Opinion ID: 433507
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Step One: Intrainstitutional Regulations in Liberty Interest Determinations

Text: 27 The D.C. officials, joined by the dissent, contend that internal prison directives such as Service Order 5000.1 and Division Operations Procedure 4090.1 are not the kind of regulations that can create a protected liberty interest. They argue that plaintiff's claim is necessarily foreclosed because neither the D.C.Code nor any published regulations of the Department of Corrections limit the discretion of prison officials. We disagree. 28 Long before Hewitt, the Supreme Court announced often, albeit in dicta, that the state could create a liberty interest not only by statutory restrictions on official discretion but by administrative rules and regulations. See, e.g., Connecticut Board of Pardons v. Dumschat, 452 U.S. 458, 465, 466, 101 S.Ct. 2460, 2464, 2465, 69 L.Ed.2d 158 (1981) (The ground for a constitutional claim must be found in statutes or other rules defining the obligations of prison authorities; here, there are no explicit standards by way of statute, regulation or otherwise); id. at 467, 101 S.Ct. at 2465 (Brennan, J., concurring) (respondents must show--by reference to statute, regulation, administrative practice, contractual arrangements or other mutual understanding--that particularized standards or criteria guide the State's decisionmakers.); Vitek v. Jones, 445 U.S. 480, 489, 100 S.Ct. 1254, 1261, 63 L.Ed.2d 552 (1980) (approving district court's reliance on objective expectation, firmly rooted in state law and official Penal Complex practice); Montanye v. Haymes, 427 U.S. 236, 243, 96 S.Ct. 2543, 2547, 49 L.Ed.2d 466 (1976) (referring to absence of regulations governing transfer of prisoners). Cf. Meachum v. Fano, 427 U.S. 215, 229, 96 S.Ct. 2532, 2540, 49 L.Ed.2d 451 (1976) (state may create procedural rights whether by statute, by rule or regulation). Admittedly, the Court has not decided precisely what kind of administrative pronouncement is necessary or sufficient to create a protected liberty interest. 29 This court has not previously squared off on the issue either. Cf. Smith v. Saxbe, 562 F.2d 729, 734 (D.C.Cir.1977) (no liberty interest in furlough where statute and regulations give unfettered discretion); Curry-Bey v. Jackson, 422 F.Supp. 926, 932 (D.D.C.1976) (At the very least, it would seem that a practice of prison officials would have to be manifested in a written policy statement to give rise to liberty interest). Other circuits, however, have. Those that confronted the issue before Hewitt were virtually unanimous that official prison policy statements could place substantive limitations on official discretion that gave rise to a liberty interest under the due process clause. 30 The Seventh Circuit, for example, reversed the district court's dismissal of a prisoner's complaint on the basis of the prisoner's allegation that prison authorities customarily do not interfere with one's work-release status unless the participant violates some rule of the program or of his work-release contract. Durso v. Rowe, 579 F.2d 1365, 1371 (7th Cir.1978), cert. denied, 439 U.S. 1121, 99 S.Ct. 1033, 59 L.Ed.2d 82 (1979). The court there held that a protected liberty interest may be created by official policies or practices. Id. at 1369. See also Shango v. Jurich, 681 F.2d 1091, 1099 (7th Cir.1982) (reaffirming Durso on this point); Arsberry v. Sieloff, 586 F.2d 37, 47 (7th Cir.1978) (directing district court on remand to consider effect of intra- and inter-institutional directives containing guidelines for allowing and denying compensatory good-time). The Fifth Circuit declared that even if a State by statute or regulation explicitly refuses to grant inmates certain liberty interests, practices of a state may nevertheless give rise to those same liberty interests. Parker v. Cook, 642 F.2d 865, 876 (5th Cir.1981). The Sixth Circuit found a protected liberty interest arising from policy statements issued by the Bureau of Prisons and the warden of a federal facility, drawing no critical distinction between the two, but noting that neither had been published in the Federal Register or otherwise incorporated in a body of federal regulations. Walker v. Hughes, 558 F.2d 1247, 1254-56 (6th Cir.1977). See also Bills v. Henderson, 631 F.2d 1287, 1289 (6th Cir.1980) (finding liberty interest based on rule contained in Adult Service Policies and Procedures Manual of the Department of Correction (Guidelines)). Similarly, the Tenth Circuit found a protected liberty interest in an official statement of policy in a manual adopted by the administrator of one particular state penitentiary. Gurule v. Wilson, 635 F.2d 782, 785 (10th Cir.1980). 