The General Assembly looks to be taking another run at curtailing litigious inmates. Last year, in a 3-2 decision, the Indiana Supreme Court struck down a statute that barred an offender from filing a complaint if the inmate had previously filed three or more frivolous complaints. The exception was for cases where the trial court determined that the inmate was in imminent danger of serious bodily injury. The court found that this law impermissibly infringed upon the prisoners’ rights under Art. 1, Sec. 12 of the Indiana Constitution which provides that “All courts shall be open; and every person, for injury done to him in his person, property, or reputation, shall have remedy by due course of law. Justice shall be administered freely, and without purchase; completely, and without denial; speedily, and without delay.â€
Now, SB 223 is making its way through the General Assembly. Included in that bill is a provision that states:
If an offender has filed at least three (3) civil actions in which a state court has dismissed the action or a claim under IC 34-58-1-2, the offender may not file a new complaint or petition as an indigent person under this chapter, unless a court determines the offender is in immediate danger of serious bodily injury.
The twist is that, this time, inmates who are able and willing to pay the filing fee can access the courts, but inmates who are unable and/or unwilling to pay will be barred. In my experience, the state courts have not paid much attention to whether or not inmates are, in fact, indigent before letting them file “in forma pauperis” (i.e. without paying the filing fee.) The federal courts are much more rigorous about getting their money from an inmate who files a civil suit, ordering that installment payments be withdrawn from an inmate’s account with the jail.
Actually under the Prison Litigation Reform Act inmates cannot even file a lawsuit until they have exhausted their adminstrative grievances. Some private jail companies make certain that no inmate every makes it through the grievance process and thus their attorneys can always try to get the case dismissed in court. They’ll try evey trick in the book…not put out the forms, lose the forms, not make copies of the forms, etc. One private jail here there have been thousands of grievance filed…not a single inmate has comleted the process in the last two years.
At least with some of the publicly run jails you can get through the grievance process. But even they are trying to use the PLRA to stop inmate lawsuits. I know of one publicly run facility that will regularly ship out inmates who dare file a grievance.
As someone who has done a fair share of inmate litigation, the notion that there are all these inmate lawsuits out there just isn’t true. Usually inmates can’t even get to court due to the PLRA. In short the pendulum has swung back too far the other way.
The PLRA doesn’t apply to state lawsuits. There is a statute that does some of the same things in terms of requiring a judge to do an initial screening, but in my experience, the state judges don’t do the screen.
From my not-at-all exhaustive perspective, Tippecanoe County has to pay more than it probably should to defend against inmate lawsuits. (Not that I’m turning away the work.) I don’t know what the right answer is. Obviously, you want people with legitimate claims to have access to the court, and the litigation process is often necessary to determine whether the claims are legitimate.
But the fact is that inmates are in an unpleasant situation, they don’t have any reason to have warm feeling for their jailers, and they are, every so often, less than completely honest.