Court Opinion

ID: 9488730
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:54:26.892425+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:04.602941
License: Public Domain

BOUDIN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
This case turns centrally on the interpretation of a provision of a 1984 consent decree settling a case that Langton and LeBlanc brought against Massachusetts corrections officials. The majority’s opinion contains many unexceptionable statements of law, but on the pivotal issue — the reading of a sentence of the 1984 decree — the majority’s reading simply does not square with either the decree’s language or its purpose. Indeed, because this case involves the regulation of a state agency by federal judges under an elderly consent decree, it raises issues of policy and judicial attitude that go beyond a mere quarrel about decree language.
1. In 1979, Langton and LeBlanc filed a 1983 action against the state prison authorities complaining of mistreatment. The complaint alleged that using corrections officers to distribute medication violated state health laws and the Constitution; that the number of telephone calls permitted to the plaintiffs was too few and the time limit too short; and finally that the prison had been monitoring telephone calls — one call by Langton to an attorney was specified — and that such monitoring violated 18 U.S.C. § 2510 and Mass. Gen.Laws ch. 272, § 99, the federal and state wiretapping statutes.
In an April 1983 decision, the district court considered the medication and limited-calls issues at some length, and it concluded that no protected rights had been violated and ordered summary judgment for the defendants. In a brief discussion of the monitoring issue, the district court said that “[n]on-consensual monitoring of inmate calls may violate 18 U.S.C. § 2510,” citing a then-recent decision of this court. Although the defendants denied any such monitoring, Langton’s affidavit described one incident in which he thought that a telephone call to his lawyer had been monitored; the court said that the affidavits, “if just barely,” created a factual issue precluding summary judgment.
In October 1984 the parties entered a settlement agreement that dealt with several different grievances. The proposed remedies included new regulations permitting inmates’ access to telephones for at least 15 minutes per day, furnishing Langton a three-drawer metal file cabinet and a stereo system in his cell, and arrangements concerning Langton’s use of an electric typewriter in the prison library. Finally, the parties agreed to the entry of a permanent injunction whose main paragraph read as follows:
All officers, agents, servants, employees and attorneys of the Department of Correction are enjoined permanently, under both 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510 et seq. and M.G.L. c. 272, §§ 99 et seq., from intercepting, endeavoring to intercept, or procuring any other person to intercept, any wire communication by or to William Langton or David LeBlanc, inmates within the custody of the Department, without a specific court *939order or legislative authorization to do so, except as specifically permitted by these statutes, taken together, as they have been amended or may be amended and as they have been construed or may be construed in reported decisions that are binding in this Court or in the state courts of Massachusetts.
There has been no showing that this provision aimed to resolve any dispute between the parties as to what was or was not unlawful. Indeed, the settlement agreement said, in the paragraph proposing the injunction just quoted, that corrections officers “specifically deny that any of them, or anyone acting in concert with any of them, ever intercepted or monitored any of Langton’s or David Le-Blanc’s wire communications by any means, lawful or unlawful....” In short, the parties disagreed about whether monitoring had occurred, and the matter was settled by a forward-looking decree that enjoined obedience to two cited statutes.
In recent years, prisons have encountered a growing number of problems created by inmate telephone calls.1 These problems include the use of telephones to obtain narcotics in prisons, to promote illegal drug trading outside of prison as well as other criminal operations, commit fraud in the purchase of merchandise and goods for prisoners, and to carry out obstructions of justice and escape plots. Ultimately Massachusetts followed a number of other prison systems including the federal prison system in adopting a standardized regime to control and track inmate use of the telephone system.
The new Massachusetts regime allows each inmate to list up to ten family members and friends and up to five private attorneys or law firms, in addition to three automatically authorized legal service organizations. Each inmate can place a call only by using his or her personal identification number, and the technology restricts the call to one of the 18 telephone numbers authorized for that inmate. To obtain such a PIN number, the inmate completes a form that requires the inmate’s consent to various conditions, including call monitoring, call recording and the retention of various “details” incident to the call (e.g., the time of the call, the number called). But calls to attorneys, law firms and the legal service organizations are not subject to monitoring or recording.
