Phil White v. Indiana Parole Board

266 F.3d 759, 2001 WL 1158918

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
• Decided: October 23, 2001
• Docket: 00-2425
• Status: Published

Opinions

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge.

While confined in the Marion County Jail, Phil White was accused of drug trafficking with the aid of Yvonne Davis, a prison employee, and Shaquilla Harrison, Davis’s daughter (and the mother of White’s child). The prison’s Conduct Adjustment Board stripped White of 120 days’ good-time credit; it also reduced his credit-earning classification. White took two administrative appeals, first to the warden and then to a tribunal maintained by the Indiana Department of Corrections. Both the warden and the Department sustained the Board’s decision, although the Department increased White’s credit-earning rate. Indiana does not provide judicial review of such actions, so White’s next stop was federal court, where he contends in this action under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 that the Board did not afford him due process of law. See Edwards v. Balisok, 520 U.S. 641, 117 S.Ct. 1584, 137 L.Ed.2d 906 (1997). White complains that the officer who investigated and filed the trafficking charge conferred with the Board’s members after the close of evidence, and that he did not receive a copy of a videotaped interview Davis had with investigating officers. The district court denied the petition.

1. The day after oral argument of his appeal, White was released on parole. Indiana contends in supplemental memoranda filed at our request that White’s parole makes this proceeding moot, on the theory that only the terminal date of his sentence — a date unaffected by good-time credits — now concerns him. The Board’s decision delayed his parole but does not affect how long parole continues after release. Indiana law provides that parole never lasts more than two years, or the end of the sentence, whichever comes first. I.C. § 35-50-6-1. White was paroled on June 8, 2001, so his supervision will end on June 7, 2003, three days before his sentence expires. More good-time credits would not advance the expiration of his sentence. Majors v. Broglin, 531 N.E.2d 189 (Ind.1988). Because neither the two-year period nor the end of the sentence depends on the disciplinary action, the state contends that the Board’s decision has no current consequences and the case must be moot. See Spencer v. Kemna, 523 U.S. 1, 118 S.Ct. 978, 140 L.Ed.2d 43 (1998); Murphy v. Hunt, 455 U.S. 478, 102 S.Ct. 1181, 71 L.Ed.2d 353 (1982).

The difficulty with this position is that it disregards the link between good-time credits and release on parole. The Board’s decision postponed the start of White’s parole by approximately six months. Because parole in Indiana lasts a maximum of two years, the Board’s decision also postpones the end of White’s supervision: had he been released, say, on December 8, 2000, his parole would be over by December 7, 2002, rather than June 7, 2003. This means that the federal court has the power to affect the duration of White’s custody (for parole is a form of custody): If the disciplinary hearing is deemed defective, the court may order Indiana to terminate White’s parole when it would have expired, but for the Board’s decision on the drug-trafficking charge. The proceeding is not moot.

2. Indiana offers a second procedural contention: that unless the Board’s procedures contravene a decision of the Supreme Court, or apply that Court’s decisions unreasonably, collateral relief is precluded. The state relies on 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d), as amended by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996:

An application for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a person in custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court shall not be granted with respect to any claim that was adjudicated on the merits in State court proceedings unless the adjudication of the claim—

(1) resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States; or

(2) resulted in a decision that was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding.

Both the language of the aedpa and Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 412, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000), show that, when this provision applies, decisions of courts other than the Supreme Court must be disregarded. Only that Court’s own decisions, and not glosses applied by other tribunals, may be enforced on collateral review. Cf. Tyler v. Cain, — U.S. -, 121 S.Ct. 2478, 150 L.Ed.2d 632 (2001). This could be a substantial advantage for Indiana, because Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U.S. 539, 94 S.Ct. 2963, 41 L.Ed.2d 935 (1974), the Supreme Court’s principal decision articulating procedural requirements for prison disciplinary hearings, does not directly support either branch of White’s argument.

But does § 2254(d) apply? White is “a person in custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court”, but how was his “claim ... adjudicated on the merits in State court proceedings”? The Conduct Adjustment Board is not a court, and Indiana did not afford judicial review of such a Board’s decision. How then could § 2254(d) be relevant? According to the state, § 2254(d) uses the word “court” in different ways. The first reference (“judgment of a State court”) uses the word in its normal sense, as an institution with legally trained judges following rules of evidence and adversarial procedure with lawyers available to both sides. (Only such an institution may enter a lawful judgment committing an accused to prison.) The second time the word appears (“adjudicated on the merits in State court proceedings”), according to the state, it takes a special sense equivalent to “any adjudicatory body.” Agencies can and do adjudicate even though they follow inquisitorial procedures and lack lawyers; the Board is an agency;' hence, Indiana insists, it is a “court” for purposes of § 2254(d).

