SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________
No. 16–1067
_________________
CHARLES MURPHY, PETITIONER
v. ROBERT
SMITH, et al.
on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the seventh circuit
[February 21, 2018]
Justice Sotomayor, with whom Justice Ginsburg,
Justice Breyer, and Justice Kagan join, dissenting.
The Court concludes that the attorney’s fee
apportionment provision of the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995
(PLRA), 42 U. S. C. §1997e(d)(2), requires that a
district court endeavor to fulfill the entirety of an attorney’s
fee award from the monetary judgment awarded to a prevailing
prisoner-plaintiff, and only if 25 percent of the judgment is
inadequate to cover the fee award can the court require
contribution from the defendant.
Ante, at 8. I cannot agree.
The text of §1997e(d)(2)—“a portion of the judgment (not to exceed
25 percent) shall be applied to satisfy the amount of attorney’s
fees awarded against the defendant”—and its statutory context make
clear that the provision permits district courts to exercise
discretion in choosing the portion of a prisoner-plaintiff’s
monetary judgment that must be applied toward an attorney’s fee
award, so long as that portion is not greater than 25 percent. I
therefore respectfully dissent.
I
In approaching this case, it helps to
understand the background of the fee award at issue. On July 25,
2011, petitioner Charles Murphy, a prisoner at the Vandalia
Correctional Center in Illinois, reported that his assigned seat at
mealtime had food and water on it, which resulted in Murphy being
handcuffed and escorted to a segregation building. Once there,
Murphy taunted respondent Correctional Officer Robert Smith, who
responded by hitting Murphy in the eye and applying a choke hold,
causing Murphy to lose consciousness. When Murphy woke up, Officer
Smith and respondent Lieutenant Gregory Fulk were pushing him into
a cell. His hands were still cuffed behind his back and he fell
face-first into the cell and hit his head on a metal toilet.
Officer Smith and Lieutenant Fulk then stripped Murphy of his
clothes, removed his handcuffs, and left him in the cell without
checking his condition. Thirty or forty minutes passed until a
nurse arrived to attend to Murphy, who was sent to a hospital. Part
of his eye socket had been crushed and required surgery. Despite
the procedure, Murphy did not fully recover; almost five years
later, his vision remained doubled and blurred.
Murphy sued respondents under 42
U. S. C. §1983 and state-law causes of action. After
trial, a jury found Officer Smith liable for state-law battery and
unconstitutional use of force under the Eighth Amendment, and found
Lieutenant Fulk liable for deliberate indifference to a serious
medical need in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The jury awarded
Murphy $409,750.00 in compensatory and punitive damages, which the
District Court reduced to $307,733.82. The District Court also
awarded Murphy’s attorney $108,446.54 in fees for the several
hundred hours he spent on the case and, pursuant to §1997e(d)(2),
ordered Murphy to contribute 10 percent of his money judgment
toward the attorney’s fee award and respondents to pay the
rest.
Respondents appealed, arguing that §1997e(d)(2)
required Murphy to contribute 25 percent of his judgment toward
payment of the attorney’s fee award. The Court of Appeals for the
Seventh Circuit agreed and reversed. In so doing, it acknowledged
that its interpretation of §1997e(d)(2) was at odds with that of
all the other Courts of Appeals to have considered the question.
See 844 F. 3d 653, 660 (2016) (citing
Boesing v.
Spiess, 540 F. 3d 886, 892 (CA8 2008);
Parker v.
Conway, 581 F. 3d 198, 205 (CA3 2009)).
II
A
The relevant provision in the PLRA
provides:
“Whenever a monetary judgment is awarded
in [a civil-rights action brought by a prisoner], a portion of the
judgment (not to exceed 25 percent) shall be applied to satisfy the
amount of attorney’s fees awarded against the defendant. If the
award of attorney’s fees is not greater than 150 percent of the
judgment, the excess shall be paid by the defendant.” 42
U. S. C. §1997e(d)(2).
The crux of the majority’s reasoning is its
definition of the infinitive “to satisfy.” The majority contends
that “when you purposefully seek or aim ‘to satisfy’ an obligation,
especially a financial obligation, that usually means you intend to
discharge the obligation in full.”
Ante, at 3. To meet its
duty to act with the purpose of fully discharging the fee award,
the majority reasons, “a district court must apply as much of the
judgment as necessary to sat- isfy the fee award, without of course
exceeding the 25% cap.”
Ibid.
But the phrase “to satisfy” as it is used in
§1997e(d)(2) does not bear the weight the majority places on it.
Its neighboring text and the realities of prisoner-civil-rights
litigation rebut the conclusion that “to satisfy” compels a
district court always to maximize the amount of the
prisoner-plaintiff’s judgment to be contributed to the fee award,
and instead indicate that the only work “to satisfy” does in the
statute is to direct a district court to contribute some amount of
the judgment toward payment of the fee award.
Beginning with the neighboring text, it may well
be that, standing alone, “to satisfy” is often used to mean “to
completely fulfill an obligation.” But the statutory provision here
does not simply say “to satisfy”; it says “applied to satisfy.” As
a matter of everyday usage, the phrase “applied to satisfy” often
means “applied toward the satisfaction of,” rather than “applied in
complete fulfillment of.” Thus, whereas an action undertaken “to
satisfy” an obligation might, as the majority suggests, naturally
be understood as an effort to discharge the obligation in full,
ante, at 3, a contribution that is “applied to satisfy” an
obligation need not be intended to discharge the obligation in
full.
