California's attempt to reduce prisoners' access to law books has run into an obstacle in a federal appeals court.
Relying on a federal law that limited courts' authority over prison conditions, the administration of then-Gov. Pete Wilson sought in 1997 to end a 25-year-old court order requiring all California prisons to stock their libraries with up-to-date volumes of laws and legal cases. Prisoners use the libraries to work on their appeals and on suits that claim violations of their rights.
The state proposed a limited supply of law books, described by a state lawyer as 'bare bones' and by a prisoners' lawyer as 'almost nothing.' Without holding a hearing on inmates' complaints that the cutbacks were excessive, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of San Francisco ruled in 1998 that the federal law authorized the change and barred further court scrutiny.
But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled August 4th that the prison system must show that it would not interfere with prisoners' constitutional right of access to the courts. The 3-0 ruling requires Illston to hold a hearing on the effects of the library reductions.
The court also told another San Francisco-based federal judge, Charles Legge, to hold a hearing on security classifications for condemned prisoners before ending 20 years of court supervision over conditions on San Quentin's death row. A report found that low-risk prisoners were being housed in maximum-security cells, the court said. The 1995 federal law, the Prison Litigation Reform Act, was aimed at curbing lawsuits by prisoners and at ending judges' oversight of state prisons under orders known as consent decrees. The decrees, originally accepted by states to settle inmates' lawsuits over prison conditions, typically required improvements in areas like food, health care and law libraries and allowed monitoring by judges, sometimes for decades.
The law limited the duration of consent decrees and restricted court supervision to the minimum necessary to prevent violations of prisoners' constitutional rights.
In the August 4th ruling, the appeals court agreed with other federal courts that the law is constitutional - rejecting arguments that it usurps judicial powers - but said the law does not require judges to rubber-stamp decisions by prison officials.
The inmates' lawyer, Donald Specter, said the ruling would give him a chance to show prisoners' need for legal materials.
If the reductions proposed by the Wilson administration in 1997 took effect, inmates 'wouldn't have access to the cases which tell them what the law is. . . . It would put tremendous roadblocks in the path of anybody trying to get to the courthouse,' said Specter, of the nonprofit Prison Law Office.
Deputy Attorney General Allen Crown declined comment on the ruling, which he hadn't seen, but said the library cutbacks were proposed to save money spent on books that may no longer be needed. Prisoners who often had to handle their own appeals in the 1970s are now guaranteed lawyers, he said.
Gov. Davis' administration has followed many of Wilson's prison policies, but Corrections Department spokeswoman Margot Bach said no decision has been made yet on law libraries.