Court Opinion

ID: 9479394
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:17:00.558981+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:00.332538
License: Public Domain

MURNAGHAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
The majority opinion adheres in a stringent way to authority as it currently exists and I regretfully concur. However, I find it unsettling that a pro se prisoner prosecuting his own case and making the attempt to appeal should be wholly barred on jurisdictional grounds. At the time he filed his notice of appeal one or two days late, there still remained the possibility of his securing a ruling of excusable neglect which would make his notice of appeal timely. That chance was not negligible or illusory. In every case which occurs to me where a pro se prisoner inadvertently files his notice of appeal too late, but within the thirty day extension period in cases of excusable neglect, it seems to me that a request for a finding of excusable neglect was implicit.
The appeal forms could, with no distortion in meaning and intent, automatically request a finding of excusable neglect. Seeking of such a finding seems commonplace and rudimentary to those of us trained in the law, but extremely arcane to the bulk of pro se prisoners who are not learned in the law. Even when a party is represented by counsel, the Supreme Court has explained that “[t]he Federal Rules reject the approach that pleading is a game of skill in which one misstep by counsel may be decisive to the outcome and accept the principle that the purpose of pleading is to facilitate a proper decision on the merits.” Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41, 48, 78 S.Ct. 99, 103, 2 L.Ed.2d 80 (1957). At least as true is that observation when judgment of a pro se prisoner is reviewed. After all, the allowing of the appeal only favors a finding of sufficient diligence in one utterly untrained in the law’s intricacies and allows for no great expansion in the number of cases to be heard, remembering that many, if not all, could have been heard if the plaintiff had been legally advised adequately-
It seems to me, therefore, that the logic of Shah v. Hutto, 722 F.2d 1167 (4th Cir.1983) (en banc), is flawed and that the case should be reversed. That, however, can only be accomplished by an en banc court, the likelihood of obtaining of which is negligible. Therefore, I am compelled to concur. I do so, however, noting that Shah v. Hutto was actually only a dictum in the sense that, decided before Houston v. Lack, — U.S. -, 108 S.Ct. 2379, 101 L.Ed.2d 245 (1988), it ignored the fact that there had been a timely filing of the notice of appeal under the holding in Houston v. Lack. Consequently, Shah v. Hutto should have been decided in a manner contrary to its actual holding on grounds rendering totally inapplicable the rationale employed by the en banc majority in Shah v. Hutto.