Court Opinion

ID: 9635094
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 13:36:25.176062+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:56:36.769428
License: Public Domain

CONCURRING OPINION

Justice TODD.
I agree with the conclusion reached by the majority that the Commonwealth Court correctly awarded summary judgment to Appellees in this case. However, I write separately because I disagree with the analysis employed by the majority in reaching this result.
After discussing the various tests suggested by federal caselaw, the majority adopts a test which does not reflect the current law in any federal court1 because it “promote[s] *431administrative discretion” to do so. Majority Op. at 427, 966 A.2d at 1121. I agree with the majority that protecting the discretion afforded prison officials in performing their difficult and important duties is a weighty policy goal; I disagree, however, that it is the only consideration in this type of case. Rather, for the reasons which follow, I would adopt the Third Circuit’s approach to prisoner retaliation claims as laid out in Rauser v. Horn, 241 F.3d 330 (3d Cir.2001).2
The majority correctly instructs that, in determining which approach to adopt, we should look to Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 107 S.Ct. 2254, 96 L.Ed.2d 64 (1987), and the state and federal Prison Litigation Reform Acts (“the PLRAs”), 42 Pa.C.S.A. § 6601 et seq. and P.L. 104-134 (codification scattered but particularly at 42 U.S.C.A. § 1997(e)), respectively, to derive the principles underlying our approach to prisoner litigation, and then adopt a test consistent with those principles. Majority Op. at 424-27, 427, 966 A.2d at 1119-20, 1120. However, while the majority suggests “retaliation claims are guided by the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Turner,” Majority Op. at 425, 966 A.2d at 1119, I note that Turner addresses prison regulations — not retaliation for constitutionally protected conduct. Accordingly, we should be mindful that while Turner outlines policy goals applicable to our consideration of prison litigation, it does not implicate the critical issue herein: adverse action by public officials taken as a result of the exercise of a person’s constitutional rights. For that reason, I believe we should instead begin with a consideration of the federal law of retaliation, and then consider how *432the particular policy concerns inherent in a prison setting affect the proper disposition of what is, fundamentally, a retaliation claim.
The law on employment retaliation claims is set out in the Supreme Court’s decision in Mount Healthy Bd. of Ed. v. Doyle, 429 U.S. 274, 97 S.Ct. 568, 50 L.Ed.2d 471 (1977).3 In that case, a discharged public school teacher alleged he was dismissed in retaliation for the exercise of his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The Supreme Court held that the teacher was required to show he had engaged in constitutionally protected conduct, and his constitutionally protected conduct was a “substantial factor” in the decision not to retain him. If it was, the court concluded, the burden of proof shifts to the school administrators who dismissed him, who could defeat his suit by proving they would have taken the same action regardless of whether the employee had taken the actions in question.4 Id. at 287, 97 S.Ct. 568.
In addition to the Third Circuit’s decision in Rauser, which I discuss in detail below, the Mount Healthy burden-shifting framework has been applied in the inmate retaliation context by several other federal circuit courts. See Sher v. Coughlin, 739 F.2d 77, 81 (2d Cir.1984); Thaddeus-X v. Blatter, 175 F.3d 378, 386 (6th Cir.1999) (en banc), Graham v. Henderson, 89 F.3d 75, 80 (2d Cir.1996), Babcock v. White, 102 F.3d 267, 275 (7th Cir.1996) (all applying Mount Healthy to claims of retaliation brought by prisoners); see also Siggers-El v. Barlow, 412 F.3d 693, 699 (6th Cir.2005); Hoskins v. Lenear, 395 F.3d 372, 375 (7th Cir.2005).
