Latif KHALIQ; Roger Henry; Lamont Nelson; Franklin Howard; Michael Cooper; Otis Blackmon; Emmanuel Hunt; Christopher Clark; Michael Norwood; Donald Bowen, Sr.; John Barmore; Ralph Shifflett; Kevin Ford; James Lang; Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail Authority, Members of the Board, in their official capacities and as an involuntary party plaintiff pursuant to Rule 19, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Mitchell Newman, Chairperson of the Authority Board; Kenneth N. Bussie; Jeremy Ziolkowski; Emmanuel Hunt; Frederick C. Shelton; Vincent Moore; Johnny Lee Layne; Germaine A. Payne; George Ayers; Tyrone Curry; Steven Robinson; Terry Dillard; Jason Via; Anthony Henshaw; William F. Willis; Derrick Stinnie, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Ronald J. ANGELONE, Director of the Virginia Department of Corrections, sued in his personal and official capacity, Defendant-Appellee.
No. 02-7365.
United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.
Decided July 21, 2003.
2003 WL 21693635 | 71 Fed. Appx. 895
Argued April 4, 2003.
Even if we were to conclude that Brackman makes out a prima facie case, we would conclude that the County offered legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for the RIF. Specifically, Winkelman and Graham, the two members of the Board most actively involved in the budget cuts, had as their sole objective the elimination of needless spending by the County. Maintaining two recycling divisions appeared to be a waste of resources and thus the Board opted, based upon its calculations, to consolidate the two operations into one division. This explanation is sufficient to shift the burden to Brackman, who must show that “the legitimate reasons offered by the defendant were not its true reasons, but were a pretext for discrimination.” Burdine, 450 U.S. at 253, 101 S.Ct. 1089. See also Causey, 162 F.3d at 803 (noting that the defendant‘s “budgetary constraints provide a legitimate non-discriminatory reason for its decision to reduce its workforce“). (While perhaps not legally relevant, we note that time bore out the Board‘s theory: the County saved nearly $90,000 in Fiscal Year 2001 by combining the recycling operations.) Brackman fails to proffer sufficient evidence to show that the County‘s explanation for her termination is false, or put differently, that she was impermissibly terminated because of her EEOC complaint. It is true that Brackman presents evidence that the County incorrectly deposited revenues from her division into Bingham‘s division. And Brackman presents evidence that some County employees may have been aware that her position was at risk in advance of the official RIF. She even proffers some evidence that the County‘s RIF procedures were not followed in her case. We note that the County did encourage Brackman to apply for the position of Recycling/Convenience Site Supervisor, which she declined to do because of the physical demands of the job. “The ultimate question is whether the employer intentionally [retaliated], and proof that the employer‘s proffered reason is unpersuasive, or even obviously contrived, does not necessarily establish that [Brackman‘s] proffered reason is correct.” Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Prods., Inc., 530 U.S. 133, 146-47, 120 S.Ct. 2097, 147 L.Ed.2d 105 (2000) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). It is not enough to disbelieve the County; the fact finder must believe Brackman‘s explanation of intentional retaliation. Id. We conclude that no rational jury could do so based on the evidence in this record. See Tinsley v. First Union Nat‘l Bank, 155 F.3d 435, 444-45 (4th Cir. 1998).
III.
For all of the foregoing reasons, the judgment of the district court is
AFFIRMED.
Before WILKINS, Chief Judge, and TRAXLER and GREGORY, Circuit Judges.
OPINION
PER CURIAM.
Appellants, state prison inmates in the custody of the Virginia Department of Corrections who were housed at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail (the “ACRJ“), filed this action under
I.
Appellants consist of twenty-nine state prisoners in the custody of the VDOC pursuant to sentences imposing incarceration for at least one year. Under
When Appellants were not transferred from the ACRJ to a state correctional facility after the sixty-day period under
Specifically, Appellants set forth eight ways in which state inmates housed in the ACRJ are treated dissimilarly from those housed in state facilities: (1) ACRJ inmates enjoy significantly less space and less humane conditions of confinement
By way of remedy, Appellants sought an order requiring the Director to either transfer them to a state correctional facility within fifteen days or make available to them the opportunities and programs that they would have if they were housed in a state correctional facility. Appellants also sought compensatory and punitive damages for the violation of their constitutional rights.
The Director moved to dismiss the complaint under
II.