17 Only the Fourth Circuit, in Gorham 70  1500 v. Hutto, 667 F.2d 1146, 1148 (4th Cir.1981), had expressly held, over a strong dissent, id. at 1148-51, that apparently statewide prison policy guidelines are not a sufficient basis for affording state prisoners a liberty interest. It has now overruled that decision as inconsistent with Hewitt. Hayes v. Thompson, 726 F.2d 1015 (4th Cir.1984). 31 It is apparent from this review of circuit law that, certainly before Hewitt, the courts did not generally look to whether administrative statements of policy and procedure were promulgated and published as statewide regulations. Instead, the courts followed a more functional approach, focusing their inquiry on whether the administrative pronouncements placed substantive limits on the discretion of prison officials. The government persists, however, arguing that Hewitt and Olim require more; in effect, the government reads those cases as overruling sub silentio the circuit courts' virtually unanimous view that official practices, embodied in explicit written pronouncements, can give rise to a protected liberty interest. We find this an untenable reading of Hewitt and Olim. 32 The atmospherics of Hewitt do support a cautious approach to prisoners' due process claims. The Court stressed that daily operation of the prison system was to be left primarily to prison officials, and that regulations structuring the authority of prison administrators may warrant treatment, for purposes of creation of entitlements to 'liberty,' different from statutes and regulations in other areas. 103 S.Ct. at 871. Furthermore, the Court distinguished decisions such as those imposing administrative segregation from decisions concerning good time credits, Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U.S. 539, 94 S.Ct. 2963, 41 L.Ed.2d 935 (1974), parole, Greenholtz v. Inmates of Nebraska Penal and Correctional Complex, 442 U.S. 1, 99 S.Ct. 2100, 60 L.Ed.2d 668 (1979), transfer to a mental institution, Vitek v. Jones, 445 U.S. 480, 100 S.Ct. 1254, 63 L.Ed.2d 552 (1980), or other decisions that radically transformed the nature or length of time of a prisoner's confinement. Id. at 870. The Court appears to have been particularly concerned in Hewitt that courts not unduly interfere with the authority of prison administrators to deal with emergency conditions involving the imminent threat of riot, 18 not a concern in this case. Atmospherics do not overrule solid circuit court precedent, however, and those courts that have revisited the question after Hewitt have continued to view intrainstitutional rules and regulations as sufficient to give rise to a liberty interest. See, e.g., Lyon v. Farrier, 727 F.2d 766 (8th Cir.1984) (per curiam) (examining Inmate Policy and Procedure Statements, but finding no substantive limits on discretion therein); Dudley v. Stewart, 724 F.2d 1493 (11th Cir.1984) (liberty interest may arise from constitution, statute, regulation, rule, or practice). 19 We see nowhere in Hewitt nor in Olim any indication that the Court intended, contrary to its repeated dicta, to limit the source of liberty interests to statutes and statewide regulations, and to bar claims based on official directives duly promulgated by the administrators of a particular facility to govern future decisionmaking. 33 We agree with the conclusion reached by every circuit that has squarely considered the issue that a prisoner may acquire a protected liberty interest by virtue of official policy statements or regulations duly promulgated by administrators of the particular institution at which the prisoner is confined. The Supreme Court has set out a single requirement for prisoners claiming the existence of a state-created liberty interest: An inmate must show 'that particularized standards or criteria guide the State's decisionmakers.'  Olim, 103 S.Ct. at 1747 (quoting Connecticut Board of Pardons, 452 U.S. at 467, 101 S.Ct. at 2465 (Brennan, J., concurring)). See also Hewitt, 103 S.Ct. at 871. We do not believe that prison officials charged with a particular decision having a significant impact on a prisoner's conditions of confinement are necessarily free to ignore standards or criteria that purport to govern the decision solely because they emanate from the director of the institution and are not published, for example, in the D.C. Register. Intrainstitutional regulations may be easier to change than published regulations of state- or district-wide application, but they can nonetheless significantly fetter discretion while in effect. 