This is not a natural reading of the word — not only because it is unusual to treat agencies as courts but also because it requires the word “court” to have two meanings in one sentence. Still, the state has some support in this circuit’s decisions. Markham v. Clark, 978 F.2d 993 (7th Cir.1992), reads the word “court” in § 2254(b)(1)(A) to include all adjudicatory bodies. (Markham predates the aedpa, but the language it interpreted has been carried forward with minimal change.) Section 2254(b)(1)(A) requires state prisoners to exhaust “the remedies available in the courts of the State” before seeking collateral relief in federal court. Markham holds that an appellate apparatus within a prison system is a “court” for this purpose and thus that state prisoners deprived of good-time credits must use all ■ available administrative remedies. That is why White had to appeal to the warden and then the Indiana Department of Corrections before seeking federal review. Section 2254(c) supports this usage of the word “court” by providing that “[a]n applicant shall not be deemed .to have exhausted the remedies available in the courts of the State, within the meaning of this section, if he has the right under the law of the State to raise, by any available procedure, the question presented.” (Emphasis added.)

One could read § 2254(c) as limited to any judicial procedure (so that state prisoners must resort to collateral attacks, mandamus, and other remedies, as well as direct appeals), but Markham concluded that it means any procedure at all, judicial or not. Nothing like § 2254(c) enlarges the definition of “court” for purposes of § 2254(d), and the latter section serves a function — enlarging the extent to which state judgments receive full faith and credit, despite provision for collateral attacks— that is more closely linked to the traditional understanding of a court.

Markham has a second theme: that “how states carve up adjudicative functions between courts and agencies is in general and in this particular no business of the federal courts, for the Constitution does not prescribe any particular allocation or separation of powers among the states.... If one state wants to use an administrative body where another state would use a conventional ‘court,’ its choice is a matter of indifference from the standpoint of the principles of federalism and comity”. 978 F.2d at 995. This is undoubtedly true for many subjects; states may (and do) allocate some apparently legislative powers to judges, and adjudicatory powers to non-tenured officials (whether called courts or agencies). But a few federal laws recognize differences among branches of state government. One of these is the Full Faith and Credit Clause, Art. IV § 1, which provides: “Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.” (Emphasis added.) Section 2254(d) specifies the extent to which states’ decisions must be respected in collateral attacks and thus like 28 U.S.C. § 1738 exercises the power granted by the second sentence of the Full Faith and Credit Clause. We know from University of Tennessee v. Elliott, 478 U.S. 788, 106 S.Ct. 3220, 92 L.Ed.2d 635 (1986), that for purposes of § 1738 a state agency is not a judicial body, and that a federal tribunal therefore may reexamine de novo issues determined by a state agency but not reviewed by that state’s judiciary. See also Astoria Federal Savings & Loan Ass’n v. Solimino, 501 U.S. 104, 111 S.Ct. 2166, 115 L.Ed.2d 96 (1991). Cf. Cleavinger v. Saxner, 474 U.S. 193, 106 S.Ct. 496, 88 L.Ed.2d 507 (1985) (members of prison disciplinary boards are not treated as judges for the purpose of absolute immunity). Elliott and Astoria strongly imply that state disciplinary boards are not the sort of “courts” whose decisions have independent legal force when Congress provides for federal review of the same topics. If administrative decisions do not have preclusive effect under § 1738 (or the Full Faith and Credit Clause itself), why should they have preclusive effect under § 2254?

Nonetheless, our early encounters with § 2254(d) as amended by the aedpa did not sharply distinguish judicial from administrative decisionmakers. Evans v. McBride, 94 F.3d 1062 (7th Cir.1996), reserved the question whether the amended § 2254(d) applies to cases pending when the aedpa was enacted, implying in the process that if it does apply then a disciplinary board is a “court” — for the petitioner in Evans was seeking relief from a decision concerning good-time credits, and the state judiciary had not addressed his contentions. We wrote in Evans, 94 F.3d at 1065: “Our circuit has issued a number of opinions requiring prison disciplinary officials to explain their actions more fully, ... but if these are extensions of (rather than glosses on) the decisions of the Supreme Court, they provide a poor foundation for relief under the amended § 2254.” Yet disregard of circuit-level precedent would be required by § 2254(d) only if prison disciplinary boards count as “courts.” Evans did not go further, but its implication has been repeated in dictum by several later cases, none of which analyzes the issue beyond citing Evans, which itself did not analyze the question. See, e.g., Gaither v. Anderson, 236 F.3d 817, 819-20 (7th Cir.2001); Sweeney v. Parke, 113 F.3d 716, 719 (7th Cir.1997).

