Court Opinion

ID: 9536427
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 06:59:48.682562+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:54:29.570388
License: Public Domain

BISTLINE, Justice,
specially concurring.
The opinion authored by Justice Johnson has gained my concurrence because it is well-substantiated in holding that Cootz is at the least entitled to some due process. My only purpose in writing additionally is to observe that competent authority suggests that an inmate is entitled to more rights and a greater degree of dignity than seems to be the present norm.
Justice Johnson moves the Court in a doubtful direction when he writes that:
In Hill1 the Court dealt with the revocation of good time credits. Here, we deal with disciplinary detention. We do not find any significant difference in the *43liberty that is impaired by one compared to the other.
117 Idaho at 41, 785 P.2d at 166 (emphasis added). The High Court in Hill had under review a disciplinary board’s decision placing two inmates in isolation for fifteen days and revoking one hundred days of their good time credits. Justice O’Connor’s opinion for the Court in Hill, as the majority does here, centers upon the revocation of good time credits, and does not discuss the liberty interests which are implicated by numerous days of isolated confinement.
At least one state has recognized the “some evidence” standard of Hill, but decided not to adopt it. Maryland for some time had applied the “substantial evidence” standard to a review of administrative decisions, and saw no reason to digress from that practice notwithstanding Hill. See Greene v. Secretary of Public Safety, 68 Md.App. 147, 510 A.2d 613, 619 (Md.App. 1986), citing with approval to Bryant v. Department of Public Safety and Correctional Service, 33 Md.App. 357, 365 A.2d 764 (1976) (penal institution’s actions challenged by inmate grievance procedures will be upheld if supported by substantial evidence). Idaho, on the other hand, has neither legislatively nor judicially heretofore set any standard applicable to the review of inmate grievance proceedings or Department of Corrections procedures. Obviously there should be standards in place to govern the review of such administrative proceedings.
There may be, perhaps, good reason why the Idaho legislature has not adopted one standard of review that would apply to all administrative decisions. As Justice Stevens wrote in his dissent in Meachum v. Fano, 427 U.S. 215, 96 S.Ct. 2532, 49 L.Ed.2d 451 (1976), it is realized that different standards of review and levels of scrutiny are appropriate. Otherwise put, it makes sense to be more concerned about a greater invasion of a citizen’s liberty interests. In this case, it would appear that Cootz received a severe sanction. According to the Department of Corrections Policy and Procedure Manual, placement in the Disciplinary Unit for sixty days is the Class A-l sanction, the top (and by implication the toughest) sanction listed on the Manual page entitled “Range of Allowable Sanctions.” At the end of that page, Class D sanctions include such light sanctions as five days of extra duty, two hours each day, or formal warnings. As Justice Stevens explained in his dissent in Meachum, a portion of which is included at the end of this opinion, this Court should be more concerned about this relatively serious invasion of Cootz’s liberty. The sanction he received was not in the form of formal warnings, but rather prolonged disciplinary detention.
A quick review of the Disciplinary Offense Report, the main piece of documentary evidence in this case, raises serious questions as to whether the evidence against Cootz supports the severe sanction he received. Cootz was charged with offense code 05-C, which is described in the Department of Corrections Policy and Procedures Manual as:
Assault — any willful attempt or threat to inflict injury upon the person of another, when coupled with apparent present ability to do so, and any intentional display of force such as would give the victim reason to fear or expect immediate bodily harm.
Clearly, an element of offense 05-C is the “present ability” of the offender to carry out the assault, or a “display of force” which strikes fear in the victim.
According to the Disciplinary Offense Report of the incident, filed by the prison guard who alleged the attack:
I was on the tier putting inmates back in there cells from the exercise pens, I had inmate cootz 15995 out of the pen with his hands cuffed behind his back, as we passed cell # 6 inmate Garzee’s cell, inmate cootz hesitated for a moment and grabbed for something laying on the food-tray shelfeof that cell. I asked to see what it was: and Mr. cootz refused, saying Fuck-it, I’ll give it back, and he put it back on the shelf, as Mr. Garzee reached for it, I grabbed it to inspect it. At this time I seen a leg comming at me, but it was to quick for me to respond to *44and it struck me in the chest, knocking the wind out of me. Had I not had my arms in front of me the way I did, I believe it could have been far more severe, as my arms obsorbed most of the shock. I then stEpped back out of his reach and went to the E-Door to advis
Idaho Department of Corrections — Disciplinary Offense Report, Log Number 12 — 83— M-73 (mistakes in the original; emphasis added).
The difficulties encountered with this report, which formed the main thrust of the evidence against Cootz, should be obvious. Cootz is handcuffed, with his hands behind his back. Yet, he is supposedly able to remove an object from within an inmate’s cell as he is escorted past that cell. His guard-escort claims that Cootz kicked him in the chest, notwithstanding that his arms and hands were immobilized. The guard, who claims to have been kicked in the chest, does not fall backward but forward, with his hands out to stop his fall. Additionally, the status of Cootz as handcuffed is determined to not have affected his “present ability” to carry out the assault, or his ability to show a “display of force” which strikes fear in the victim.
Nevertheless, the “some evidence” rule is thought to be satisfied in this case, despite the glaring inconsistencies in the guard’s report. Cootz received only the process guaranteed him by the “some evidence” rule. Should ft be the rule that simply “some evidence” can justify prolonged severe disciplinary detention?
It should be remembered that those convicted of crime are made to pay their debt to society by removal from society, through confinement. On being convicted they are not sent to prison with directions that while incarcerated they are to have punishment inflicted upon them. Rather, such medieval days are far in the distant past. Justice Stevens, in his dissent in Meachum, explained, in simple yet forceful terms, why it is appropriate to distinguish, even for prisoners, between varying degrees of constraints on liberty:
The [United States Supreme] Court’s rationale [in Meachum ] is more disturbing than its narrow holding. If the Coui;t had merely held that the transfer of a prisoner from one penal institution to another does not cause a sufficiently grievous loss to amount to a deprivation of liberty within the meaning of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment [footnote omitted], I would disagree with the conclusion but not with the constitutional analysis. The Court’s holding today, however, appears to rest on a conception of ‘liberty’ which I consider fundamentally incorrect.
The Court indicates that a ‘liberty interest’ may have either of two sources. According to the Court, a liberty interest may ‘originate in the Constitution,’ or it may have ‘its roots in state law.’ Apart from those two possible origins, the Court is unable to find that a person has a constitutionally protected interest in liberty. [Citations omitted.]
