Rufo v. Inmates of Suffolk County Jail

Justice O'Connor,

concurring in the judgment.

I agree that these cases should be remanded so that the District Court may reconsider whether to modify the decree. I write separately to emphasize the limited nature of our review; to clarify why, despite our limited review, the cases should be returned to the District Court; and to explain my concerns with certain portions of the Court's opinion.

I

A court may modify a final judgment, such as the judgment embodied in the consent decree at issue, where the court finds that "it is no longer equitable that the judgment should have prospective application." Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 60(b)(5). Determining what is "equitable" is necessarily a task that entails substantial discretion, particularly in a case like this one, where the District Court must make complex decisions requiring the sensitive balancing of a host of fac- *394 tors. As a result, an appellate court should examine primarily the method in which the District Court exercises its discretion, not the substantive outcome the District Court reaches. If the District Court takes into account the relevant considerations (all of which are not likely to suggest the same result) and accommodates them in a reasonable way, then the District Court’s judgment will not be an abuse of its discretion, regardless of whether an appellate court would have reached the same outcome in the first instance. Cf. Lemon v. Kurtzman, 411 U. S. 192, 200 (1973) (“In shaping equity decrees, the trial court is vested with broad discretionary power; appellate review is correspondingly narrow”).

Our deference to the District Court's exercise of its discretion is heightened where, as in this litigation, the District Court has effectively been overseeing a large public institution over a long period of time. Judge Keeton has been supervising the implementation of this decree since 1979; he has developed an understanding of the difficulties involved in constructing and managing a jail that an appellate court, even with the best possible briefing, could never hope to match. In reviewing the District Court’s judgment, we accordingly owe substantial deference to “the trial judge’s years of experience with the problem at hand.” Hutto v. Finney, 437 U. S. 678, 688 (1978).

The Court devotes much of its attention to elaborating a “standard” for lower courts to apply in cases of this kind. Ante, at 378-384. I am not certain that the product of this effort — “A party seeking modification of a consent decree may meet its initial burden by showing a significant change either in factual conditions or in law,” ante, at 384 — makes matters any clearer than the equally general language of Rule 60(b)(6). I think we would offer more guidance to the District Court here, and to the many other courts burdened with administering complex decrees like this one, if we would simply review the District Court’s exercise of its dis *395 cretion and specify any shortcomings we might find in the method by which the court reached its conclusion.

II

In my view, the District Court took too narrow a view of its own discretion. The court’s reasoning, as expressed in its opinion, was flawed by three different errors of law, each of which excised a portion of the range of options available to the court. I believe the sum of these erroneously self-imposed limits constituted an abuse of the court’s discretion.

First, the court relied on United States v. Swift & Co., 286 U. S. 106, 119 (1932), to determine that “new and unforeseen conditions” were a prerequisite to any modification. Inmates of Suffolk County Jail v. Kearney, 734 F. Supp. 561, 563 (Mass. 1990). Because the court found that the overcrowding at the jail was foreseen, id., at 564 , the court viewed Swift as barring modification. As the Court explains today, ante, at 379-380, the District Court erred in this respect. That overcrowding was foreseen should not have been a dispositive factor in the court’s decision. Modification could conceivably still be “equitable” under Rule 60(b)(5) even if the rise in inmate population had been foreseen; the danger to the community from the pretrial release of inmates, for example, might outweigh the petitioners’ failure to accommodate even a foreseen increase in the inmate population.

Second, the District Court concluded that it lacked the authority to consider the petitioners’ budget constraints in determining whether modification would be equitable. The court held: “It is not a legally supportable basis for modification of a consent decree that public officials having fiscal authority have chosen not to provide adequate resources for the Sheriff to comply with the terms of the consent decree.” 734 F. Supp., at 566 . Here again, I think the court took too narrow a view of its own authority. State and local governments are responsible for providing a wide range of services. *396 Public officials often operate within difficult fiscal constraints; every dollar spent for one purpose is a dollar that cannot be spent for something else. While the lack of resources can never excuse a failure to obey constitutional requirements, it can provide a basis for concluding that continued compliance with a decree obligation is no longer “equitable,” if, for instance, the obligation turns out to be significantly more expensive than anyone anticipated.