We review the district court‘s decision to dismiss the complaint under Rule 12(b)(6) de novo. See Veney v. Wyche, 293 F.3d 726, 730 (4th Cir.2002). A complaint will be dismissed for failure to state a claim upon which relief may be granted if, assuming the facts alleged in the complaint are true and drawing all reasonable factual inferences in the plaintiffs’ favor, the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief. See id.
The Equal Protection Clause provides that “[n]o State shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
A.
We begin with the district court‘s conclusion that Appellants, while housed in the local jail, were not similarly situated to state prisoners housed in state correctional facilities. More specifically, we must examine whether state inmates housed in a local facility are similarly situated to state inmates housed in state facilities for purposes of evaluating the physical space, and the programs and opportunities made available to them, e.g., the opportunity to participate in work release programs, work for pay inside the facility, furlough programs, contact visits, additional exercise, work and vocational training program opportunities, and elective medical treatment and surgery. See Klinger v. Dep‘t. of Corr., 31 F.3d 727, 731 (8th Cir.1994) (“The similarly situated inquiry focuses on whether the plaintiffs are similarly situated to another group for purposes of the challenged government action.“). We conclude that they are not.
This is not our first occasion to address an inmate‘s equal protection challenge to the conditions of imprisonment based upon the locale of confinement. In Moss v. Clark, inmates convicted and sentenced in the District of Columbia brought an equal protection claim under the Fifth Amendment because persons convicted of crimes in the District of Columbia were not treated the same with regard to good time credits. Inmates sentenced under District law and housed in D.C. prisons could accumulate good time credits under the District of Columbia Good Time Credits Act, whereas inmates sentenced under District law but housed in federal prisons could only accumulate good time credits under the federal good time system, which provided less generous credits and a diminished opportunity to reduce the ultimate sentence. See Moss, 886 F.2d at 688-89.
The district court concluded that the District of Columbia‘s Good Time Credits Act violated the equal protection rights of the inmates by creating a distinction between D.C. Code offenders housed in D.C. correctional facilities and D.C. Code offenders housed in federal penal institutions, and held that the distinction bore no rational relationship to the governmental purpose of relieving overcrowding in the D.C. prisons. We reversed, rejecting the inmates’ “contention that inmates incarcerated in District and federal facilities are in fact so similarly situated that different treatment of them defies rational explanation.” Id. at 691. We explained:
The equal protection clause guarantees that all persons similarly circumstanced shall be treated alike. The equal protection clause does not, however, require things which are different in fact or opinion to be treated in law as though they were the same. District of Columbia prisoners do not become similarly situated to prisoners in federal facilities with regard to parole eligibility simply because both were sentenced in the District of Columbia Superior Court under the District of Columbia Code. After sentencing, all individuals are remanded to the authority of the Attorney General who determines the location of their incarceration. Thereafter, for purposes of imprisonment and parole, the class to which [an inmate] belongs consists of the persons confined as he was confined, subject to the same conditions to which he was subject.
Id. (citations and internal quotation marks omitted); see also Bates v. Wilkinson, 267 F.2d 779, 781 (5th Cir.1959) (rejecting
We reached a similar conclusion in Strickler v. Waters, 989 F.2d 1375 (4th Cir.1993). After Strickler was convicted and sentenced by the City of Portsmouth Circuit Court to a prison term, he was committed to the Portsmouth City Jail pending an unrelated trial in the Virginia Beach Circuit Court. He alleged that the differing conditions in the local jail—overcrowding, inadequate exercise facilities, poor climatological conditions, and an inadequate library to which he had restricted access—violated his equal protection rights. We declined to allow Strickler to pursue this claim against the Director because, inter alia, Strickler failed to demonstrate that he was similarly situated to state inmates housed in state facilities:
[A]bsent a right to have been housed in a state facility during the time he was confined at Portsmouth, a right that Strickler did not and almost surely could not allege (and one that the State of Virginia does not believe he has, see
Va.Code Ann. § 53.1-20 ), he was not similarly situated for equal protection purposes with state prisoners in state facilities, and therefore his claim necessarily would have failed.