By contrast, the law governing prison regulation is set out in Turner. There, the Supreme Court noted that regulations imposed by prison administrators — who face a difficult task and are presumed to possess administrative expertise not typical of a member of the appellate bench — are entitled to *433judicial deference even where they impinge on inmates’ constitutional rights as long as the regulations are “reasonably related to legitimate penological interests.” Id. at 89, 107 S.Ct. 2254; see also Cutter v. Wilkinson, 544 U.S. 709, 125 S.Ct. 2113, 161 L.Ed.2d 1020 (2005) (repeatedly deferring to prison administrators’ judgment in implementing the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act). As a result, the courts do not micromanage prison policy, but afford a broad swath of discretion to prison officials endeavoring to preserve discipline and security in correctional institutions. To do otherwise would be to substitute judicial judgment, informed by only the written pleadings of the parties, for the judgment of career experts in prison administration and security. See Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U.S. 396, 404-05, 94 S.Ct. 1800, 40 L.Ed.2d 224 (1974) (noting that because “the problems of prisons in America are complex and intractable” and courts particularly “ill equipped” to deal with those problems, broad deference to prison administrators is appropriate), abrogated on other grounds, Thornburgh v. Abbott, 490 U.S. 401, 109 S.Ct. 1874, 104 L.Ed.2d 459 (1989).
As a result, until the middle of the 20th century, the rights of prisoners were, if any, exceedingly limited. See Shaw v. Murphy, 532 U.S. 223, 228-29, 121 S.Ct. 1475, 149 L.Ed.2d 420 (2001) (collecting cases). Nonetheless, courts have recognized for at least several decades that constitutional rights are not forfeited in toto at the prison door. In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a right of prisoners to access the courts to pursue criminal appeals and to petition the courts for writs of habeas corpus. Ex parte Hull, 312 U.S. 546, 61 S.Ct. 640, 85 L.Ed. 1034 (1941) (striking as unconstitutional a Michigan regulation which precluded prisoners from filing habeas petitions unless a parole board’s “legal investigator” found them “properly drawn”). The right to file habeas petitions was subsequently further explicated to provide inmates “adequate and effective appellate review” which would produce “a meaningful appeal” from conviction and that prisoners retain a “fundamental constitutional right of access to the courts.” See Bounds v. Smith, 430 U.S. 817, 822-23, 828, 97 S.Ct. 1491, 52 *434L.Ed.2d 72 (1977) (collecting cases). Since Bounds, the Supreme Court has recognized the right to access the courts so inmates may “challenge the conditions of their confinement.” Lewis v. Casey, 518 U.S. 343, 355, 116 S.Ct. 2174, 135 L.Ed.2d 606 (1996); see also Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994) (imposing a duty on the sovereign to “provide humane conditions of confinement”). While these two principles — providing access to the courts and preserving administrative discretion — may superficially appear to be in tension, that tension is easily resolved by the general rule that a right of access to the courts is preserved, but the courts, after granting access, will properly exercise restraint and defer to reasonable administrative decisions.
Consistent with this general rule, prisoners’ rights against transfer are both limited and vigorously disputed. There is, initially, no constitutional right to be detained in any particular prison. Meachum v. Fano, 427 U.S. 215, 224, 96 S.Ct. 2532, 49 L.Ed.2d 451 (1976) (“The Constitution does not require that the State have more than one prison for convicted felons; nor does it guarantee that the convicted prisoner will be placed in any particular prison, if, as is likely, the State has more than one correctional institution.... The conviction has sufficiently extinguished the defendant’s liberty interest to empower the State to confine him in any of its prisons.” (emphasis original)). Nor does a prisoner have any constitutional right against being transferred from one prison to another. See Olim v. Wakinekona, 461 U.S. 238, 251, 103 S.Ct. 1741, 75 L.Ed.2d 813 (1983).
However, in Montanye v. Haymes, 427 U.S. 236, 96 S.Ct. 2543, 49 L.Ed.2d 466 (1976), the Supreme Court held that the Due Process Clause does not impose judicial oversight on administrative decisions by prison officials as long as those decisions comport “with the sentence imposed upon [the prisoner] and are not otherwise violative of the Constitution.” Id. at 242, 96 S.Ct. 2543 (emphasis added). Courts have consistently interpreted this language to mean that where an inmate is subjected to retaliation for constitutionally protected conduct, his due process rights are violated even if the retaliatory act in itself would not give rise to a constitutional tort. See, *435e.g., Allah v. Seiverling, 229 F.3d 220, 224-25 (3d Cir.2000) (“[G]overnment actions, which standing alone do not violate the Constitution, may nonetheless be constitutional torts if motivated in substantial part by a desire to punish an individual for [the] exercise of a constitutional right.” (internal quotation marks omitted)); see also Gomez v. Vernon, 255 F.3d 1118, 1122 (9th Cir.2001), cert. denied, 534 U.S. 1066, 122 S.Ct. 667, 151 L.Ed.2d 581 (2001); Frazier v. Dubois, 922 F.2d 560 (10th Cir.1990); Bridges v. Russell, 757 F.2d 1155 (11th Cir.1985); Murphy v. Missouri Dep’t of Correction, 769 F.2d 502 (8th Cir.1985).