If a man were a creature of the state, the analysis would be correct. But neither the Bill of Rights nor the laws of sovereign States create the liberty which the Due Process Clause protects. The relevant constitutional provisions are limitations on the power of the sovereign to infringe on the liberty of the citizen. The relevant state laws either create property rights, or they curtail the freedom of the citizen who must live in an ordered society. Of course, law is essential to the exercise and enjoyment of individual liberty in a complex society. But it is not the source of liberty, and surely not the exclusive source.
I had thought it self-evident that all men were endowed by their Creator with liberty as one of the cardinal unalienable rights. It is that basic freedom which the Due Process Clause protects, rather than the particular rights or privileges conferred by specific laws or regulations.
A correct description of the source of the liberty protected by the Constitution does not, of course, decide this case. For, by hypothesis, we are dealing with persons who may be deprived of their liberty because they have been convicted of criminal conduct after a fair trial. We should therefore first ask whether the *45deprivation of liberty which follows conviction is total or partial.
At one time the prevailing view was that deprivation was essentially total. The penitentiary inmate was considered ‘the slave of the State.’ See Ruffin v. Commonwealth, 62 Va. 790, 796 (1871). Although the wording of the Thirteenth Amendment provided some support for that point of view [footnote omitted], ‘courts in recent years have moderated the harsh implications of the Thirteenth Amendment.’
The moderating trend culminated in this Court’s landmark holding that notwithstanding the conditions of legal custody pursuant to a criminal conviction, a parolee has a measure of liberty that is entitled to constitutional protection^]
“We see, therefore, that the liberty of a parolee, although indeterminate, includes many of the core values of unqualified liberty and its termination inflicts a ‘grievous loss’ on the parolee and often on others. It is hardly useful any longer to try to deal with this problem in terms of whether the parolee’s liberty is a ‘right’ or a ‘privilege.’ By whatever name, the liberty is valuable and must be seen as within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment. Its termination calls for some orderly process, however informal.” Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U.S. 471, 482, 92 S.Ct. 2593, 2601, 33 L.Ed.2d 484.
Although the Court’s opinion [in Morrissey] was narrowly written with careful emphasis on the permission given to the parolee to live outside the prison walls, the Court necessarily held that the individual possesses a residuum of constitutionally protected liberty while in legal custody pursuant to a valid conviction. For release on parole is merely conditional, and it does not interrupt the State’s legal custody. I remain convinced that the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit correctly analyzed the true significance of the Morrissey holding, when I wrote for that court in 1973:
“In view of the fact that physical confinement is merely one species of legal custody, we are persuaded that Morrissey actually portends a more basic conceptual holding: liberty protected by the due process clause may — indeed must to some extent — coexist with legal custody pursuant to conviction. The deprivation of liberty following an adjudication of guilt is partial, not total. A residuum of constitutionally protected rights remains.
“As we noted in Morales v. Schmidt, the view once held that an inmate is a mere slave is now totally rejected. The restraints and the punishment which a criminal conviction entails do not place the citizen beyond the ethical tradition that accords respect to the dignity and intrinsic worth of every individual. [Footnote omitted.] ‘Liberty’ and ‘custody’ are not mutually exclusive concepts.
“If the Morrissey decision is not narrowly limited by the distinction between physical confinement and conditional liberty to live at large in society [footnote omitted], it requires that due process precede any substantial deprivation of the liberty of persons in custody. We believe a due regard for the interests of the individual inmate, as well as the interests of that substantial segment of our total society represented by inmates,23 requires that Morrissey be so read.” United States ex rel. Miller v. Twomey, 479 F.2d 701, 712-713. *46tion of Justice, Task Force Report: Corrections 82 (1967).]
It demeans the holding in Morrissey — more importantly it demeans the concept of liberty itself — to ascribe to that holding nothing more than a protection of an interest that the State has created through its own prison regulations. For if the inmate’s protected liberty interests are no greater than the State chooses to allow, he is really little more than the slave described in the 19th century cases. I think it clear that even the inmate retains an unalienable interest in liberty — at the very minimum the right to be treated with dignity — which the Constitution may never ignore.
This basic premise is not inconsistent with recognition of the obvious fact that the State must have wide latitude in determining the conditions of confinement that will be imposed following conviction of crime. To supervise and control its prison population, the State must retain the power to change the conditions for individuals, or for groups of prisoners, quickly and without judicial review. In many respects the State’s problems in governing its inmate population are comparable to those encountered in governing a military force. Prompt and unquestioning obedience by the individual, even to commands he does not understand, may be essential to the preservation of order and discipline. Nevertheless, within the limits imposed by the basic restraints governing the controlled population, each individual retains his dignity and, in time, acquires a status that is entitled to respect.
Imprisonment is intended to accomplish more than the temporary removal of the offender from society in order to prevent him from committing like offenses during the period of his incarceration. While custody denies the inmate the opportunity to offend, it also gives him an opportunity to improve himself and to acquire skills and habits that will help him to participate in an open society after his release. Within the prison community, if my basic hypothesis is correct, he has a protected right to pursue his limited rehabilitative goals, or at the minimum, to maintain whatever attributes of dignity are associated with his status in a tightly controlled society. It is unquestionably within the power of the State to change that status, abruptly and adversely; but if the change is sufficiently grievous, it may not be imposed arbitrarily. In such case due process must be afforded.
That does not mean, of course, that every adversity amounts to a deprivation within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.4
There must be grievous loss, and that term itself is somewhat flexible. I would certainly not consider every transfer within a prison system, even to more onerous conditions of confinement, such a loss. On the other hand, I am unable to identify a principled basis for differentiating between a transfer from the general prison population to solitary confinement and a transfer involving equally disparate conditions between one physical facility and another.
Meachum v. Fano, 427 U.S. 215, 229-235, 96 S.Ct. 2532, 2540-2543, 49 L.Ed.2d 451 (1976) (Stevens, J., dissenting) (emphasis added).
*47Perhaps that which Justice Stevens wrote in Meachum may be one day discovered as the sowing of the seeds of enlightenment.

