Jackson v. Jamrog

RECOMMENDED FOR FULL-TEXT PUBLICATION

Pursuant to Sixth Circuit Rule 206

File Name: 05a0239p.06

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

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Petitioner-Appellant, -

PAUL JACKSON,

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No. 02-2057

v.

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DAVID JAMROG, Warden, -

Respondent-Appellee. -

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Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Eastern District of Michigan at Detroit.

No. 01-73310—Paul D. Borman, District Judge.

Argued: October 21, 2003

Decided and Filed: June 2, 2005

Before: KEITH, DAUGHTREY, and GILMAN, Circuit Judges.

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COUNSEL

ARGUED: Andrew N. Wise, FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDERS OFFICE, Detroit, Michigan, for

Appellant. Charles C. Schettler, Jr., OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL, Lansing,

Michigan, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Andrew N. Wise, FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDERS

OFFICE, Detroit, Michigan, for Appellant. Laura Graves Moody, OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY

GENERAL, Lansing, Michigan, for Appellee.

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OPINION

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MARTHA CRAIG DAUGHTREY, Circuit Judge. In this appeal from the district court’s

denial of habeas relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2254, we are asked to determine the constitutionality of

a Michigan statute, M.C.L.A. § 791.234(9), which permits an appeal to state court by prosecutors

and crime victims from decisions of the state parole board granting parole, but provides no

equivalent right of appeal to state prisoners who are denied parole. The petitioner, Paul Jackson,

is a Michigan prison inmate who contends that the state legislature’s 1999 amendment to

§ 791.234(9) that produced this dichotomy violates his right to equal protection under the Fourteenth

Amendment to the United States Constitution. The district court, utilizing rational-basis analysis,

upheld the state statute as constitutional. We agree with this decision and affirm the judgment of

the district court.

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I. FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND

Jackson was convicted of unarmed robbery in Michigan state court in 1989 and was

sentenced to a prison term of 4-15 years. Although he was paroled in 1997, he was eventually

arrested again, this time for possession of less than 25 grams of a controlled substance and for

resisting arrest. As a result, the petitioner’s parole was revoked and he was re-incarcerated. At

parole hearings conducted on June 24, 2000, and August 8, 2001, the Michigan Parole Board denied

Jackson’s requests for release, concluding that “[t]he Parole Board lacks reasonable assurance that

the prisoner will not become a menace to society or to the public safety.”

Alleging that he, unlike state prosecutors and crime victims, could not avail himself of state

court remedies to contest even the constitutional validity of the procedures used to deny him parole,

Jackson filed with the federal district court a petition for a writ of habeas corpus that raised an equal

protection challenge to the Michigan statute governing the parole process. The court denied that

petition on the merits, determining that even though the respondent “has waived exhaustion of state

remedies as a defense,” the petitioner’s “claim does not warrant habeas relief.” Specifically, the

district judge ruled that, assuming that prisoners are similarly situated with prosecutors and crime

victims, no suspect classifications or fundamental rights are implicated in the parole decision.

Employing the deferential rational-basis review standard in judging the statute, the district court

concluded that the state’s legitimate explanation – the attempt to minimize the number of frivolous

prisoner appeals – rationally accounted for the differing treatment of prisoners on the one hand and

prosecutors and crime victims on the other. From this determination, Jackson now appeals.

II. DISCUSSION

A. The Statute

Prior to 1982, Michigan’s correctional code contained a general prohibition against appeals

from parole board decisions. Public Act 314 of 1982 amended the relevant statute to permit appeals

from the grant or denial of parole. After prisoners began using this mechanism to appeal denials of

parole by the board, the legislature amended the statute to make it clear that appeals from orders

granting parole could be undertaken by prosecutors and crime victims. Hence, until it was once

again amended effective March 10, 2000, M.C.L.A. § 791.234(7) (1998) provided, in relevant part:

[A] prisoner’s release on parole is discretionary with the parole board. The action

of the parole board in granting or denying a parole is appealable by the prisoner, the

prosecutor of the county from which the prisoner was committed, or the victim of the

crime for which the prisoner was convicted. The appeal shall be to the circuit court

in the county from which the prisoner was committed, by leave of the court.

That statute, as amended and renumbered, now provides that “[t]he action of the parole board in

granting a parole is appealable by the prosecutor of the county from which the prisoner was

committed or the victim of the crime for which the prisoner was convicted.” M.C.L.A. § 791.234(9)

(2003 Supp.) (emphasis added). Consequently, Michigan law no longer authorizes state court

review of parole board decisions denying parole, while continuing to provide judicial review of the

granting of parole.

B. The Exhaustion Requirement

We note as a threshold matter that the question now before us has not been addressed by

the Michigan state courts, an issue that the district court treated only briefly, finding that the state

had waived any objection to the failure to exhaust by failing to raise the issue in a timely fashion.