20 We therefore reject the dissent's view that anything less than a published regulation is too weak and ephemeral a basis from which to derive a protected liberty interest. We do not regard as ephemeral a binding internal regulation that requires prison officials to apply particular substantive criteria in making a classification decision. 34 At the same time, it is clear that not every internal memorandum or other pronouncement of prison administrators concerning a prisoner classification decision is intended or reasonably understood as an authoritative statement of the criteria by which that decision must be made. 21 Today we decide only that a prisoner may in some circumstances derive a protected liberty interest from prison rules or regulations of less than state- or district-wide application. We conclude therefore that the absence of a district-wide statute or regulation is not necessarily fatal to plaintiff's due process claim. Service Order 5000.1 and Division Operations Procedure 4090.1 may be sufficient, depending on a further explication of their meaning and implementation, to give rise to a protected liberty interest in not being assigned to Special Handling absent certain substantive predicates. 35 B. Step Two: The Effect of Service Order 5000.1 and Division Operations Procedure 4090.1 on Plaintiff's Liberty Interest 36 The remaining issue is whether the District of Columbia officials, in promulgating Service Order 5000.1 and Division Operations Procedure 4090.1, have placed substantive limitations on the discretion of prison officials to place a prisoner in Special Handling so as to give rise to a protected liberty interest, or whether they have left the decisionmaker free to deny the requested relief for any constitutionally permissible reason or for no reason at all. Olim, 103 S.Ct. at 1747. See also Dumschat, 452 U.S. at 467, 101 S.Ct. at 2465 (Brennan, J., concurring); Meachum v. Fano, 427 U.S. at 228, 96 S.Ct. at 2540. 37 The documents before us set out definite procedures by which Special Handling decisions must be made. 22 However, unlike the statute and regulations discussed in Hewitt, Service Order 5000.1 and Operations Procedure 4090.1 grant the prisoner no procedural rights whatsoever in connection with the Special Handling classification. Thus it is clear that the petitioner here cannot make the precise showing that was held sufficient in Hewitt: language of an unmistakably mandatory character requiring that certain procedures 'shall,' 'will,' or 'must' be employed, ... and that administrative segregation will not occur absent specified substantive predicates. 103 S.Ct. at 871. However, it is also clear from the Supreme Court's discussion in both Hewitt and Olim that the Court did not intend to make the existence of procedural rights a prerequisite to finding a liberty interest protected by the due process clause. As the Court stated in Hewitt with regard to state-created procedural rights, [i]t would be ironic to hold that when a State embarks on such desirable experimentation it thereby opens the door to scrutiny of the federal courts, while States that choose not to adopt such procedural provisions entirely avoid the strictures of the Due Process Clause. Id. The Court further clarified its reasoning in Olim, in which it rejected the contention that the existence of procedural rights was sufficient to create a liberty interest: 38 The Court of Appeals thus erred in attributing significance to the fact that the prison regulations require a particular kind of hearing before the administrator can exercise his unfettered discretion. As the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently stated in Shango v. Jurich, 681 F.2d 1091, 1100-1101 (1982), [a] liberty interest is of course a substantive interest of an individual; it cannot be the right to demand needless formality. Process is not an end in itself. Its constitutional purpose is to protect a substantive interest to which the individual has a substantive claim of entitlement. 39 103 S.Ct. at 1748 (footnotes omitted). 40 A holding that the existence of state procedural rights was a prerequisite to establishing a due process claim would achieve the ironic result eschewed in Hewitt as readily as would a holding that such rights were sufficient to establish due process rights. Thus, the Supreme Court's recent decisions indicate that, although the existence of explicit mandatory procedural requirements may contribute to the creation of a liberty interest, such requirements are neither sufficient nor necessary. 