Court Opinion

ID: 9445362
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:26:08.53497+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:13.420493
License: Public Domain

*957FINNEGAN, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I agree the judgment appealed must be affirmed. Yet I would point up the reason why Atterbury’s verified complaint, to which no responsive pleading was filed below, fails in stating a cause of action under the Fourteenth Amendment and 42 U.S.C.A. §§ 1981, 1983, 1985(2) and (3), R.S. §§ 1977, 1979, 1980. The deficiency lies in the factual situation on which Atterbury bottoms his complaint. It is not how he has pleaded, as a matter of form or style, but what he has pleaded that cuts ground from under his position. Indeed because he is a layman presenting his appeal pro se, my brothers and I have accorded him the widest latitude. Whiting v. Seyfrit, 7 Cir., 1953, 203 F.2d 773, 774; Allen v. Corsanco, D.C.D.Del.1944, 56 F.Supp. 169.
It is understandable how the bare phrases of the Civil Rights Act would seemingly appear as an open-sesame for bringing about accountability of the state officials and employees named in the complaint. However, those statutory provisions can only be applied within the framework of constitutional law. There is more to the statutory story. Not all torts of state officials are within the ambit of the Act. For Congress, though it exercised its power to create a federal cause of action, has done so only for persons deprived of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and federal laws. Collins v. Hardyman, 1951, 341 U.S. 651, 71 S.Ct. 937, 95 L.Ed. 1253. Atterbury’s complaint, then, must show deprivation of some constitutionally protected right. Or, as put by Mr. Justice Douglas in Screws v. United States, 1945, 325 U.S. 91, 108, 65 S.Ct. 1031, 1038, 89 L.Ed. 1495: “The problem is not whether state law has been violated but whether an inhabitant of a State has been deprived of a federal right by one who acts under ‘color of any law.’ ”
In his brief (p. 6) the Attorney General of Illinois tells us:
“ * * * the plaintiff has suggested no more than maltreatment at the hands of State prison officials. The more brutal that maltreatment may have been, the greater is an action at law in Illinois courts.”
The particular Illinois remedy is left unmentioned. However, we find § 10, Ill.Rev.Stat.1955, c. 108, implemented by § 16 charges the Illinois Department of Public Safety with “jurisdiction of the government, discipline and police of the penitentiary, the punishment * * * of the convicts * * * ” and directs the Department to “inquire into any improper conduct which is alleged to have been committed by the warden or any other officer or employee of the penitentiary * * * ” More significant, however, is § 38, Ill.Rev.Stat.1955, c. 108 providing:
“Whenever several convicts combined, or any single convict, shall offer violence to any officer or guard of the penitentiary, or to any convict, or do or attempt to do any injury to any building or workshops, or any appurtenances thereof, or shall attempt to escape, or shall disobey or resist any lawful command, the officers of the penitentiary and guards shall use all suitable means to defend themselves, to enforce the observance of discipline, to secure the persons of the offenders, and prevent such attempted violence or escape; and if said officers or guards employed in said penitentiary, or any of them, shall, in the attempt to prevent the escape of any convict, or in attempting to retake any convict who has escaped, or in attempting to prevent or suppress a riot, revolt, mutiny or insurrection, take the life of a convict, such officer or guard shall not be held responsible therefor, unless the same was done unnecessarily or wantonly.”
Parenthetically we have also noted that at one time a statute of Illinois provided: “It shall not be lawful in said penitentiary to use any cruel or unusual mode of punishment, or to punish any *958convict by whipping in any case whatever.” Cahill’s Ill.Rev.Stat. c. 108, § 37 (1929), but the repeal of this section by the Illinois General Assembly, in an act approved July 8, 1931, L.1931, p. 1, § 1, leaves § 38 standing. The Attorney General argues in his brief that the tortious conduct of the defendants he represents, “was contrary to State law. Therefore it was not done under color of that law [ed. State] and gives no rise to a cause of action for invasion of civil rights.” On the other hand plaintiff expressly states in his complaint the assaults on his person were committed “under the guise of discipline.” While I may think brutality to convicts repugnant, nevertheless there is State legislative authority for discipline and unless such course of treatment and action results in deprivation of a federal right then no basis appears for interference with the State’s internal administration of its penal system.
Even a latitudinarian approach fails to disclose an impingement on some federal right owing to Atterbury. His alleged claim is outside the shelter of the federal constitution. When New York adopted electrocution as its method ■of carrying out the death penalty, an application for a writ of error on behalf of a condemned man brought the problem of punishment by the States, in the Fourteenth Amendment setting, before the Supreme Court. Denying the writ in that case reported as In re Kemmler, 1890, 136 U.S. 436, 10 S.Ct. 930, 34 L.Ed. 519, Chief Justice Fuller explained the relationship between the cruel and unusual punishment interdiction in the Eighth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment, showing the inapplicability of the former Amendment to the States. Subsequently the court decided State of Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 1947, 329 U.S. 459, 67 S.Ct. 374, 91 L.Ed. 422, where the petitioner had been placed in an electric chair, pursuant to lawful order, and presumably because of some mechanical difficulty death did not result. Issuance of a second death warrant stimulated a series of appeals culminating in several opinions by a divided court, the majority of which found an absence of constitutional infringements. Mr. Justice Frankfurter focused his concurring opinion, Id., 329 U.S. at pages 466-472, 67 S.Ct. at page 379, ori the problem of the Fourteenth Amendment, saying inter alia:
“ * * * a State may be found to deny a person due process by treating even one guilty of crime in a manner that violates standards of decency more or less universally accepted though not when it treats him by a mode about which opinion is fairly divided. But the penological policy of a State is not to be tested by the scope of the Eighth Amendment and is not involved in the controversy which is necessarily evoked by that Amendment as to the historic meaning of ‘cruel and unusual punishment’. See Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349, 30 S.Ct. 544, 546, 54 L.Ed. 793, and particularly the dissenting opinion of White and Holmes JJ.”
Mr. Justice Cardozo speaking for the Court in Palko v. State of Connecticut, 1937, 302 U.S. 319, 323, 58 S.Ct. 149, 151, 82 L.Ed. 288, summarized the theme applicable to the current matter:
“We have said that in appellant’s view the Fourteenth Amendment is to be taken as embodying- the prohibitions of the Fifth. His thesis is even broader. Whatever would be a violation of the original bill of rights (Amendments I to VIII) if done by the federal government is now equally unlawful by force of the Fourteenth Amendment if done by a state. There is no such general rule.”
While plaintiff’s incarceration under an unchallenged judgment of conviction eliminates the usual questions of procedural due process, the cases treating with state adjudicatory processes manifest rationale furnishing guidance here. See e. g. Rochin v. People of California, 1952, 342 U.S. 165, 72 S.Ct. 205, 96 L.Ed. *959183; Adamson v. People of State of California, 1947, 332 U.S. 46, 67 S.Ct. 1672, 91 L.Ed. 1903; Commonwealth of Pennsylvania ex rel. Sullivan v. Ashe, 1937, 302 U.S. 51, 58 S.Ct. 59, 82 L.Ed. 43. Our prior declarations of an absence of power to exercise supervision over Illinois’ regulation of its penitentiaries flows from recognizing the power reserved to that State so to do. In re Civil Rights Cases, 1883, 109 U.S. 3, 3 S.Ct. 18, 27 L.Ed. 835.
Under the facts and circumstances of this particular record I am satisfied there was no abuse of discretion when the trial judge dismissed the complaint.