Apr. 2, 2018
Murphy v. Smith, 138 S. Ct. 784 (2018) (Gorsuch, J.).
Response by Katy Ramsey
Geo. Wash. L. Rev. On the Docket (Oct. Term 2017)
Slip Opinion | SCOTUSblog
Murphy v. Smith: Limiting Access to Counsel for Prisoners
On February 21, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Murphy v. Smith,1 which hinged on the interpretation of a provision of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (“PLRA”), a statute enacted by Congress in 1996. The plaintiff, Charles Murphy, was an inmate at the Vandalia Correctional Center, a facility operated by the Illinois Department of Corrections. In 2011, Murphy was assaulted by two prison guards, Robert Smith and Gregory Fulk. The attack resulted in multiple surgeries and permanent vision damage to one of Murphy’s eyes. Murphy brought a civil rights claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (2012) against Smith and Fulk, and a jury awarded him $409,750 in damages. The judge later reduced the damages award to $307,733.82, and also entered an attorneys’ fees award of $108,446.54. Pursuant to a section of the PLRA, 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(d)(2), the judge ordered Murphy to contribute ten percent of his judgment to offset the attorneys’ fees award that the State of Illinois was obligated to pay to Murphy’s lawyer. This section reads, “a portion of the judgment (not to exceed 25 percent) shall be applied to satisfy the amount of attorney’s fees awarded against the defendant.”2 Smith and Fulk appealed, arguing that the plain language of § 1997e(d)(2) required a prevailing prisoner to pay exactly twenty-five percent of his judgment towards the attorneys’ fees, and that the judge did not have discretion to set the contribution at a lower percentage. The Seventh Circuit agreed, and the Supreme Court affirmed the Seventh Circuit’s ruling.
Fee-shifting provisions are among the hallmarks of modern civil rights laws. They encourage litigation against state bad actors by incentivizing attorneys to represent plaintiffs with viable claims, and by assuring plaintiffs that they will not be forced to shoulder the entire financial burden of litigation. Cases brought by prisoners, however, are the only civil rights cases in which prevailing plaintiffs are required, under the PLRA, to contribute part of their monetary award toward their own attorneys’ fees. This is consistent with what the PLRA is designed to do: namely, to reduce the number of frivolous lawsuits filed by inmates. The PLRA contains many provisions that were designed to discourage prisoners from filing pro se claims, but, perhaps even more harmfully, also included many deterrents for attorneys who may consider representing inmate plaintiffs. Among the new restrictions imposed by the PLRA and its accompanying package of legislation were the prohibition on representation of prisoners by organizations receiving federal funding from the Legal Services Corporation, and also the requirement at issue in Murphy, which provides that if a prisoner prevailed in a civil rights suit against the State, he must contribute a portion of his monetary award to offset any attorneys’ fees awarded.
In ruling for the prison guards in Murphy, the Supreme Court split 5–4 along ideological lines, with Justice Gorsuch writing the majority opinion and Justice Sotomayor writing the dissent. The Court’s decision, which interpreted the PLRA to require that prevailing prisoner plaintiffs contribute exactly twenty-five percent of their judgment to offset the attorneys’ fees award, heightens the already significant barriers to prisoners obtaining legal counsel. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor pointed out that the majority opinion ignores “the realities of prisoner-civil-rights litigation,” where there are already substantial obstacles to asserting successful civil rights claims because of the low average monetary awards and the low rate of compensation that courts are allowed to grant attorneys—another litigation-discouraging provision of the PLRA.3 What Justice Sotomayor failed to mention, however, is that access to counsel is not just a problem for inmates with civil rights claims. Indeed, prisoners who want or need lawyers to assist with everything from asserting innocence claims to petitioning for release on parole are most often unsuccessful in obtaining representation. The Court’s ruling in Murphy is a setback for access to justice for a population of litigants that is already significantly disadvantaged.
None of the decisions or briefs in Murphy discuss the reasons why Murphy was incarcerated, and it is not relevant to the issues in the case. Yet it is obvious that Mr. Murphy was convicted of a crime, and is, by virtue of that conviction, a member of one of the most politically unpopular groups in our society—people who are incarcerated. The court papers also do not discuss Murphy’s racial background, but the odds are that he is a person of color. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, using data from the 2010 census, the rate of incarceration for African-Americans is 2207 per 100,000 people, while the rate for white Americans is 380 per 100,000 people.4 This means that black Americans are nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated than their white counterparts.
Given the racial disparities in incarceration rates, it is impossible to separate issues of prisoners’ rights and access to legal counsel from issues of racial justice. The majority opinion in Murphy glossed over this, choosing to ignore the implications of a law—the PLRA—that applies primarily to people of color. These same prisoners have no political leverage to advocate for changes in the laws that exclusively affect them because of prohibitions at the state and federal levels against inmates voting. Lawmakers pay attention to the concerns of their constituents, but prisoners, who are overwhelmingly people of color, are constituents of no one, and few lawmakers are inclined to take political risks on behalf of a population that cannot vote. As a result, in order to assert their rights or challenge unsafe or abusive conditions, prisoners must frequently bring their claims to court.5 Moreover, as the Supreme Court has noted previously,
The relationship of state prisoners and the state officers who supervise their confinement is far more intimate than that of a State and a private citizen. For state prisoners, eating, sleeping, dressing, washing, working, and playing are all done under the watchful eye of the State . . . . What for a private citizen would be a dispute with his landlord, with his employer, with his tailor, with his neighbor, or with his banker, becomes, for the prisoner, a dispute with the State.”6
One of the sad ironies of the PLRA is that it operates to discourage prisoners from utilizing the only recourse for advocacy that they have—complaining to the courts. The message that the Murphy majority sends to prisoners is that even when they have legitimate civil rights claims (as Murphy did) the courts, their only recourse, will make it as difficult as possible for them to pursue those claims.
Professor Katy Ramsey is a Visiting Associate Professor of Clinical Law and Friedman Fellow at The George Washington University Law School, Prisoner & Reentry Clinic (formerly known as Neighborhood Law & Policy Clinic). Previously, Professor Ramsey was an Equal Justice Works/AmeriCorps Legal Fellow and a housing attorney at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House in New York City, where she represented low-income residents of East Harlem in housing and public benefits matters and served as a supervisor and trainer of law student interns. She also served as a volunteer attorney for New York’s Safe Passage Project, representing an unaccompanied child migrant from Central America. Beginning in the fall of 2018, Professor Ramsey will be an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law.
1. 138 S. Ct. 784 (2018).
2. 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(d)(2) (2012).
3. Murphy, 138 S. Ct. at 794 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting); see 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(d)(3).
4. See Peter Wagner, Incarceration Is Not an Equal Opportunity Punishment, Prison Pol’y Initiative (Aug. 28, 2012), https://www.prisonpolicy.org/articles/notequal.html.
5. See Margo Schlanger, Inmate Litigation, 116 Harv. L. Rev. 1555, 1570–74 (2003).
6. Preiser v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 475, 491–92 (1973).
Recommended Citation
Katy Ramsey, Response, Murphy v. Smith: Limiting Access to Counsel for Prisoners, Geo. Wash. L. Rev. On the Docket (Apr. 2, 2018), https://www.gwlr.org/murphy-v-smith.