We find these principles to be controlling here. Appellants had no federal right to be housed in any particular state facility, or in a state corrections facility as opposed to a local jail compensated by the state for the cost of incarcerating state inmates pending their transfer to an available and appropriate space within a state facility. Once convicted and sentenced, the state inmates housed in local jails are committed to the custody of the Director of the VDOC, who is charged with receiving them into the state corrections system within sixty days of the final sentencing order being sent. See
Finally, we are unpersuaded by Appellants’ contention that our holdings in Strickler and Moss are inherently flawed, and should not be followed in this case, because they would allow the Director “to send all black inmates to a local jail and to accept only white prisoners into state facilities.” Appellants’ Brief at 22. Under such a holding, Appellants argue, black inmates would be automatically precluded from raising an equal protection challenge because they would not be similarly situated to white state prisoners. Appellants, of course, have made no claim that they were deprived of an assignment to a state facility for discriminatory reasons, much less for racially discriminatory reasons. But in any event, the hypothetical advanced by Appellants entirely misconstrues our holdings regarding the similarly situated inquiry. Under our holdings, all state-eligible inmates, black and white, housed in the local jail would be similarly situated for purposes of assignment to a state correctional facility from a local correctional facility. See Moss, 886 F.2d at 691. If the assignment of local facility inmates to state facilities was being made by the Director on the basis of race, then the Director would be treating similarly situated inmates differently. That, of course, is a far cry from the allegations before us today.
B.
As an alternative ground for affirming the district court, the Director asserts that, even if we assume or conclude that Appellants are similarly situated to state prisoners housed in state facilities for purposes of the challenged conduct, we should affirm the dismissal because there is a rational basis for the disparate treatment. See Ostrzenski v. Seigel, 177 F.3d 245, 253 (4th Cir.1999) (noting that the court may affirm the district court‘s dismissal “on the basis of any ground supported by the record“). We agree.
Because the classification of inmates based upon their situs of incarceration does not employ a suspect class or burden a fundamental right, it “is accorded a strong presumption of validity.” Heller v. Doe, 509 U.S. 312, 319, 113 S.Ct. 2637, 125 L.Ed.2d 257 (1993). “The only proper judicial inquiry is whether the [classification] serves a legitimate state [penological] interest and whether the challenged classification is rationally related to it.” Moss, 886 F.2d at 690. Even where similarly situated persons are treated differently, a state classification “that neither proceeds along suspect lines nor infringes fundamental constitutional rights must be upheld against equal protection challenge if there is any reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis for [it]“. FCC v. Beach Communications, Inc., 508 U.S. 307, 313, 113 S.Ct. 2096, 124 L.Ed.2d 211 (1993); see McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420, 426, 81 S.Ct. 1101, 6 L.Ed.2d 393 (1961) (noting that such clas-
Appellants’ allegations, if proven, fail to establish that their imprisonment in the ACRJ was irrational, arbitrary, or otherwise not in furtherance of a legitimate penological interest. Appellants’ complaint conclusorily asserts that “[d]enying [them] opportunities and programs available to state prisoners in state facilities irrationally discriminates against state prisoners confined to the ACJR by treating them differently from state prisoners confined in state correctional facilities.” J.A. 66. However, the facts alleged in the complaint, even if true, do not bear out such an equal protection claim.
“There is no doubt that discipline and administration of state detention facilities are state functions. They are subject to federal authority only where paramount federal constitutional or statutory rights supervene.” Kersh v. Bounds, 501 F.2d 585, 588 (4th Cir.1974) (quoting Johnson v. Avery, 393 U.S. 483, 486, 89 S.Ct. 747, 21 L.Ed.2d 718 (1969)); see also Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 85, 107 S.Ct. 2254, 96 L.Ed.2d 64 (1987) (noting the high degree of deference which must be afforded to prison authorities in the “inordinately difficult undertaking” of running a prison system). As correctly noted by the magistrate judge, at least two of the rational bases found in Moss are equally applicable here—relieving overcrowding in the prisons and preserving uniformity of treatment between inmates who are incarcerated together. See Moss, 886 F.2d at 691-92; see also Counts, 951 F.Supp. at 585 (concluding that even if he were similarly situated, the inmate‘s claim would fail because he “ha[d] not alleged that the Commonwealth of Virginia ha[d] no rational reason for housing him in a local jail instead of a state prison“). Because there are legitimate, plausible reasons for the alleged disparate treatment between state inmates housed in local jails and inmates housed in state facilities, our inquiry is concluded. See FCC, 508 U.S. at 313-14. Accordingly, we affirm the district court‘s dismissal of the equal protection claim for the additional reason that there is a rational basis for the Director‘s challenged action.
III.
For the foregoing reasons, the judgment of the district court is affirmed.
AFFIRMED.