Opinion ID: 184384
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Should This Action Have been Brought in Habeas Corpus?

Text: 11 The District argues that, if Brown prevails, this will necessarily imply that the District's decision to place him in administrative segregation was invalid, and claims that this means that, under Preiser v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 475, 93 S.Ct. 1827, 36 L.Ed.2d 439 (1973) and its progeny, Brown's action must be brought in habeas corpus, not through section 1983. We conclude that the District reads the Preiser line of cases too broadly, and so decline to require that Brown's action be brought in habeas corpus. 12 In Preiser, the Supreme Court held that prisoners seeking the restoration of good-time credits which they claimed had been unconstitutionally withdrawn must do so through habeas corpus, not through section 1983. The Court observed that the prisoners' claims were within the core of habeas corpus in attacking the very duration of their physical confinement itself. Id. at 487-88, 93 S.Ct. at 1835. Congress had required exhaustion of available state remedies as a prerequisite to habeas corpus relief, the Court explained, and it would wholly frustrate Congress's intent to permit this rule to be circumvented through the invocation of section 1983. Id. at 489-90, 93 S.Ct. at 1836-37. Preiser said that the same rule must apply to any challenge by a state prisoner to the fact or duration of his confinement based, as here, upon the alleged unconstitutionality of state administrative action. Id. at 489, 93 S.Ct. at 1836. The Preiser Court set clear limits to this principle, however, expressly reaffirming its previous cases holding that a section 1983 action is a proper remedy for a state prisoner who is making a constitutional challenge to the conditions of his prison life, but not to the fact or length of his custody, id. at 499, 93 S.Ct. at 1841, because such actions are not at the heart of habeas corpus, id. at 498, 93 S.Ct. at 1840-41. 13 The Court has twice since clarified the reach of Preiser. In Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477, 114 S.Ct. 2364, 129 L.Ed.2d 383 (1994), the Court considered a section 1983 action that sought money damages, rather than the specific relief at issue in Preiser. The plaintiff in Heck claimed that the unconstitutional acts of the defendants, who were state officials, had led to his arrest and conviction. The Court found that the plaintiff's action was analogous to a common-law action for malicious prosecution, and that the favorable-termination requirement of such actions therefore applied to the plaintiff's section 1983 action. Heck thus held that a plaintiff who brings a claim under section 1983 that, if established, would necessarily imply that a criminal conviction or sentence was unlawful must demonstrate as an element of his claim that the conviction or sentence has been reversed, expunged, invalidated, or called into question by a federal court's issuance of a writ of habeas corpus. Id. at 484-87, 114 S.Ct. at 2371-73. In Edwards v. Balisok, --- U.S. ----, 117 S.Ct. 1584, 137 L.Ed.2d 906 (1997), the Court made clear that Heck applies in some cases in which the underlying proceeding is not a criminal conviction or sentence, applying Heck to an action by a prisoner who asserted that a prison disciplinary proceeding that had deprived him of good-time credits had been invalid because, inter alia, the decisionmaker had not been impartial. See id. at ---- - ----, 117 S.Ct. at 1588-89. 14 We conclude, however, that Brown's suit, which challenges only his placement in administrative segregation, is not of the type to which it is appropriate to apply Preiser and [327 U.S.App.D.C. 318] its progeny. 4 The Court has never deviated from Preiser's clear line between challenges to the fact or length of custody and challenges to the conditions of confinement. In Edwards, the Court was careful to respect the distinction drawn by Preiser, repeatedly characterizing the plaintiff's claim as one that would necessarily imply the invalidity of the deprivation of his good-time credits and therefore hasten his release. --- U.S. at ----, 117 S.Ct. at 1588. Heck, too, observed that the damages action in that case was in effect an attack on  'the fact or length of confinement.'  512 U.S. at 482, 114 S.Ct. at 2369-70 (quoting Preiser, 411 U.S. at 494, 93 S.Ct. at 1838-39). The Court also did not question the plaintiff's invocation of section 1983 in Sandin, a case in which the underlying prison disciplinary proceeding affected only the plaintiff's conditions of confinement, not the duration of his sentence. See 515 U.S. at 487, 115 S.Ct. at 2302. See also McCarthy v. Bronson, 500 U.S. 136, 142, 111 S.Ct. 1737, 1741-42, 114 L.Ed.2d 194 (1991) (drawing on Preiser 's distinction between challenges to the fact or length of custody and challenges to conditions of confinement in construing a statutory reference to the conditions of confinement). 5 15 Moreover, Heck's rationale for its favorable-termination requirement is inapplicable to the facts of this case. Brown's action may not properly be analogized to a suit for malicious prosecution, as the decision he is challenging bears little resemblance to a judicial proceeding. Decisions to place inmates in administrative segregation are subject to greatly relaxed procedural requirements, see Hewitt v. Helms, 459 U.S. 460, 476, 103 S.Ct. 864, 874, 74 L.Ed.2d 675 (1983) (An inmate must merely receive some notice of the charges against him and an opportunity to present his views to the prison official charged with deciding whether to transfer him to administrative segregation), and the Court has recognized that they are often made fairly informally, on the basis of subjective and intuitive considerations, see id. at 474, 103 S.Ct. at 872-73. Indeed, the administrative proceeding before the Housing Board entailed so little process that it would almost certainly be accorded no collateral estoppel effect. See Nasem v. Brown, 595 F.2d 801, 806-08 (D.C.Cir.1979) (holding that an administrative proceeding in which the parties were not permitted to present live witness testimony or to cross-examine opposing witnesses should not be accorded collateral estoppel effect); 18 CHARLES ALAN WRIGHT ET AL., FEDERAL PRACTICE AND PROCEDURE § 4475, at 766 (1981). One of the Court's principal concerns in Heck was to limit collateral attacks on final judgments, see 512 U.S. at 484, 114 S.Ct. at 2371; but a proceeding that is incapable of giving rise to collateral estoppel, like that at issue in this case, hardly needs to be insulated from collateral attack. Finally, were Brown required to invoke habeas corpus to challenge his placement in administrative segregation, then the same rule would presumably apply to a myriad of prison officials' other administrative decisions affecting conditions of confinement, such as visitation, mail, shower, or library privileges. Habeas corpus might conceivably be available to bring challenges to such prison conditions, as the Court observed in Preiser, 411 U.S. at 499, 93 S.Ct. at 1841, but requiring the use of habeas corpus in [327 U.S.App.D.C. 319] such cases would extend Preiser far beyond the core of the writ that Preiser set out to protect. Id. at 487, 93 S.Ct. at 1835. 16