Court Opinion

ID: 9476090
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:47:08.609341+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:07.232194
License: Public Domain

ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
with whom HEANEY, Circuit Judge, joins, dissenting.
The plaintiff, Troy Dace, is in jail, and, like most people in that condition, he wants out. The State of South Dakota has decided not to let him out, but will not say why. That is the uncomplicated fact situation that gives rise to this case.
Dace loses his plea today not because the fairness of the State’s procedures for determining his liberty or the lack thereof measure up to the Federal Constitution, but because his case does not involve “liberty” at all, as that word is used in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. For those who speak English, this is not an easy holding to understand. The whole issue in a system of parole is whether a prisoner, validly convicted and incarcerated, shall be set free before the expiration of his term. If parole is granted, the prisoner is given liberty. If it is denied, he is not. One would have thought that it would be the easiest thing in the world to determine that the prisoner’s “liberty” is at stake in this situation. On this view, the focus of cases such as this would be on the phrase “without due process of law.” The basic question would be what process is due, and no time would be spent analyzing the niceties of state statutes and regulations to determine whether the decision to let someone out of jail, or keep him in, involves “liberty.”
This view of the Due Process Clause, which I recognize is now out of date, seems to me more faithful to what the framers of that great provision had in mind. As Mr. Justice Frankfurter once put it, “The right to be heard before being condemned to suffer grievous loss of any kind ... is a principle basic to our society.” Joint Anti-Fascist Committee v. McGrath, 341 U.S. 123, 149, 168, 71 S.Ct. 624, 636, 646, 95 L.Ed. 817 (1951) (concurring opinion). A similar view was advocated by Mr. Justice Powell, concurring in part and dissenting in part in Greenholtz v. Inmates of the Nebraska Penal and Correctional Complex, 442 U.S. 1, 18, 99 S.Ct. 2100, 2109, 60 L.Ed.2d 668 (1979). Greenholtz is the fountain of Supreme Court doctrine on the application of the Due Process Clause to discretionary parole-release determinations, and all of the cases that have followed it are essentially explications of the Court’s opinion in Greenholtz, which, as Chief Judge Lay’s opinion for our Court today makes clear, turns the existence of federal constitutional protection on the particular words of state statutes and regulations. Justice Powell would have taken a different tack:
I do not believe ... that the applicability of the Due Process Clause to parole-release determinations depends upon the particular wording of the statute govem*1284ing the deliberations of the parole board____
442 U.S. at 18, 99 S.Ct. at 2109. He would have held simply that
when a State adopts a parole system that applies general standards of eligibility, prisoners justifiably expect that parole will be granted fairly and according to law whenever those standards are met. This is so, whether the governing statute states, as here, that parole “shall” be granted unless certain conditions exist, or provides some other standards for making the parole decision.
Id. at 19, 99 S.Ct. at 2110.
Consider for a moment the anomalies that the Greenholtz doctrine have produced. Parole cases, and many other kinds of cases dealing with the treatment of prisoners, now depend completely upon choices made by the states and their administrative agencies. If the state decides to publish no criteria whatever for the granting or withholding of parole, prisoners who are not paroled are not deprived of their “liberty” in a federal constitutional sense. Only if a state does publish criteria and give certain assurances, the degree of specificity of which is not easy to define, will the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment come into play. Thus, the existence of a federal constitutional right is at bottom only a matter of grace for a state to grant or deny. I can understand such a holding with respect to “property,” also protected by the Due Process Clause, because this word naturally refers to a pre-existing system of law, common law at first, and now increasingly statutory, laid down by the states in their capacity as residual sovereigns governing most of the day-to-day relationships of citizens. “Property” is a legal category. The word describes a legal relationship: the right of one person to exclude others from the possession and enjoyment of a certain thing. “Liberty,” however, like “life,” sounds more like a reference to a simple fact than to a legal conclusion or relationship. If someone is in jail, he is not at liberty. If he is released on parole, he is at liberty, at least to a greater extent than people still in jail. Yet, in the present state of legal doctrine set out in Supreme Court opinions, and therefore binding on us, many cases of liberty are decided as if they were property cases, wholly dependent on local law. Perhaps that is why court opinions interpreting the Due Process Clause often speak not of “liberty” as such, but rather of “liberty interests.”