41 The key to determining whether the state has created a liberty interest giving rise to a due process claim is whether it has set out explicit substantive criteria on which the decisionmaker must base the imposition of restrictions or the withholding of benefits. We do not believe it appropriate to decide this issue on the scanty record before us. A precipitous decision would have too many implications for future cases. We therefore deem it necessary for such a decision to have both a more complete factual record and the considered judgment of the district court as to what Special Handling is and how prisoners are assigned to that category. 23 42 Our knowledge of how the Special Handling decision is made is far from complete. For instance, we do not know whether Order 5000.1 and Procedure 4090.1, the latter of which appeared for the first time in the record as an attachment to the government's brief to this court, are the only authoritative institutional regulations that bear upon the Special Handling decision, or in the case of the D.C. Detention Facility, the decision to place an inmate in the Adjustment Unit. 24 Nor do we pretend to understand fully the significance of Service Orders and Division Operations Procedures within the prison administration. Although it appears that they are compiled in some organized form, we do not know whether they are available to prisoners themselves or are solely for internal use. In addition, we do not know how the two directives before us have been customarily interpreted during their six or more years of operation, and whether they have been read by officials and/or prisoners as limiting the discretion of the ultimate decisionmakers--the Adjustment Board at the D.C. Detention Facility and the Administrator and the Superintendent of Correctional Services at Lorton--or whether they are interpreted merely as guidelines for frontline officials making the initial decision. 25 Such information would be essential in determining whether either document we have in hand actually limits the discretion of prison officials to place a prisoner in Special Handling, and therefore gives rise to a protected liberty interest. C. The Qualified Immunity Defense 43 There is still another reason not to decide at this stage of the proceedings whether Lucas had a liberty interest: it may not be ultimately necessary to decide the issue at all. The only remaining claims in this case are for damages. Plaintiff will almost certainly be faced with a defense of qualified immunity from D.C. officials claiming that the constitutional right allegedly violated was not clearly established at the time of the conduct at issue. Consideration of such a defense, the success of which would dispose of Lucas' remaining claims, need not necessarily await a final determination of whether a liberty interest exists. 44 The Supreme Court has shaped a qualified immunity defense that is based on the objective reasonableness of an official's conduct, as measured by reference to clearly established law. Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 2739, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982). See also Zweibon v. Mitchell, 720 F.2d 162, 168 (D.C.Cir.1983). In this case, the availability of the qualified immunity defense may well turn in part on the state of the law about what kind of official pronouncement can give rise to a protected liberty interest. Although we hold today that the state may create a liberty interest protected by the due process clause even in the absence of a statute or district-wide regulation containing substantive limitations on official discretion, that holding by no means dictates the conclusion that the adequacy of these alternate sources of due process rights was clearly established at the time of the challenged conduct so as to defeat a claim of qualified immunity. For instance, the absence of a square holding either way by the Supreme Court, this court, or the D.C. district court could weigh more heavily in deciding the qualified immunity issue than it does in our decision on the merits of this legal issue. 45 We once again decline to define precise standards for determining what constitutes clearly established law, cf. Zweibon v. Mitchell, 720 F.2d at 169, especially here where the qualified immunity defense has not yet been pleaded and is not before us. However, if such a defense is asserted, the district court must inquire and perhaps even decide promptly whether the state of the law at the time of the challenged conduct was such that a conscientious prison administrator could reasonably believe that the conduct was consistent with the prisoner's constitutional rights--in this case, that no liberty interest, and thus no due process rights, could be implicated by the Special Handling decision in the absence of a D.C. statute or published regulation. If so, then the defendants are entitled to judgment without further inquiry. See id. at 168.