Section 2254 is one among many parts of the aedpa that make the handling of federal collateral attack turn on what a state “court” has done. Another is § 2253(c), which says:

(1) Unless a circuit justice or judge issues a certificate of appealability, an appeal may not be taken to the court of appeals from—

(A) the final order in a habeas corpus proceeding in which the detention complained of arises out of process issued by a State court; or

(B) the final order in a proceeding under section 2255.

Does a state prisoner need a certificate of appealability when seeking federal collateral review of a prison disciplinary board’s decision revoking good-time credits? We gave a negative answer in Walker v. O’Brien, 216 F.3d 626 (7th Cir.2000), holding among other things that the additional time served as a result of a disciplinary board’s decision is not “detention [that] arises out of process issued by a State court”. That conclusion was debated within the court; three judges thought that detention “arises out of process issued by a State court” whenever imprisonment has been authorized by a criminal sentence. 216 F.3d at 642-44. Thus it is possible to see how collateral attacks concerning good-time credits could require certificates of appealability even if a disciplinary board is not a “court”; but it is impossible to see how, if a disciplinary board is a “court,” an appeal would be possible without a certificate of appealability. The assumption made in cases such as Evans therefore is irreconcilable with the holding of Walker in addition to the holdings of Elliott and Cleavinger.

To eliminate the tension among this court’s decisions, we now disapprove any language in Evans, Sweeney, Gaither, and similar opinions implying that prison disciplinary boards are “courts” for the purpose of 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d). That portion of the aedpa accordingly does not affect collateral review of decisions revoking good-time credits unless states provide for judicial review of these decisions — review that under § 2254(c) (as interpreted in Markham) a prisoner must pursue. White did pursue all available state corrective processes, but Indiana does not make a judicial process available, so § 2254(d) does not give that state the benefit of limitation on the scope of federal collateral attack. (So far as we can tell, this decision is the first anywhere in the country to produce a holding, as opposed to dicta, about the question. Evans, Sweeney, and Gaither at least adverted to the question, though they did not resolve it. Courts elsewhere do not ever advert to the subject. For example, the eighth circuit has treated prison disciplinary boards as courts with no explanation, see Class v. Weber, 238 F.3d 1018 (8th Cir.2001), while the fifth circuit has employed de novo review with no explanation, see Broussard v. Johnson, 253 F.3d 874 (5th Cir.2001); Hudson v. Johnson, 242 F.3d 534 (5th Cir.2001).)

3. Now we arrive at the merits, where our conclusion that the Board is an agency rather than a court has a different significance. White’s principal contention is that the Board violated the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment because Officer Thompson, who prepared the conduct report charging him with drug trafficking, remained in the hearing room after the close of the evidence and, we must presume, discussed the charge with the Board’s members before or even during their deliberations. (Because there is no written record, we cannot tell how long Thompson remained and thus we indulge the assumption that he stayed through the deliberations.) If the Board were a court, ex parte proceedings would be irregular and would raise constitutional issues- — and although the due process clause does not apply to the states every ethical requirement for federal judges, see Del Vecchio v. Illinois Department of Corrections, 31 F.3d 1363 (7th Cir.1994) (en banc), receipt of evidence off the record, or lobbying in chambers by a witness for one side, would be a substantial problem under the Constitution. But non-record discussions between an agency’s decisionmakers and members of the agency’s staff are common and proper; for example, Commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission routinely discuss pending cases with that agency’s economic staff, even though the economists also give counsel to (and testify for) the agency’s internal prosecutor (the Bureau of Competition). When the Chairman of the ftc has a private meeting with the agency’s Chief Economist, does this spoil all cases then under advisement? Hardly. Agencies and courts have different methods of resolving disputes; what is unthinkable for a court may be normal for an agency; and although the ftc must in the end defend its decisions by reference to the administrative record, no rule of law prevents the Commissioners (or, say, Members of the National Labor Relations Board) from discussing pending matters with agency employees. See 5 U.S.C. § 554(d).