Langton and LeBlanc refused to complete the consent forms, were denied telephone access, and in June 1994 began the contempt proceeding that prompted the present appeal. When the defendants moved to dismiss the petition on the ground that they had not violated the consent decree, the district judge indicated that a motion to modify the decree should be filed. Without agreeing that it was necessary, the defendants filed the suggested motion. Their affidavits provide reasons why they think it impractical or dangerous to except Langton and LeBlanc from the regime that is now applied to all other prisoners.
In February 1995, the district judge entered an unpublished decision which treated the issue before the court as a motion for modification of the consent decree. Fed. R.Civ.P. 60(b)(5), (6). The court granted the government’s motion in part and denied it in part, ruling that the new regime did respond to new technology and real threats of abuse, that Langton and LeBlanc could be limited as to the number of telephone calls they could make, but that there was no pattern of abuse by either of them to justify the monitoring of their calls. The core of the court’s injunctive judgment is that prison officials cannot monitor or record calls made by these two plaintiffs.
2. The broad question on appeal is whether the monitoring and recordation regime violates the consent decree. The district court evidently assumed that it did — thus its suggestion that the government file a motion for modification — but it never addressed this issue in detail. Yet if the regime does not violate the consent decree, the contempt proceeding case should have been dismissed and the Rule 60(b) motion mooted. Langton and LeBlanc have never moved to modify the decree to enlarge their rights; and prison officials, in moving to modify the decree in *940their favor (in accordance with the district court’s suggestion), certainly were not abandoning their bedrock position that the new regime was lawful under the decree and did not require any decree modification.
In my view, a realistic reading of the 1984 decree provision is that it effectively enjoined state prison officials from violating the cited provisions of federal or state law and nothing more. True the provision was clumsily worded: it juxtaposed a ban on interception, itself a term differently defined under the two cited statutes, with an awkward but broadly worded qualification, namely, that interceptions are allowed “as specifically permitted by the statutes, taken together, as they may have been amended or may be amended and as they have been construed or may be construed in reported decisions that are binding in this Court or the state courts of Massachusetts.”
The injunction could and probably should have used a much simpler formulation, such as a ban on “unlawful” interceptions, but everyone knows that lawyers often overwrite legal documents. There is no indication anywhere that the phrase “specifically permitted” means anything more than “permitted,” the term “specifically” being the kind of legal flourish that usually causes more trouble than it solves. In any event, the provision itself describes the defendants as “enjoined ... under both 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510 et seq. and M.G.L. c. 272, §§ 99 et seq.” and nothing in the provision suggests that the injunction was intended to be broader than the statutes themselves.
This view is confirmed by the “circumstances surrounding the formation of the consent order” which are properly considered in its interpretation. United States v. ITT Continental Baking Co., 420 U.S. 223, 238, 95 S.Ct. 926, 935, 43 L.Ed.2d 148 (1975). The casus belli, it must be remembered, was a claim, denied by prison officials, that they had monitored an inmate’s call to his lawyer, something that no one would expect a court or legislature to authorize. The prison officials, who never contended that such a monitoring of calls to lawyers would be lawful, simply denied that they did any monitoring. The parties then settled the ease by having the defendants enjoined to obey federal and state law on interception, as it might be construed by courts or amended by legislatures from time to time.
The panel majority expresses disbelief that plaintiffs in a lawsuit would ever settle merely for a promise by defendants to obey the law. But in fact such provisions are common in decrees (SEC consent decrees are a classic example) and, in any event, a promise simply to obey the law made perfectly good sense in this ease. The settlement provided Langton and LeBlanc a small number of specific benefits already described. As to telephone monitoring, the prison did not defend listening in on a telephone call between an inmate and his lawyer, but denied that monitoring had occurred or was routinely practiced. Lang-ton and LeBlanc then settled for a general provision that made the prison officials subject to contempt proceedings if they did violate the law in the future.
