 The Due Process Clause does not itself create[ ] an interest in being confined to a general population cell, rather than the more austere and restrictive administrative segregation quarters. Hewitt v. Helms, 459 U.S. 460, 466-67, 103 S.Ct. 864, 868-69, 74 L.Ed.2d 675 (1983). However, state law may create a liberty interest by placing substantive limitations on official discretion. Olim v. Wakinekona, 461 U.S. 238, 249, 103 S.Ct. 1741, 1747, 75 L.Ed.2d 813 (1983). A liberty interest is created if state law contains substantive predicates to the exercise of discretion and specific directives to the decisionmaker that if the regulations' substantive predicates are present, a particular outcome must follow. Kentucky Dept. of Corrections v. Thompson, 490 U.S. 454, 463, 109 S.Ct. 1904, 1910, 104 L.Ed.2d 506 (1989). Procedural guidelines, such as a mandatory hearing, are not enough to create a liberty interest; state law must contain explicitly mandatory language in connection with requiring specific substantive predicates. Hewitt, 459 U.S. at 472, 103 S.Ct. at 871. 11 Swenson's assertion of a protected liberty interest is based solely upon § 217.375.2, which in February 1986 provided: 12 When it is determined by the chief administrative officer of an institution that an inmate is an immediate security risk, or an inmate is violent, struggling and creating sufficient disturbance to indicate he is not in control of himself, or an inmate is physically violent, or an inmate is in urgent need to be separated from others for his own safety or that of others, the chief administrative officer of the institution may transfer the inmate to an administrative segregation unit which shall be situated so that the segregation of such inmates from the other inmates of the institution shall be in all respects complete. A hearing shall be held concerning the incident within seventy-two hours. 13 There is an obvious problem with Swenson's reliance upon this statute--by its plain language, it governs a prison official's decision to transfer an inmate to administrative segregation after an incident, not to the process by which a new inmate is initially classified and placed within the prison's overall security system. In 1986, an inmate's initial classification was the subject of a number of other statutes, none of which imposed either time or hearing limitations on the process. 2 14 The Supreme Court recognized in Hewitt that one use of administrative segregation is to await later classification. 459 U.S. at 468, 103 S.Ct. at 869. The initial classification of inmates clearly impacts prison security and may require flexible time limitations. For example, if one hundred inmates are transferred from a prison where a riot is in progress, the administrator of the prison receiving those inmates surely acts reasonably by segregating them from the prison's own general population while the initial assignment and classification process is completed, even if that process is unusually lengthy. Section 217.375.2 does not deal with either the substantive or procedural issues relevant to initial classifications, and Thompson teaches that a liberty interest is created only by substantive predicates governing deprivation of the particular interest in question. 490 U.S. at 464 n. 4, 109 S.Ct. at 1911 n. 4. Therefore, we cannot accept Swenson's unsupported assertion that § 217.375.2 governed his initial placement in administrative segregation when he arrived at MECC in February 1986, an issue we did not decide in Brown-El v. Delo, 969 F.2d 644 (8th Cir.1992). 15 Of course, Swenson could have undertaken to prove as a factual matter that, in 1986, MECC by regulation or established practice treated this statute as applying to his initial placement in administrative segregation. But he did not do so. In these circumstances, it is not clearly established that Swenson had a protected state-created liberty interest in avoiding administrative segregation in February 1986. Thus, qualified immunity bars his claim. 16