The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to consider a federal inmate’s request to revive his lawsuit over alleged mistreatment in prison after it was dismissed.
Donte Parrish sued the federal government on April 7, 2017, in a federal district court in West Virginia for compensation based on his view that he was wrongfully placed in administrative segregation for three years after being accused of murdering a fellow inmate. Parrish denied involvement.
Parrish was a pro se litigant at trial, meaning he represented himself in court. Prisoners often do not have attorneys representing them in lawsuits. Parrish later obtained an attorney during the appeals process.
At the time he filed the lawsuit, Parrish was incarcerated at a federal penitentiary in Inez, Kentucky, where he was serving a 180-month sentence for an unspecified offense.
The murder took place in December 2009 during a riot at the prison where Parrish was then being held. The Federal Bureau of Prisons charged Parrish in the killing and put him in administrative segregation “while the FBI spent nearly six years purportedly investigating the incident,” according to the petition.
Parrish said in his petition that 20 months of his segregation consisted of spending time in a unit that was known as “the worst place in the federal prison system.”
Parrish said he was isolated in a small cell, was denied access to his property, lost law library privileges, was denied family visits, had difficulty contacting his lawyer, and was denied access to showers.
“He was sometimes restrained and forced to sleep in shackles, and at one point ‘was forced to stay in a cell with [a] feces stained wall and floor for at least a week,’” the petition said.
The murder charge was eventually dropped.
A federal district court dismissed his lawsuit over administrative segregation on March 23, 2020, and sent notice of the dismissal to a federal prison in Illinois where he had previously been held.
Parrish said he did not receive notice until after the 90-day appeal period had passed because he was in the process of being transferred from one correctional facility to another.
He asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to review the dismissal and that court interpreted the request as a motion to reopen the appeal period. The circuit court returned the case to the district court.
The district court ruled that Parrish received the dismissal notice more than 21 days after it was sent, that he asked for the appeal period to be reopened within 14 days of receipt, and that neither side would be harmed by reopening the appeal period.
The district court ordered the reopening of the period for 14 days, after which the case was sent back to the Fourth Circuit. In that circuit court proceeding, both sides agreed that “Parrish’s original notice of appeal had become effective in light of the reopened appeal period,” the petition said.
A divided Fourth Circuit panel then ruled it had no authority to hear Parrish’s appeal because he had “not file[d] a timely notice of appeal.”
A majority on the panel found that Parrish was obligated to file a fresh notice of appeal within 14 days of the district court’s ruling to reopen, rejecting his argument “that when the district court reopened the time to appeal ... it ‘validated’ his prior untimely notice of appeal.”
Parrish asked for a rehearing. The government agreed with him that the panel erred when it found it lacked authority to rehear the case but took no position on whether a rehearing should be granted. The panel, and then the full circuit court, voted to deny rehearing.
Parrish urged the Supreme Court to grant the petition to resolve a split among the federal courts of appeals “on the recurring question whether a notice of appeal filed before an appeal period is reopened becomes sufficient once a district court reopens the appeal period, or whether a new and duplicative notice of appeal is required after reopening.”
The petition said the “issue is profoundly important to the pro se litigants it most frequently affects.”
The Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure has created a subcommittee to examine the rules regarding appeals, she wrote.
Prelogar wrote that while the Fourth Circuit’s decision is “incorrect,” Parrish “fails to identify any compelling basis for further review, particularly while the Advisory Committee is studying the issue and has the authority to amend the rules in a manner that could obviate any need for additional guidance from this Court.”
The Epoch Times reached out for comment to Parrish’s attorney, Amanda Rice of Jones Day in Detroit, Michigan, and the U.S. Department of Justice. No replies were received by publication time.