. Superintendent, Massachusetts Correctional Institution v. Hill, 472 U.S. 445, 105 S.Ct. 2768, 86 L.Ed.2d 356 (1985).

 "A substantial portion of our population is affected by the law in this area. Approximately 1.3 million people are at any one time subject to correctional authority; untold millions have criminal records. There is increasing doubt as to the propriety of treating this large group of persons as, in varying degrees, outcasts from society. And there is increasing recognition that such treatment is not in the ultimate interests of society. Denying offenders any chance to challenge arbitrary assertions of power by correctional officials, and barring them from legitimate opportunities such as employment, are inconsistent with the correctional goal of rehabilitation, which emphasizes the need to instill respect for and willingness to cooperate with society and to help the offender assume the role of a normal citizen.” [President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administra-

 "This does not mean, however, that every decision by prison officials should be subject to judicial review or that the courts rather than experienced administrators should write prison regulations. Morrissey reminds us that due process is a flexible concept which takes account of the importance of the interests at stake; thus, it is abundantly clear that a myriad of problems of prison administration must remain beyond the scope of proper judicial concern. Only significant deprivations of liberty raise constitutional issues under Morrissey. Moreover, in determining whether to require due process, we need not choose between the ‘full panoply’ of rights afforded a defendant in a criminal prosecution, on the one hand, and no safeguards whatsoever, on the other. Rather, as Morrissey aptly illustrates, the requirements of due process may be shaped to fit the needs of a particular situation.” United States ex rel. Miller v. Twomey, 479 F.2d, at 713.