As the majority notes, Majority Op. at 426-28, 966 A.2d at 1120-21, the legislatures of this Commonwealth and of the United States have supplemented this jurisprudence by passing Prison Litigation Reform Acts, channeling grievances into internal resolution processes and attempting to decrease the burden frivolous prisoner complaints place on the judiciary.
Accordingly, prisoners’ rights are limited, but not eliminated, and while prisoners may be transferred from prison to prison for no reason at all, they may not be transferred in pure retaliation for the exercise of their constitutional rights. Allah, Rauser.
In Rauser, an inmate alleged that because he refused to enter into Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous programs which required participants to accept God as part of treating their addictions, the Department of Corrections (“DOC”) issued a negative parole recommendation and demoted him from a Class 3, Step D worker earning 41 cents an hour to a Class 1, Step A worker earning 18 cents an hour. 241 F.3d at 332. The court concluded Rauser pled three facts which might convince a reasonable jury that he was retaliated against for exercising his constitutional rights: (1) his own testimony that a DOC official threatened to deny him parole if he would “try and disrupt” the treatment programs with constitutional challenges; (2) the explicit DOC acknowledgment that Rauser’s negative parole recommendation was due to his failure to complete Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous; and (3) a “suggestive temporal proximity be*436tween his insistence on his First Amendment rights and his subsequent transfer and wage reduction.” Id. at 334. Finding Rauser demonstrated there were issues of material fact with respect to the three prongs set out above, and noting DOC offered no evidence that the actions against Rauser were taken for any legitimate penological reason, the court held that summary judgment was inappropriately granted. Accordingly, the court reversed the trial court’s order and remanded the matter for consideration on the merits.
In doing so, the Rauser court adopted the Mount Healthy burden-shifting framework. However, Rauser modified the Mount Healthy test by requiring defendant prison officials to show only a reasonable relationship between the challenged action and a legitimate penological objective, rather than requiring them to prove they would have taken the action regardless of the prisoner’s constitutionally protected conduct. The Rauser court justified this modification by reference to the deference afforded prison officials under Turner. Thus, Rauser requires a prisoner to show that: (1) he engaged in constitutionally protected conduct; (2) he suffered adverse action at the hands of prison officials; and (3) a causal link exists between his protected conduct and the adverse action against him; that is, that his protected conduct was “a substantial or motivating factor” for the action against him. 241 F.3d at 333 (citation omitted). If those three factors are met, the burden shifts to prison officials to prove that the challenged action was reasonably related to a legitimate penological interest. Id. at 334.
In my opinion, the virtue of the Rauser approach is its recognition that claims such as Appellant’s are fundamentally retaliation claims, and its preservation of the basic framework for retaliation claims laid out in Mount Healthy — requiring a threshold showing by the plaintiff of protected conduct, adverse action, and a causal relationship between the two, and then shifting the burden to administrators to demonstrate the action was permissible considering the level of discretion afforded them. Rauser further recognizes prison officials are entitled to greater deference than public employers because of the unique challenges surrounding prison administration, and *437so affords them greater discretion — applying the Turner standard of a reasonable relationship between administrative action and a legitimate administrative purpose, rather than requiring administrators to prove the prisoner’s protected conduct had no causal relation to the action against him. In short, Rauser affords prison officials’ administrative decisions heightened deference, but otherwise treats a retaliation claim in this context much like any other.5
