Opinion ID: 197630
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: vacating the consent decree

Text: 54 Having construed the PLRA and established that its termination-of-prospective-relief provision passes constitutional muster, that the conditions for exemption have not been met, and that the Act's mandate requires the district court to terminate the consent decree, we now mull whether that mandate means that an order must be entered not only terminating the consent decree but actually vacating it. The district court thought not. See D. Ct. Op., 952 F.Supp. at 883-84. We agree. 55 The defendants' opposition is easily dispatched. Nothing in the PLRA or its legislative history speaks of vacating consent decrees. Congress chose to use the verb terminate and to eschew the verb vacate. The distinction between these two words is clear: terminate means to put an end to or to end, Black's Law Dictionary at 1471, whereas vacate means to annul or to render ... void, id. at 1548. 56 In the present context, this distinction may well possess practical significance. Cf. Benjamin, 124 F.3d at 177-178 (explaining that court's view of the distinction between terminating prospective relief and vacating a consent decree). While terminating a consent decree strips it of future potency, the decree's past puissance is preserved and certain of its collateral effects may endure. Vacating a consent decree, however, wipes the slate clean, not only rendering the decree sterile for future purposes, but also eviscerating any collateral effects and, indeed, casting a shadow on past actions taken under the decree's imprimatur. As nothing in the PLRA even hints that consent decrees must be vacated when prospective relief is terminated, we uphold the district court's ruling that the PLRA does not require vacation of the 1979 decree.