A Fantastic Voyage
Prisoners’ lawsuits, and the prisoners who file them, have always been a special subset of the frivolous lawsuits raining down on the courts. It probably stands to reason: you have a group of people locked up 24 hours a day with little else to occupy their time, while U.S. Supreme Court decisions protect prisoners’ right of “access to the courts.” What else do they have to do except file lawsuits?
These cases seemed to reach a peak in the 1980s, some of them passing into a kind of informal notoriety in the court systems. There was the legendary Clovis Carl Green, Jr., who as of 1981, had set some kind of record by filing more than 550 such lawsuits. (The judge who threw out one of Green’s cases described him with a phrase borrowed from the late Houston Oilers football coach, O. A. “Bum” Phillips: “He may not be in a class by himself, but it doesn’t take long to call the roll.”)
Also from the same era was Frank Carter, an inmate at the George State Prison in Reidsville, Georgia. Carter was not as productive as Mr. Green, but his effort to challenge the conditions of his confinement did lead the judge to write an almost poetic ode to prisoner litigation in general, and to Carter’s little lawsuit in particular.
Carter, representing himself (as almost all prisoner-litigators do) sued the prison hospital administrator, warden, and another inmate. Carter alleged that he was receiving improper medication for his ailments, claiming to have “blue ink and glass in the General sensory area” of his brain, as well as amnesia and failing eyesight.
Come to think of it, this would go a long way toward explaining this lawsuit.
Anyway, Carter claimed that the prison warden had taken pictures of him in a . . . compromising pose. He also asserted that hospital employees had put the blue ink and glass into his brain, and that while at the hospital his head was pushed into a sack with a rattlesnake and that the rattlesnake bit him.
The district judge (who’d obviously spent too much time watching Star Wars) began by commenting that the study of prisons and the prisoner litigants “is like the study of astronomy or even science fiction. The explorer . . . embarks upon a fantastic voyage into another world, even another galaxy, far, far away. Prisoners protect themselves with the laser-light power of their constitutional rights. Prison officials shield themselves with administrative autonomy. Both sides have power, but both must exercise restraint, lest they give in to the dark side of the force.”
Well, there’s an analogy that, undoubtedly, no one ever made before.
But the judge continued, “The astronomer who examines the sky will discover a variety of celestial bodies. The explorer of the world will encounter in his twilight zone a variety of phenomena, although few prisoner plaintiffs are noted for their heavenly aura. A handful of cases burn brightly with a meritorious claim, piercing the prison officials’ shield of autonomy. Many inmate cases, however, explode instantaneously in a burst of maliciousness or frivolousness . . . . Other cases glow on and on, dimming gradually as discovery and evidentiary hearings make clear that they have no merit.”
Wow — he managed to carry the astronomic metaphor through two steps. In a footnote, he even added, “Unlike the astronomer Carl Sagan who can boast of billions and billions of stars, the Court can claim only some 347 pending cases” in that court. He added, “Sometimes, however, the number seems closer to billions and billions.”
Eventually, the judge worked his way through Carter’s claims about the blue ink and glass, as well as his argument that Carter should have been prescribed “Cocane of Porcane.” The judge responded that Carter perhaps “meant ‘cocaine of porcine.’ The recipient of such a drug would, no doubt, be ‘high on the hog.’”
He eventually had to get down to the rather mundane business of getting rid of the lawsuit — which he did, finding that there was no factual or legal basis for Carter’s claims, and that the case should therefore be dismissed. But he did conclude with this “fond farewell”: “Thus ends, at least for now, the Carter episode, only a chapter in the saga of prisoner litigation. Everyday brings news of alleged skirmishing between inmate and institution; each bulletin begs the Court to respond. The Court’s adventures in the prisoner world will continue.”