Moreover, Rauser’s burden-shifting mechanism strikes the appropriate balance between protecting inmates’ constitutional rights and preserving a zone of discretion for prison administrators. Requiring an inmate bringing suit to demonstrate a causal relationship between his protected conduct and an adverse penological action imposes a high bar on lawsuits, satisfying the policy objective of filtering out groundless claims which underlies the PLRAs. Shifting the burden to prison officials to demonstrate a legitimate penological objective once a prisoner has met the substantial burden of showing causation preserves an appropriate role for the judiciary in protecting prisoners’ ability to exercise their constitutional rights without being subjected to retaliatory punishment by those with the most authority over their day-to-day lives.
By contrast, the majority’s chosen test — adopted from Abdul-Akbar, supra — adds an extra layer of deference by not shifting the burden to prison officials to establish a reasonable connection to a legitimate penological justification for their actions. The majority adopts this test without explaining why it is necessary to do so to protect administrators’ lawful discretion. Moreover, in imposing the burden on prisoners to disprove a legitimate penological justification, the majority assigns the burden of proof to the party less expert on the subject and without particular knowledge of prison adminis*438tration, or of the facts and circumstances underlying a particular transfer — even though courts have often held that a burden of proof should be placed on the party best able to meet that burden. See Fleming James, Jr. & Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr., Civil Procedure § 7.8 (3d ed. 1985) (cited in Lisa Brodoff, Lifting Burdens: Proof, Social Justice, and Public Assistance Administrative Hearings, 32 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 131, 178 n. 233 (2008)); see, e.g., 31A CJS Evidence 2003 (Effect of Particular Knowledge or Control of Evidence Generally); Campbell v. U.S., 365 U.S. 85, 96, 81 S.Ct. 421, 5 L.Ed.2d 428 (1961); Skeen v. Stanley Co. of America, 362 Pa. 174, 178, 66 A.2d 774, 776 (1949); Barrett v. Otis Elevator Co., 431 Pa. 446, 452-53, 246 A.2d 668, 672 (1968) (citing 9 Wigmore, Evidence § 2486 at 275 (1940)); Hepps v. Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc., 506 Pa. 304, 312, 485 A.2d 374, 378 (1984) (concluding that a burden should be placed on the party who “has peculiar means of knowledge of the particular fact in issue”), rev’d on other grounds, 475 U.S. 767, 106 S.Ct. 1558, 89 L.Ed.2d 783 (1986).6
Thus, while I disagree with the majority as to the proper test to apply to Appellant’s claim, I concur because I conclude *439Rauser does not compel a different result than Abdul-Akbar. As Justice Eakin’s majority opinion reasons, Appellant’s reliance on temporal proximity to show causation is insufficient to satisfy the third Rauser factor, so which party bears the burden of proof on the Turner issue is not essential to the outcome of this case. See Anderson v. Coors Brewing Co., 181 F.3d 1171, 1179 (10th Cir.1999) (“unless the termination is very closely connected in time to the protected activity, the plaintiff must rely on additional evidence beyond temporal proximity to establish causation” (emphasis supplied)).7 Indeed, Appellant can show only that he was transferred in the same year he brought suit against a government contractor. The temporal connection to DOC’s stated cause is much more direct, and the parties do not dispute any of the material facts. Accordingly, Appellant’s transfer is not closely connected to his initiation of the telecommunications litigation, and so Appellant has not introduced adequate evidence to enable a reasonable jury to find for him on the issue of causation. Compare Rauser, 241 F.3d at 334 (noting the plaintiff therein “presented a great deal of evidence” tending to show causation); see also Watkins v. Hosp. of University of Pennsylvania, Penn Health Systems, 737 A.2d 263, 267 (Pa.Super.1999) (holding “[sjpeculative causality is insufficient to defeat a motion for summary judgment”).
Chief Justice CASTILLE and Justice BAER join this opinion.