If the decree is read in this fashion, then the contempt motion boils down to the question whether the prison’s new regime is lawful under the relevant statutes. Nothing in the decree’s terms prohibits monitoring or .recording as such. The decree uses the term “interception” which is a statutory concept freighted with exceptions, and the decree’s ban is itself subject to the broad “except as” clause already described. Nor does the panel majority hold that the present regime is unlawful under the federal and state statutes but only that reasonable arguments can be made on both sides.
The issue of the regime’s lawfulness under the statutes may be debatable, but it is doubtful that it is a close call. Massachusetts has adopted a widely used model, used by the federal prison system as well, see generally 28 C.F.R. § 540.100 et seq., and practically all the case law cited in the briefs tends to support it.2 Given the general *941wording of the federal and state statutes, and the strong policy considerations for giving prison officials “appropriate deference and flexibility,” Sandin v. Conner, — U.S. -, -, 115 S.Ct. 2293, 2299, 132 L.Ed.2d 418 (1995), it is very unlikely that a regime like that of Massachusetts would be struck down, even if there are possible occasional applications that might raise hard questions.
In any event, once it is understood that the decree only precludes unlawful interception, the district court has provided no basis for entering a judgment against the prison officials since that court did not find that the regime violated federal or state law. It is true that this general question is one of law that we might in theory resolve ourselves; but no such theory has been adequately briefed by the plaintiffs, and no decision of a district court on this issue has ever been rendered. The proper solution in this case is to vacate the district court’s 1995 judgment and remand to give the plaintiffs the opportunity to show that the present regime is unlawful, and therefore in violation of the decree.
The panel majority’s contrary construction of the decree does not rest on an attempt to grapple seriously with its language and background. Rather, the majority relies primarily on several rather general propositions: that parties sometimes do resolve by consent decree legal issues that are reasonably debatable, that such resolutions have an operative effect through the consent decree, and that parties are bound by the decree even if the legal issues should have been decided the other way. These notions might have some bearing if the prison officials had agreed, with no exceptions, that “monitoring and re-cordation” are prohibited. But the defendants did not make such a bargain, so the general propositions relied on by the majority have nothing to do with this case.
To sum up, the panel majority could decide on the merits whether the new Massachusetts regime does violate the federal or state statutes, and it would be equally permissible, and in my view more appropriate, to vacate the 1995 judgment, to remand and to allow the district court to consider this set of issues in the first instance. But what is not tenable is an interpretation of the 1984 consent decree, "without serious support in either its phrasing or its context, that enjoins Massachusetts officials from doing what (so far as we know from the precedents) they lawfully can do under existing federal and state law.
Courts have been widely criticized in recent years for excessively interfering with state institutions such as prisons and, of course, these charges are often made by those who are unaware of the abusive conditions that the federal decrees are invoked to remedy. But it does behoove federal judges — who do not have political responsibility for managing these institutions — to consider with care and modesty how they interpret their authority, especially in construing elderly decrees as applied to entirely new sets of conditions.

. This intervening history is recounted in defense affidavits filed in the district court incident to the latest round of litigation and the description was largely accepted by the district court.

. E.g., United States v. Horr, 963 F.2d 1124, 1126 (8th Cir.1992); United States v. Sababu, 891 F.2d 1308, 1326-30 (7th Cir.1989); United States v. Willoughby, 860 F.2d 15, 19-21 (2d Cir.1988); Martin v. Tyson, 845 F.2d 1451, 1458 (7th Cir.1988); United States v. Amen, 831 F.2d 373, 378-80 (2d Cir.1987); United States v. Paul, 614 F.2d 115, 117 (6th Cir.1980); United States v. Green, *941842 F.Supp. 68, 71-72 (W.D.N.Y.1994); United States v. Valencia, 711 F.Supp. 608, 611 (S.D.Fla.1989); Lee v. Carlson, 645 F.Supp. 1430, 1438-39 (S.D.N.Y.1986).