Third, although the District Court purported to apply the “flexible standard” proposed by the petitioners, the court denied modification because “[t]he type of modification sought here would not comply with the overall purpose of the consent decree; it would set aside the obligations of that decree.” Id., at 565 . Taken literally, this conclusion deprives the “flexible standard” of any meaning; every modification, by definition, will alter an obligation of a decree. The court may have meant no more than that the plaintiff class would never have agreed to a decree without single celling, but, taking the court at its word, it held the petitioners to a standard that would never permit modification of any decree. This was another instance where the District Court, in my view, erroneously found that it lacked the authority to grant the relief requested by the petitioners.

In these three respects, the District Court felt itself bound by constraints that in fact did not exist. We do not know whether, and to what extent, the court would have modified the decree had it not placed these limits on its own authority. I would accordingly remand these cases so that the District Court may exercise the full measure of its discretion.

In doing so, however, I would emphasize that we find fault only with the method by which the District Court reached its conclusion. The District Court may well have been justified, for the reasons suggested by Justice Stevens, in refusing to modify the decree, and the court is free, when fully exercising its discretion, to reach the same result on remand. This is a case with no satisfactory outcome. The new jail is *397 simply too small. Someone has to suffer, and it is not likely to be the government officials responsible for underestimating the inmate population and delaying the construction of the jail. Instead, it is likely to be either the inmates of Suffolk County, who will be double celled in an institution designed for single ceiling; the inmates in counties not yet subject to court supervision, who will be double celled with the inmates transferred from Suffolk County; or members of the public, who may be the victims of crimes committed by the inmates the county is forced to release in order to comply with the consent decree. The District Court has an extraordinarily difficult decision to make. We should not be inclined to second-guess the court's sound judgment in deciding who will bear this burden.

III

The Court's opinion today removes what I see as the three barriers the District Court erroneously placed in its own path. Ante, at 379-380 (distinguishing Swift); ante, at 386-387 (explaining that the court applied an impossibly strict version of the petitioners' proposed "flexible standard"); ante, at 392-393 (permitting the court to consider the petitioners' fiscal constraints). But what the Court removes with one hand, it replaces with the other. Portions of the Court's opinion might be read to place new constraints on the District Court's discretion that are, in my view, just as misplaced as the ones with which the District Court fettered itself the first time~

Most significantly, the Court observes that the District Court recognized single ceiling as "`the most important element" of the decree. Ante, at 382 (quoting 734 F. Supp., at 565 ). But the Court decides that "this was not an adequate basis for denying the requested modification." Ante, at 382. This conclusion is unsupported by any authority. Instead, the Court offers its own reasoning: "If modification of one term of a consent decree defeats the purpose of the decree, *398 obviously modification would be all but impossible. That cannot be the rule.” Ante, at 387.

This sweeping conclusion strikes me as both logically and legally erroneous. It may be that the modification of one term of a decree does not always defeat the purpose of the decree. See supra, at 396. But it hardly follows that the modification of a single term can never defeat the decree’s purpose, especially if that term is “the most important element” of the decree. If, for instance, the District Court finds that the respondents would never have consented to the decree (and a decade of delay in obtaining relief) without a guarantee of single celling, I should think that the court would not abuse its discretion were it to conclude that modification to permit double celling would be inequitable. Similarly, were the court to find that the jail was constructed with small cells on the assumption that each cell would hold but one inmate, I doubt that the District Court would exceed its authority under Rule 60(b)(5) by concluding that it would be inequitable to double cell the respondents. To the extent the Court suggests otherwise, it limits the District Court’s discretion in what I think is an unwarranted and ill-advised fashion.

The same is true of the Court’s statement that the District Court should “defer to local government administrators . . . to resolve the intricacies of implementing a decree modification.” Ante, at 392. To be sure, the courts should defer, to prison administrators in resolving the day-to-day problems in managing a prison; these problems fall within the expertise of prison officials. See, e. g., Thornburgh v. Abbott, 490 U. S. 401, 407-408 (1989). But I disagree with the notion that courts must defer to prison administrators in resolving whether and how to modify a consent decree. These questions may involve details of prison management, but at bottom they require a determination of what is “equitable” to all concerned. Deference to one of the parties to a lawsuit is usually not the surest path to equity; deference to these *399 particular petitioners, who do not have a model record of compliance with previous court orders in this case, is particularly unlikely to lead to an equitable result. The inmates have as much claim as the prison officials to an understanding of the equities. The District Court should be free to take the views of both sides into account, without being forced to grant more deference to one side than to the other.