Court Opinion

ID: 9491016
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:01:15.507946+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:27.581173
License: Public Domain

JOHN R. GIBSON, Circuit Judge,
with whom HEANEY and McMILLIAN, Circuit Judges, join, dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. The court today simply ignores the record before the district court and principles restraining our review of motions on summary judgment.
This case presents a factual dispute relevant to whether the rule in question is rationally related to a governmental interest that is legitimate and neutral. See Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 89-90, 107 S.Ct. 2254, 2261-62, 96 L.Ed.2d 64 (1987). Both the rationality of the rule and its neutrality are put into question by the evidence Weiler has presented.
Although the “rational relation” standard is appropriately deferential to the judgment of prison administrators, it does not make the prison officials’ explanations for their actions the last and only word to be considered on the subject. A prisoner can still prevail by showing that a prison policy is “an exaggerated response to [stated] security objectives,” id. at 97-98, 107 S.Ct. at 2266, as did the prisoners challenging the marriage regulations in Safley. One way of showing such an exaggerated response is by showing that the prison officials have not thought it necessary to impose the restriction on other similarly situated prisoners. For instance, in Safley, the stated reason for withholding approval of women inmates’ marriages was to promote rehabilitation by avoiding “dependency.” The rationality of that justification was rendered suspect by evidence that the marriages of male inmates were routinely approved. The Supreme Court stated, “That kind of lopsided rehabilitation concern cannot provide a justification for the broad Missouri marriage rule.” Id. at 99, 107 S.Ct. at 2267. Similarly, in Thornburgh v. Abbott, 490 U.S. 401, 417 n. 15; 109 S.Ct. 1874, 1883 n. 15, 104 L.Ed.2d 459 (1989), the Court stated that claims of inconsistency in application of a rule went “to the adequacy of the regulations as applied, and [should be] considered on remand.” In the same vein, we held that uneven application of rules raised factual is*1053sues as to whether those rules were rationally related to announced security concerns in Griffin v. Lombardi, 946 F.2d 604, 608 (8th Cir.1991), and Thongvanh v. Thalacker, 17 F.3d 256, 259 (8th Cir.1994). If the factual record in a case shows that the prison officials thought so little of the need for the rule that they neglected to enforce it, their actions are relevant to the issue of whether there was enough need to justify the rule’s entrenchment on the prisoner’s (admittedly abridged) First Amendment rights.
The record in this case contains both evidence of such neglect and evidence that the rule was enforced. Weiler presented the affidavits of ten inmates who said they had received legal papers from family or friends, despite the existence of the rule under which Weller’s papers were confiscated. The prison mail room supervisor, Leah Embly, and the prison superintendent, James Purkett, submitted affidavits that, to their knowledge, “there has never been an exception made to those policies either officially or unofficially.” Weiler’s side of the story, with permissible inferences, would indicate that enforcement of the rule was arbitrary rather than rational. See Thongvanh, 17 F.3d at 259. We cannot choose between contradictory accounts on motion for summary judgment.
The evidence of irregularity in enforcement is also relevant to the neutrality of the rule as applied. If the rule is not enforced as written but is occasionally invoked, one can infer that it is enforced according to some other less neutral principle than that stated.
The factual dispute about how this rule was applied should not be resolved on motion for summary judgment. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.