Crawford-El v. Britton

The ruling in this case attempted to strike a balance between a plaintiff's right to seek redress for alleged violations of federal rights by government employees, and government employees' need for protection against frivolous law suits. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals held in this case that the petitioner suit failed because he did not present "clear and convincing evidence" at the outset that the prison official's motives were as charged. The Supreme Court rejected the court of appeals' "clear and convincing evidence" test because it was new, without precedent, and, most important, would make it more difficult for all classes of plaintiffs with legitimate grievances to seek remedies for violations of their federal rights.

Crawford-El v. Britton presents an apparent paradox. Citizens are entitled to bring suit against government officials when they believe they have been wronged, but in order to do their jobs, government officials must be free from harassment by petty and frivolous claims. Accordingly, the first line of defense for a government official accused of a tort ("a wrong") by a citizen is to claim immunity from the lawsuit by asking for a summary judgment against his or her accuser. The claim of immunity kills the legal proceedings, in effect, before all the pretrial activities--"discovery," evidence-gathering, depositions, and the like--can begin. But the citizen bringing suit--the plaintiff--can overcome that first line of defense in a variety of ways, providing his or her complaint is judged by the courts to have merit. In other words, with the exception of the president of the United States (who has absolute immunity against being taken to court), government officials have the presumption of immunity from lawsuits while in office, but citizens can overcome those immunities--again, assuming their claims are substantial rather than frivolous.

In the United States, the idea that government officials are sometimes immune from suit dates at least from 1824, in a Supreme Court ruling. In 1871, Congress enacted a modest law protecting citizens against constitutional violations committed against them by government officials; this law produced 21 cases in its first 50 years of existence, according to Justice Scalia in his dissenting opinion in this case. Because of the way a 1961 Supreme Court ruling expanded this statute, "tens of thousands" of suits pour into the federal courts each year, and, as Justice Scalia put it, the Supreme Court is engaged "in a losing struggle to prevent the Constitution from degenerating into a general tort law." In fiscal 1997, for example, there were 41,215 civil rights suits filed in federal courts by prison inmates. It is therefore extremely important that federal courts have clear guidelines for distinguishing between the frivolous and the substantive, and, at the same time, for protecting the right of plaintiffs to bring suit.

At the time of this case, Crawford-El was serving a life sentence in the District of Columbia's correctional system; he was litigious (a "jail-house lawyer") and outspoken. On several occasions in the late 1980s, his outspokenness allegedly brought verbal disapproval from Patricia Britton, a corrections administrator. In 1988 Crawford-El and several other inmates were transferred to the county jail in Spokane, Washington, and after several more transfers, Crawford-El ended up in a federal prison in Florida. Three boxes of his personal belongings, including legal materials, were transferred separately; when they arrived back in Washington, the respondent in this case, Patricia Britton, asked Crawford-El's brother-in-law (also a corrections officer) to pick them up and forward them to Crawford-El. He received the boxes several months after his arrival in Florida. Crawford-El sued Britton, claiming she had diverted the boxes containing his legal materials in order to interfere with his constitutional right of access to the courts; later, he added the complaint that Britton diverted his boxes in retaliation for his exercising his First Amendment rights.

The case bounced back and forth between district court and the court of appeals for several years, the question at all times involving the adequacy or appropriateness of the Crawford=El's legal efforts to overcome Britton's first line of defense--the qualified-immunity-from-suit defense. Finally, in 1996, a bare majority of the court of appeals sent the case back to district court once again, this time saying that the unless the petitioner could offer "clear and convincing evidence" about the repondent's "state-of-mind" and motives when she diverted the boxes, judgment should be entered in favor of the respondent. Of the five opinions written by the court of appeals, three agreed with the newly announced standard calling for "clear and convincing evidence," one stated a preference for the "objective standard" announced in Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982), and a dissenting opinion (signed by four judges) thought the newly announced standard was unauthorized. Thus, the question of what plaintiffs can do to overcome a defendant's first line of defense was unresolved and less clear than it had been. Thus the Supreme Court decided to hear the case--"despite the relative unimportance of the facts of this particular case."

Noting that the court of appeals thought its new standard was a corollary to the Supreme Court's ruling in Harlow v. Fitzgerald, Justice Stevens re-examined Harlow, the problem of which hinged on the idea that a government official's state of mind is "easy to allege and hard to disprove." Before Harlow, a plaintiff could get to trial with "bare allegations of malice," which involved a subjective judgment about the defendant's state of mind at the time of his or her action; after Harlow, that type of allegation was no longer allowed. Instead, the standard was now objective: in Justice Powell's words, " . . . government officials . . . are shielded from liability for civil damages, insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." In other words, if Britton diverted Crawford-El's boxes because she hated him, that would not necessarily prove that she retaliated against him for exercising his First Amendment rights.

At the same time, Justice Stevens wrote, Harlow's shift to an exclusively objective standard of evidence-evaluation "does not justify a rule that places a thumb on the defendant's side of the scales," as did the "clear and convincing evidence" standard invented by the court of appeals. Their "new rule" is "a blunt instrument that carries a high cost, for its rule also imposes a heightened standard of proof . . . upon plaintiffs with bond fide constitutional claims." Further, "it lacks any common law pedigree and alters the cause of action itself in a way that undermines remedies for the violation of federal rights." In short, Harlow had nothing to do with the present case. New rules are the business of the legislative branch and the judiciary. Justice Stevens then sent ("remanded") the case back to the court of appeals.

In conclusion, mindful of his ruling's potential for generating even more cases in an already crowded field, and mindful of the friend-of-the-court briefs filed by 34 states supporting the court of appeals' new rule, Justice Stevens reminded judges of the "many options" they had in dealing with such cases. Noting that the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996 had reduced the number of prisoner-filed civil rights suits by 31 percent in just one year (from 42,215 to 28,365), Justice Stevens said that for district court judges, "broad discretion in the management of the fact finding process may be more useful and equitable to all the parties than the categorical rule imposed by the Court of Appeals."