Court Opinion

ID: 9488686
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:52:48.817336+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:02.615482
License: Public Domain

JERRY E. SMITH, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent from the conscientious view of the panel majority. Unless and until we are told by a new appellate rule or by the Supreme Court that we should extend the rule of Houston v. Lack, 487 U.S. 266, 108 S.Ct. 2379, 101 L.Ed.2d 245 (1988), to all filings by prisoners, we should enunciate boundaries to the rule’s application. The majority, however, announces no such limitations.
In Houston, the prisoner had only thirty days to file a notice of appeal. Here, Cooper had two years to file his civil complaint. There is absolutely no showing that he needed to wait until the eleventh hour to file. Certainly, there is no intimation that the federal prison authorities hampered him in any way from preparing and filing his complaint. Hence, there is no unfairness in requiring Cooper to adhere to the same two-year limitations period required of all litigants in Texas.
One workable distinction between the instant case and one like Houston is that the Houston rule should apply only to relative short filing periods, not to extended periods that are usually applicable where statutes of limitations are involved. Using this rationale would also allow us to distinguish Thompson v. Rasberry, 993 F.2d 513, 515 (5th Cir.1993), in which we applied Houston to a ten-day filing period.
Moreover, as the majority notes, the appellate rule at issue in Houston has since been amended to conform to Houston. If there were a perceived problem in regard to limitations periods, presumably the policymakers would have amended the rule to cure that perceived inequity, as well. They did not, and we should take a clue from that inaction.
The majority does not mention that this circuit has already declined to extend the Houston rule to just any civil filing. In Guirguis v. Immigration & Naturalization Serv., 993 F.2d 508, 509-10 (5th Cir.1993), we refused to give the benefit of Houston to an alien, confined in a federal detention facility, who tardily filed a petition for review from an order of deportation, despite the fact that his confinement may have been similar to that of a prisoner in terms of the inability to control one’s own outgoing mail. We held that “the narrow exception carved out for pro se prisoners, based substantially upon the language of [Fed.R.App. P.] 3(a) and 4(a), is unavailable to petitioners aggrieved by orders of the [Board of Immigration Appeals] who wish to petition for review----” Id. at 510 (emphasis added).
*382The majority also rejects, as a distinction, that Cooper was confined in a federal prison, while the suit he was attempting to file was against county officials. In Houston, the petitioner was attempting to appeal a judgment in favor of the state, which at the time was confining him in prison. Here, an entirely different sovereign — a party with no interest in the lawsuit — is involved. This is another distinction significant enough to take this case out of the “narrow exception” created in Houston.
Again, the main question left unanswered by the panel majority’s diligent effort to reconcile our precedent is this: What are the neutral principles that tell us the limits to the Houston rule? In the absence of a rule that says so, should Houston be extended to discovery filings, pretrial orders, petitions for rehearing, motions for new trial, jury demands, or any combination of such matters? I would leave it to the drafters of the rules, cognizant of the policy concerns expressed in Houston, to tell us how far that principle should be extended.
I appreciate the difficulty the majority faces, confronted with some easelaw that extends Houston and other authority that does not. Here, there being no inequity, I would not stretch the rule to reach a prisoner who waited until the very end of a two-year period before taking advantage of his right to institute civil litigation.
“It is hard to understand why the Court felt the need to short-circuit the orderly process of rule amendment in order to provide immediate relief in the present case.” Houston, 487 U.S. at 284, 108 S.Ct. at 2389 (Scalia, J., dissenting). Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.