It was a three-box, four-opinion day at the Supreme Court, and the morning began with a case that showcased the Nine’s ideological split. You can expect that to happen frequently: Opinions are announced in order of reverse seniority and our newest justice, Gorsuch, is fond of taking ideological stands.
In Murphy v. Smith, the Court’s more conservative wing—that’s Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch—claimed Justice Kennedy’s vote. (Kennedy is to the two ideological factions as “y” is to vowels and consonants: Sometimes he counts; there are rules in theory, but also surprises.)
The case hinged on a provision concerning how courts should handle prisoners’ attorneys’ fees when a prisoner wins a “deprivation of rights” case around prison conditions. It’s easy to understand why Charles Murphy prevailed in his deprivation of rights suit against two prison guards.
On July 25, 2011, petitioner Charles Murphy, a prisoner at the Vandalia Correctional Center in Illinois, reported that his assigned seat at mealtime had food and water on it, which resulted in Murphy being handcuffed and escorted to a segregation building. Once there, Murphy taunted respondent Correctional Officer Robert Smith, who responded by hitting Murphy in the eye and applying a choke hold, causing Murphy to lose consciousness. When Murphy woke up, Officer Smith and respondent Lieutenant Gregory Fulk were pushing him into a cell. His hands were still cuffed behind his back and he fell face-first into the cell and hit his head on a metal toilet. Officer Smith and Lieutenant Fulk then stripped Murphy of his clothes, removed his handcuffs, and left him in the cell without checking his condition. Thirty or forty minutes passed until a nurse arrived to attend to Murphy, who was sent to a hospital. Part of his eye socket had been crushed and required surgery. Despite the procedure, Murphy did not fully recover; almost five years later, his vision remained doubled and blurred.
After Murphy won, the federal district court determined that 10 percent of his award of $308,000 for compensatory and punitive damages should go toward his attorney’s fees, $108,000, with the rest to come from the guards. The guards appealed on the basis of this provision they claimed requires 25 percent of Murphy’s award to go toward his attorney’s fees.
Whenever a monetary judgment is awarded in an action [brought by a prisoner who is confined to any jail, prison, or other correctional facility, in which attorney’s fees are authorized] 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.
Turning to the opinion, there are three immediate flags: One, the composition of the majority; two, the opinion’s written by Gorsuch, whose noxious style is an impediment to the clarity of his every opinion; and three, it begins, “This is a case about how much prevailing prisoners must pay their lawyers.” When the conservative wing makes the call on a topic like this one, that means good news for prisons and bad news for prisoners.
Murphy and the liberal minority—justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Kagan, led by dissent author Sotomayor—recognized judicial discretion in the statute’s language, aka a range of options: They would have ruled that “the provision permits district courts to exercise discretion in choosing the portion of a prisoner-plaintiff ’s monetary judgment that must be applied toward an attorney’s fee award, so long as that portion is not greater than 25 percent.” (Pretty sure I didn’t even need law school to understand and agree with that reasoning.)
Instead, the conservative majority decided that the provision should be interpreted to require courts to maximize the amount of the attorney’s fee that can be taken out of the prevailing prisoner’s award. Gorsuch’s smug “ta-da!” paragraph illustrates perfectly why your author keeps Pepto-Bismol close at hand on opinion days.
At the end of the day, what may have begun as a close race turns out to have a clear winner. Now with a view of the full field of textual, contextual, and precedential evidence, we think the interpretation the court of appeals adopted prevails. In cases governed by §1997e(d), we hold that district courts must apply as much of the judgment as necessary, up to 25%, to satisfy an award of attorney’s fees.
That’s a classic conservative move: Text! Context! Precedent! The claim that this ruling is so firmly rooted belies the gymnastics the court’s right wing performed to reach this contra-plain text conclusion.
What this ruling means is that when people are awarded money meant to compensate them for the abuses they experienced in prison—and, key concept here, punish the perpetrators—courts are now required to redirect as much of that award as possible to lessening the amount the offenders are responsible for paying. So, here, Mr. Murphy loses 25 percent of his reduced award to the attorney’s fee he’d never have incurred had prison guards not brutalized him—so they don’t have to.
How’s that for justice?