. I recognize, of course, that we are not bound by the decisions of federal district and circuit courts. See, e.g., Office of Disciplinary Counsel v. Marcone, 579 Pa. 1, 17 n. 12, 855 A.2d 654, 664 n. 12 (Pa.2004). However, the majority has chosen to follow an (implicitly) rejected district court decision, Abdul-Akbar, supra, rather than the appellate judgment which displaced it, Rauser, supra. Moreover, in the instant case, the parties both explicitly urge that we adopt Rauser and apply it in Pennsylvania, although their readings of the decision differ. See Brief for Appellant at 14; Brief for Appellees at 8.

. The majority opinion follows Abdul-Akbar v. Department of Corrections, 910 F.Supp. 986 (D.Del.1995), aff'd without opinion, 111 F.3d *431125 (3d Cir.1997). However, that opinion has been displaced by the Third Circuit’s decision in Rauser v. Horn, 241 F.3d 330 (3d Cir.2001).

. Although different circuits apply different tests to inmate retaliation claims, the United States Supreme Court has not yet spoken to whether Mount Healthy applies to retaliation claims filed in this context.

. The teacher exercised his right to free speech by, inter alia, informing a disc jockey at a local radio station of the substance of a memorandum to teachers from the principal dealing with the subject of teacher attire. 429 U.S. at 282, 97 S.Ct. 568.

. The policy imperative of promoting administrative discretion is not a blank check; rather, that policy goal has merely prompted the federal courts to permit that broad swath of administrative regulation which is reasonably related to a legitimate penological objective. Turner, It does not eliminate or undermine the competing policy concern underlying retaliation jurisprudence — preventing public administrators from punishing anyone, employee or prisoner, for the mere exercise of their constitutional rights.

. The other tests proffered by the various federal circuits are also, in my opinion, inferior to the Rauser approach. Requiring an inmate to demonstrate but-for causality, as do the First, Fifth, Eighth, and Tenth Circuit Courts of Appeal, see McDonald v. Hall, 610 F.2d 16, 18 (1st Cir.1979), Woods v. Smith, 60 F.3d 1161, 1166 (5th Cir.1995), Goff v. Burton, 7 F.3d 734, 737 (8th Cir.1993), Peterson v. Shanks, 149 F.3d 1140, 1144 (10th Cir.1998), would risk imposing an unreasonably high bar and deferring not just to reasonable administrative decisions, but even to unreasonable ones. Moreover, applying a but-for test of causation would require a searching judicial inquiry into prison officials' motivation, since a court would have to consider every document with any relationship to the action or similar actions. This would impose a very high burden of production on officials while, as in Abdul-Akbar, imposing a high burden of persuasion on plaintiffs, simultaneously rendering it difficult for prisoners subjected to retaliation to obtain judicial review and, in violation of the express intent of the drafters of the state and federal PLRAs, rendering it difficult for prison officials to focus on doing their jobs rather than responding to multitudinous discovery requests. Furthermore, requiring a restriction to be "narrowly tailored” to achieve a legitimate objective, as does the Ninth Circuit, see Rhodes v. Robinson, 408 F.3d 559, 567-68 (9th Cir.2005), imposes a level of scrutiny inconsistent with the broad discretion *439afforded prison officials under both statutory and United States Supreme Court precedent.

. Where temporal proximity alone does not support an inference of causation, courts considering employment cases have traditionally looked to whether the period between the protected conduct and the adverse action was marked by ongoing antagonism. See, e.g., Farrell v. Planters Lifesavers Co., 206 F.3d 271, 279 (3d Cir.2000). Appellant proffers no such evidence here.