Once a person has been convicted and the sentence specified by a court, informal proceedings determine how much of that sentence must be served. The role (and the propriety) of ex parte contacts are clearest in the pardon process. Governors rarely hold hearings on the record; they receive information and advice from many sources, including prosecutors, victims, and witnesses. None of these steps is constitutionally questionable, and none becomes so if the governor delegates the pardoning power to an agency that holds formal hearings; a governor (or other holder of the pardoning power) need not provide any process at all and may resolve matters as he pleases. See Connecticut Board of Pardons v. Dumschat, 452 U.S. 458, 101 S.Ct. 2460, 69 L.Ed.2d 158 (1981). Likewise with parole. See Greenholtz v. Nebraska Penal Inmates, 442 U.S. 1, 99 S.Ct. 2100, 60 L.Ed.2d 668 (1979). Officials empowered to act on applications for release regularly use informal process, receiving unsworn (and sometimes off-the-record) recommendations from prosecutors, victims, and witnesses. In the wake of Wolff decisions about good-time credits are subject to more constitutional limitations than decisions about pardons or parole, but Wolff did not require disciplinary boards to follow the judicial model. To the contrary, Wolff concluded that disciplinary boards need not place on the record all of the evidence that influences their decisions. The Court recognized that considerations of institutional security may militate against full disclosure. In White’s own proceeding, although a “Report of Conduct” detailing the charge was made available, a separate “Case Report” was held in confidence, a step that White does not contest. If the Case Report could be held back — as portions of presentence reports in criminal prosecutions may be held back — it is hard to see how there could be a constitutional objection to allowing Officer Thompson to discuss that Case Report with the Board in confidence. We do not know what Thompson said to the Board’s members and thus cannot be sure that his contribution was limited to discussing the portion of the evidence that was legitimately held in confidence, or subjects such as selecting the right penalty; this is an inevitable consequence of off-the-record discussions. But it is a risk common to all non-record proceedings; a reviewing court cannot know what happened even in the public portions of a prison disciplinary hearing.

Because prison disciplinary boards are entitled to receive, and act on, information that is withheld from the prisoner and the public, they must be entitled to discuss that evidence off the record with persons who know its significance. Wolff holds that prisoners are entitled to impartial decisionmakers — Thompson could not have been given a vote 'on the Board, see 418 U.S. at 570-71, 94 S.Ct. 2963; Merritt v. De Los Santos, 721 F.2d 598 (7th Cir.1983); Whitford v. Boglino, 63 F.3d 527, 534 (7th Cir.1995) — but there is no reason to believe that the members of this Board were other than impartial. Listening to a point of view does not constitute bias. If it did, judges could not listen to witnesses or lawyers who represent adversarial positions, and they probably could not consult with the authors of presentence reports or read articles in law reviews, for both presentence-report writers and professors may have axes to grind. Disciplinary boards are made up of prison employees; Thompson surely was talking to this panel’s members routinely, and on other occasions Thompson likely served as a member and received evidence presented by the officers who made up White’s disciplinary panel. Such daily camaraderie and mixing of roles pose greater threats to impartiality than does listening to commentary on off-the-record evidence in a particular case — yet it is clear from Wolff that the Constitution does not require prisons to import professional decisionmakers such as administrative law judges to run the disciplinary process. The Court could have required a more adversarial approach to prison discipline but held instead that an inquisitorial model suffices, if modified by formal separation of the witnesses and decisionmakers in the particular case. Formal separation was respected here— for Thompson was not a member of the Board. Baxter v. Palmigiano, 425 U.S. 308, 96 S.Ct. 1551, 47 L.Ed.2d 810 (1976), warns the courts of appeals not to add to the procedures required by Wolff, which, Baxter held, represents a balance of interests that should not be further adjusted in favor of prisoners. Indiana has played by the rules articulated in Wolff. Cf. Edwards, 520 U.S. at 647, 117 S.Ct. 1584.

4. Two pieces of confidential evidence were received at the hearing: the Case Report and the videotaped interview with Yvonne Davis. As we have mentioned, White does not protest the confidentiality of the Case Report, but he does contend that he should have received the tape of the interview with Davis. White believes that lack of access to this tape prevented him from presenting favorable evidence, one of his rights under Wolff. We have some difficulty, however, seeing the linkage. The Board had the tape, so it knew whatever evidence favorable to White the tape contained. The district court, which reviewed the tape, thought it highly inculpatory; but even if it was exculpatory it was before the Board. The only evidence that White wanted to, but could not, present was live testimony of Yvonne Davis. But the reason why he could not present her testimony' — 'that she was no longer an employee of the prison, and the Board lacked compulsory process to require civilians to appear before it — is unrelated to his access to the tape. This makes it difficult to see what is at stake. White is understandably curious about what the tape reflects, but the prison is understandably skittish about revealing an interview that likely discussed prison-security measures about which prisoners are best kept in the dark.

As the district court held, the administrative record contains “some evidence” that White engaged in drug trafficking. See Superintendent of Walpole v. Hill, 472 U.S. 445, 454, 105 S.Ct. 2768, 86 L.Ed.2d 356 (1985). The Board therefore was entitled to take the actions it did, and the petition for habeas corpus was properly denied.

AFFIRMED