Alexis Nguyen | Do Fine Deductions from Inmates’ Prison Trust Accounts Without a Hearing Violate their Fourteenth Amendment Rights?

Background

The Fourteenth Amendment provides that no state may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1. Analyzing whether one’s due process has been violated is a two-step process. First, the court must determine whether one has been deprived of a protected liberty or property interest. Second, if the court has determined that such a deprivation has occurred, then the court must determine if that deprivation occurred without constitutionally sufficient process. See Bd. Agents of Roth, 408 U.S. 564, 569-571 (1972); Prieto v. Clarke, 780 F.3d 245, 248 (4th Cir. 2015).

Plaintiff Demmerick Brown is an inmate at Red Onion State Prison, located in Virginia. In August 2020, Brown walked from his cell to the prison’s barber shop wearing a face mask, as required by prison policy, considering that this was at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. When Brown sat down in the barber chair, the barber told Brown to take off his face mask and he complied. There were two correctional officers located directly across the barber shop who noticed that Brown had removed his mask. They had not told Brown at the time that he was forbidden per the prison’s COVID-19 policy to remove his mask. The day after his shave, Brown received a disciplinary charge for failing to wear a mask and thereby violating prison rules.

Brown prepared for a hearing to contest the disciplinary charge by requesting forms that would allow him to present evidence and call witnesses. He never received these forms, even after multiple asks. The hearing officer denied Brown’s request to postpone the hearing until he could fill out the necessary paperwork, and he was subsequently found guilty of violating the prison’s face mask rule; $15 was deducted from his prison trust account as a result. Brown then sued three prison officials on June 28, 2022, claiming under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 that they violated his Fourteenth Amendment due process rights. Defendants sought to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6); the district court granted defendants’ motion, claiming that “’small fines routinely assessed at disciplinary hearings do not trigger due process protections’ because they do not impose an ‘atypical and significant hardship.’” Brown appealed.

Issue

Whether deducting money from an inmate’s prison trust account to pay a fine without permitting that inmate to present evidence or witnesses at a hearing related to the violation causing such deduction is a violation of their Fourteenth Amendment rights.

The Split

The Fourth Circuit reversed the decision of the district court and remanded for a new trial. It joins the Second and Fifth Circuits, and splits with the Tenth Circuit.

Fourth Circuit

A property interest is “‘a legitimate claim of entitlement’ to an object or benefit ‘upon which people rely in their daily lives.’” Bd. Of Regents, 408 U.S. at 577; see also Fuentes v. Shevin, 407 U.S. 67, 86 (1972). The Fourth Circuit held that Brown was deprived of a property interest because inmates have a property interest in the money in their trust accounts. Henderson v. Harmon, 102 F.4th 242, 245 (4th Cir. 2024). Property interests “are created . . . by existing rules of understandings that stem from an independent source such as state law,” and Virginia state law is what created inmate trust accounts and gave inmates a source of entitlement as to those funds. In that same vein, Virginia state law has no provisions allowing fines to be deducted freely from prison trust accounts for disciplinary purposes; therefore, the property interest established in Henderson applies in this case because it does not conflict with the state statute.

Defendants argued that it was not the standard established in Henderson that governed Brown’s case, but that in Sandin v. Conner, 515 U.S. 472 (1995). In Sandin, SCOTUS held that “states may under certain circumstances create liberty interests which are protected by the Due Process Clause.” Liberty interests are only recognized when they provide “freedom from restraint[s] that would “impose atypical and significant hardship on the inmate in relation to the ordinary incidents of prison life.” The Fourth Circuit held that the Sandin exception did not apply in this case because a monetary fine does not fit in the list of liberty interests—such as increases in sentence length or periods of time in solitary confinement—but rather is a very clear property interest. Sandin does not mention property interests and therefore does not apply to cases involving them. This is where the Fourth Circuit ruled in accordance with the Second and Fifth Circuits, who also did not apply the Sandin exception to property interests, and splits with the Tenth Circuit, who explicitly applied the Sandin exception to property interests.

Second and Fifth Circuits

In Handberry v. Thompson, 446 F.3d 335 (2nd Cir. 2006), the Second Circuit held that incarcerated individuals do not have a property interest in a public education that continues during their incarceration, and that officials’ failure to provide them with adequate educational services therefore does not deprive them of due process. In order to make this determination, the court relies on the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution; Article 11, Section 1 of the New York Constitution; and New York Education Law Section 3202(1). They do not apply the Sandin analysis for a similar reason to the Fourth Circuit: the court found that Sandin was concerned with liberty interests, not property interests, and therefore the court would rather apply statutory and constitutional provisions that use the type of language that explicitly deal with property interests.

In Bulger v. U.S. Bureau of Prisons, 65 F.3d 48 (5th Cir. 1995), the Fifth Circuit held that an incarcerated individual does not have a vested property interest in continuing a Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR) job assignment because there is no legitimate claim of entitlement in continuing such employment. The court did apply a Sandin analysis in this case, but only because plaintiff Bulger claimed that the mandatory language of 28 C.F.R. § 345.12(d) (1994) created a liberty or property interest in his UNICOR job assignment. The court only used Sandin to evaluate whether Bulger had a liberty interest, and they found none. They used the precedent established in Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564 (1972) in order to evaluate the alleged property interest.

Tenth Circuit

In Cosco v. Uphoff, 195 F.3d 1221 (10th Cir. 1999), the Tenth Circuit held that officials’ prevention of allowing incarcerated individuals to keep disputed property and any income derived from that property in their cells violated their due process rights because the income stemming from those items is a property interest according to the methodology created by SCOTUS in Hewitt v. Helms, 459 U.S. 460 (1983). The Tenth Circuit rejected using that methodology as they believed that SCOTUS held in Sandin that the Hewitt methodology was not to be applied in the context of prison liberty interests. In order to ensure compliance with the avoidance of “undesirable effects” set out in Hewitt, the Tenth Circuit held that they should follow the Sandin analysis instead; in effect, they shifted the focus of their due process inquiry from “the language of a particular regulation” to “the nature of deprivation,” and held that Sandin does apply to both property and liberty interests for public policy purposes.

Looking Forward

The question of whether an incarcerated person’s due process rights have been violated is an important one. Incarceration inherently places one at a level in which it is much easier for them to be taken advantage of and at a position of vulnerability when it comes to knowing what legal redress is available to that person. Asking whether to apply the Sandin analysis can take on different light when looking at it from the perspective of an incarcerated person. What might be simply a property interest outside of a penitentiary, such as money, could be a liberty interest inside of one because it affects one’s access to knowledge, maintaining one’s appearance, or more. In addition, if the court does decide to apply Sandin, one must consider the context of the incarceration to determine whether such deprivation entails " typical and significant hardship.” For example, at Red Onion State Prison specifically, guards can issue fines at their discretion for amounts from $15 to $25, and the average wage for incarcerated people at that same prison is 45 cents an hour (Rights Behind Bars). Therefore, in making their decision, SCOTUS has the power to establish a precedent that could make establishing due process violations harder for incarcerated individuals.

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