We find this ruling questionable, at best, given the provision in 28 U.S.C. § 2254(b)(3) that “[a]

State shall not be deemed to have waived the exhaustion requirement or be estopped from reliance

No. 02-2057 Jackson v. Jamrog Page 3

upon the requirement unless the State, through counsel, expressly waives the requirement.” There

was no express waiver in this case, and on appeal the state raises the issue, while simultaneously

maintaining that the district court should be affirmed on the merits and not that the petition should

be dismissed for failure to exhaust.

At the time of oral argument, we were concerned, despite the state’s ambivalence, with the

possibility of having the Michigan courts review the constitutionality of their own state statute

before we were called upon to do so. Although the petitioner maintained that there was no avenue

of review – given the 1999 amendment to M.C.L.A. § 791.234(9) – at least one district court, in

an unrelated case raising the same equal protection issue as the one now before us, held that an

inmate unable to appeal the denial of parole under § 791.234(9) might nevertheless appeal under

M.C.L.A. § 600.631, the Revised Judicature Act. See Matson v. Mich. Parole Bd., 175 F. Supp.2d

925 (E.D. Mich. 2001). That provision authorizes an appeal of “any order . . . of any state board

. . . from which an appeal . . . has not otherwise been provided . . . to the circuit court of the county

of which the appellant is a resident . . . .”

Although the plain language of M.C.L.A. § 600.631 would seem to indicate that an appeal

by a prisoner of a decision of the parole board should be allowed under the Revised Judicature Act,

the Michigan Court of Appeals has held, in the period since this case was argued, that an appeal

from the denial of parole is “not allowed under the [Act].” Morales v. Mich. Parole Bd., 676

N.W.2d 221, 225 (Mich. Ct. App. 2003), app. for leave to appeal denied, 682 N.W.2d 90 (Table)

(Mich. 2004). Given this background, it appears that the petitioner’s failure to exhaust prior to

filing the current habeas action is excusable under § 2254(b)(1)(B)(i), because “there is an absence

of available State corrective process.”

C. The Equal Protection Claim

As we have noted, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United

States Constitution “protects against arbitrary classifications, and requires that similarly situated

persons be treated equally.” Richland Bookmart, Inc. v. Nichols, 278 F.3d 570, 574 (6th Cir. 2002).

Nevertheless, “[t]o withstand Fourteenth Amendment scrutiny, statutes that do not interfere with

fundamental rights or single out suspect classifications must bear only a rational relationship to a

legitimate state interest.” Id. (citing City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Ctr., 473 U.S. 432, 440

(1985)).

The respondents here contend that the equal protection clause is not implicated in this

matter because prisoners seeking parole are not “similarly situated” with prosecutors and crime

victims seeking to restrict releases from imprisonment. It is, of course, axiomatic that parties on

opposite sites of any true dispute will not be similarly situated, because one litigant, after all, is

attempting to achieve a result that is the opposite of the goal sought by the opponent. The district

judge recognized the inherent fallacy in the state’s argument and simply presumed that the parties

in this litigation met the “similarly situated” prerequisite for equal protection analysis. On appeal,

we assume likewise. The challenged statute merely seeks to define the appellate options available

to parties aggrieved by decisions of the parole board. Because prisoners, as well as prosecutors and

crime victims, can be aggrieved by such determinations, all three groups are “similarly situated.”

The district court then determined that the rational-basis standard of review was appropriate

in this case because the challenged statute “does not violate a fundamental right or make a suspect

distinction.” Without question, prisoners are not considered a suspect class for purposes of equal

protection litigation. See Wilson v. Yaklich, 148 F.3d 596, 604 (6th Cir. 1998). Moreover, there

is no fundamental right to parole under the federal constitution. See Bd. of Pardons v. Allen, 482

U.S. 369, 373 (1987). As the district court correctly noted, prison inmates do have a fundamental

No. 02-2057 Jackson v. Jamrog Page 4

right of access to the courts, see Bounds v. Smith, 430 U.S. 817, 828 (1977), but the right is not an

absolute one:

Bounds does not guarantee inmates the wherewithal to transform themselves into

litigating engines capable of filing everything from shareholder derivative actions

to slip-and-fall claims. The tools it requires to be provided are those that the

inmates need in order to attack their sentences, directly or collaterally, and in order

to challenge the conditions of their confinement. Impairment of any other litigating

capacity is simply one of the incidental (and perfectly constitutional) consequences

of conviction and incarceration.