All of this is by way of gratuitous comment in the present legal context. The Court’s opinion today is quite right in applying current doctrine. It is quite wrong, though, in my view, in reaching the result it does. The question comes down to this: Has the State of South Dakota, either in its statutes or its regulations, established “particularized standards or criteria [that] guide [its] decisionmakers”? Connecticut Board of Pardons v. Dumschat, 452 U.S. 458, 467, 101 S.Ct. 2460, 2466, 69 L.Ed.2d 158 (1981) (Brennan, J., concurring), quoted with approval in Olim v. Wakinekona, 461 U.S. 238, 249, 103 S.Ct. 1741, 1747, 75 L.Ed.2d 813 (1983). If such particularized standards or criteria do exist, Dace has a right to expect that they will be followed, and he also has a right to procedures that will make it likely that they will be followed. Here, as the panel opinion explains, Dace v. Mickelson, 797 F.2d 574, 577-78 (8th Cir.1986), the administrative regulations governing parole do provide substantive guidance for board decisionmaking. Certain criteria must be considered, including “all available history, medical, social and psychological information, past and present difficulties, institutional adjustment and progress of the inmate and treatment possibilities or other plans for the inmate.” A.R.S.D. 17:60:02:01. Of course the decision is still discretionary, in the sense that the very existence and significance of these criteria are subject to informed professional judgment, but it still must be admitted that the regulation confines official decisionmakers and does not leave them completely free to do whatever the Board of Pardons and Parole may wish. Parole is not a matter of whim, but rather of discretion guided by substantive criteria. If the criteria seem vague and unspecific, leaving a great deal of room for judgment, the same is true of the Nebraska statute held to create a liberty interest in Greenholtz. This statute referred, among other *1285-1295things, to the following factors: Whether there is a substantial risk that an inmate would not conform to the conditions of parole; whether release would promote disrespect for law; and whether continued correctional “treatment” would substantially enhance the inmate’s capacity to lead a law-abiding life when released at a later date. If these are substantive criteria, and the Court concedes that they are, ante at 1282, where is the line that distinguishes them from the criteria required by the regulation in effect in the present case? I do not see such a line.
This is not a case, then, in which the inmate must contend that the mere existence of state-created procedures creates a constitutionally protected liberty interest. Here, rather, the state has voluntarily chosen to go beyond mere procedure and to set forth certain criteria or factors that must be considered. If, to take an example, the state should deny parole and, while doing so, state explicitly that it had not considered the inmate’s institutional adjustment and progress, the regulation would be violated, and the inmate would presumably be entitled to some kind of relief under the state’s equivalent of the Administrative Procedure Act. Discretion, though present, would have been abused. One of the traditional meanings of abuse of discretion is a decision taken without considering some significant factor that the law makes relevant. But under this Court’s decision today, neither Dace nor anyone else will ever know whether the Board of Pardons and Parole did consider all of the factors that state law required it to consider. This is so because the Board is not required by state law to give reasons for its decision, and because it has refused to do so. For a government to keep someone in jail without giving a reason is one of the earmarks of tyranny.
If Dace were to allege that his parole had been denied because of some political belief, or because he had pointed out some wrongdoing by prison officials, I suppose the Court would have little trouble reaching the conclusion that a claim had been stated under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet, the federal constitutional right involved in such a case would derive from the very clause, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, that the Court today holds completely inapplicable. This is an internal contradiction in constitutional doctrine to which I cannot subscribe. If Dace’s interest in being released on parole is “liberty” when he claims that release has been denied for some constitutionally forbidden reason, why is it not also “liberty” when he claims simply that fair procedures have not been followed? The two aspects of due process are intimately related. For without fair procedures, the likelihood that parole and other governmental decisions will be made for constitutionally impermissible reasons is greatly increased. Dace’s parole may well have been denied for reasons that everyone would acknowledge as good and acceptable, but neither he nor anyone else can ever know that if the law remains as the Court has announced it today. Compare Cafeteria & Restaurant Workers Local Union v. McElroy, 367 U.S. 886, 901, 81 S.Ct. 1743, 1751, 6 L.Ed.2d 1230 (1961) (Brennan, J., dissenting, joined by Warren, C.J., Black and Douglas, JJ.).
For these reasons, as well as those stated in more detail in the panel opinion, I respectfully dissent.