Lewis v. Casey, 518 U.S. 343, 355 (1996). The district court was equally correct in determining that

“judicial review of the denial of parole is not an attack on the prisoner’s conviction or sentence; nor

is it a challenge to the conditions of confinement.” Moreover, as the Michigan Court of Appeals

noted in Morales, an inmate who is denied parole may, under certain circumstances, test the ruling

of the parole board by means of “a complaint for habeas corpus” (“where [for example] the Parole

Board has denied a prisoner parole exclusively on the basis of his race, religion, or national origin”)

or by means of “an action for mandamus” (“to compel compliance with a statutory duty”). Morales,

676 N.W.2d at 229-30. Thus, concluded the Morales court, a Michigan prisoner denied parole is

not “without recourse to have the judiciary review the legality of [the] inmate’s imprisonment.” Id.

at 230.

Without a basis for application of strict scrutiny, the district court proceeded to review

M.C.L.A. § 791.234(9) to determine whether it could be upheld as having a rational basis for the

distinction in its treatment of prosecutors on the one hand and inmates on the other. The state argued

that the statute was justified on the basis of a perceived need to decrease frivolous inmate appeals

from parole decisions, which had risen in number dramatically since the original statute was enacted

in 1982. The state also contended that the financial burden on the state courts had undergone a

similar increase and that the legislature’s protection of the state fisc was an additional justification

for the decision to amend the provision to eliminate prisoner appeals.

The district court accepted the first of these two arguments, noting that the deterrence of

frivolous prisoner lawsuits has been recognized as a legitimate legislative goal and citing in support

of this proposition Hampton v. Hobbs, 106 F.3d 1281, 1287 (6th Cir. 1997), and Lewis v. Sullivan,

279 F.3d 526, 528, 531 (7th Cir. 2002). The court also relied upon statistics provided in the

legislative document referred to as the House Report to the 1999 amendment. Those figures

indicated that the vast majority of appeals from the denial of parole were fruitless, while

prosecutorial appeals had been successful some 25 percent of the time:

[F]rom 1995 to 1999, there were a total of 3,879 parole board appeals: 79 appeals by

prosecutors and 3,800 by prisoners . . . . Out of the 3,800 . . . , only 162 cases (or

about 4 percent) were remanded by the circuit courts to the parole board for

reconsideration. Of these 162 remanded cases, only 24 (about .6 percent of the total

. . .) resulted in parole primarily because of the court-ordered reconsideration.

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Figures provided by the Department of Corrections indicate that from 1996 through

1999, prosecutor appeals of parole grants have been successful almost 26 percent of

the time.

See House Legislative Analysis Section, First Analysis, H.B. 4624 at 9 (Mich. Mar. 21, 2000).

Reviewing these statistics, the district court concluded that “[d]ifferentiating between prisoners and

non-prisoners has a rational basis because prisoner claims have inundated the judicial system in a

No. 02-2057 Jackson v. Jamrog Page 5

manner that non-prisoners have not” and held that “[t]he amendment to § 791.234(9) is rationally

related to the legitimate state goal of eliminating frivolous lawsuits filed by prisoners.”

We agree, even though we recognize, as did the district court, that the legislature’s answer

to the problem of groundless prisoner lawsuits sweeps away the meritorious along with the frivolous.

But, as the district court also noted, “courts are compelled under rational-basis review to accept a

legislature’s generalizations even when there is an imperfect fit between means and ends. A

classification does not fail rational-basis review because it is not made with mathematical nicety or

because in practice it results in some inequality.” Heller v. Doe, 509 U.S. 312, 321 (1993) (internal

quotation marks and citations omitted).

Were we to hold otherwise and strike down § 791.234(9) as a violation of the Equal

Protection Clause, it is exceedingly unlikely that the Michigan legislature would respond by

resurrecting the statute as it existed before the 1999 amendment. Hence, the relief the petitioner

seeks here would not be available even if we were to rule in his favor, for we are without authority

to add anything to the state provision, lest we be accused of legislating. Even if we were to

invalidate only the 1999 amendment, it is exceedingly likely that the Michigan legislature, in order

to stem the tide of prisoner appeals, would repeal § 791.234(9) altogether. The result would be that

no one could appeal from a decision of the parole board. That result might produce literal equality

as between prisoners and non-prisoners, but it would defeat the interest of the legislature in its “duty

to protect the public health, safety, and welfare . . . by ensuring that prosecutors and crime victims

could continue to be able to challenge the parole board’s decision to release a prisoner to parole if

the prosecutor or victim believed that the prisoner should not be released.” House Report at 15.

III. CONCLUSION

As the Michigan Court of Appeals has noted, even in the absence of the right to appeal under

§ 791.234(9), state inmates wrongfully denied parole on a basis recognized as illegal continue to

have access to the courts to seek relief through state habeas actions and mandamus. See Morales,

676 N.W.2d at 229-30. The 1999 amendment to § 791.234(9) deprives a prisoner only of the

privilege of challenging the discretionary determination by the board not to grant immediate release

on parole. Because the legislature’s action in adopting the amendment has a rational basis, as

discussed above, we AFFIRM the judgment of the district court denying the petitioner habeas relief.