Take a few examples: A consumer makes a payment
on her credit card, which her agreement with the card company
provides shall be “applied to satisfy” her debt. A student enrolls
in a particular type of math class, the credits from which her
university registrar earlier announced shall be “applied to
satisfy” the requirements of a physics degree. And a law firm
associate contributes hours to a
pro bono matter that
her firm has provided may be “applied to satisfy” the firm’s
overall billable-hours requirement. In each case, pursuant to the
relevant agreement, the payment, credits, and hours are applied
toward the satisfaction of a larger obligation, but the inference
is not that the consumer, student, or associate had to contribute
or even necessarily did contribute the maximum possible credit card
payment, classroom credits, or hours toward the fulfillment of
those obligations. The consumer may have chosen to make the minimum
credit card payment because she preferred to allocate her other
funds elsewhere; the student may have chosen the four-credit
version of the math course over the six-credit one because the
former had a better instructor; and the associate may have been
judicious about the hours she dedicated to the
pro bono
matter because she knew her firm more highly valued paid over
pro bono work. So, too, here. Section 1997e(d)(2), like
the credit card agreement, university registrar announcement, and
law firm policy, sets out the relevant rule—“a portion of the
judgment (not to exceed 25 percent) shall be applied to satisfy”
the fee award—and the district court, like the consumer, student,
and law firm associate, decides how much of the judgment to
apply.
As a practical matter, moreover, a district
court will almost never be able to discharge fully a fee award from
25 percent of a prisoner-plaintiff’s judgment. In the vast majority
of prisoner-civil-rights cases, the attorney’s fee award exceeds
the monetary judgment awarded to the prevailing prisoner-plaintiff.
In fiscal year 2012, for instance, the median damages award in a
prisoner-civil-rights action litigated to victory (
i.e., not
settled or decided against the prisoner) was a mere $4,185. See
Schlanger, Trends in Prisoner Litigation, as the PLRA Enters
Adulthood, 5 U. C. Irvine L. Rev. 153, 168 (2015) (Table 7)
(Trends in Prisoner Litigation). Therefore, in 2012, the maximum
amount (25 percent) of the median judgment that could be applied
toward an attorney’s fee award was $1,046.25. The PLRA caps the
hourly rate that may be awarded to a prisoner-plaintiff’s attorney
at 150 percent of the rate for court-appointed counsel under 18
U. S. C. §3006A, which in 2012 was $125. 42
U. S. C. §1997e(d)(3); App. to Pet. for Cert. 21a. Thus,
a prisoner’s attorney was entitled to up to $187.50 per hour
worked. Even if a district court were to apply an hourly rate of
just $100, well below the cap, unless the attorney put in fewer
than 10.5 hours in the ordinary case—a virtually unimaginable
scenario—25 percent of the judgment will not come close to
discharging fully the attorney’s fee award.[
1]
Such low judgments are not a new phenomenon in
prisoner-civil-rights suits; they were the norm even before
Congress enacted the PLRA. In fiscal year 1993, for example, the
median damages award for prisoner-plaintiffs in cases won at trial
was $1,000. See Trends in Prisoner Litigation 167; Schlanger,
Inmate Litigation, 116 Harv. L. Rev. 1555, 1602–1603, and Table
II.C (2003).[
2]
Given the very small judgment awards in
successfully litigated prisoner-civil-rights cases, it is hard to
believe, as the majority contends, that Congress used “applied to
satisfy” to command an effort by district courts to “discharge
. . . in full,”
ante, at 3, when in most cases,
full discharge will never be possible.[
3] Rather, taking into account both the realities of
prisoner-civil-rights litigation and the most natural reading of
“applied to satisfy,” the more logical inference is that
§1997e(d)(2) simply requires that a portion of the prevailing
prisoner-plaintiff’s judgment be applied toward the satisfaction of
the attorney’s fee award.[
4] It
does not, however, demand that the district court always order the
prisoner-plaintiff to pay the maximum possible portion of the
judgment (up to 25 percent) needed to discharge fully the fee
award. Under that interpretation, applying any amount of Murphy’s
judgment toward payment of his attorney’s fee award complies with
§1997e(d)(2), whether that amount is 10 percent of the judgment as
ordered by the District Court or 25 percent as ordered by the Court
of Appeals.
B
The majority suggests that if Congress had
wanted to permit judges to pursue something other than full
discharge of the fee award from the judgment, it could have
replaced “to satisfy” with “to reduce” or “against.”
Ante,
at 3. But the majority ignores that Congress also easily could have
written §1997e(d)(2) to more clearly express the meaning it and
respondents champion. The statute, for example, simply could have
said: “Twenty-five percent of the plaintiff’s judgment shall be
applied to satisfy the amount of attorney’s fees awarded against
the defendant. If the award of attorney’s fees is not greater than
150 percent of the judgment, the excess shall be paid by the
defendant.”
In fact, Congress considered and rejected
language prior to enacting the current attorney’s fee apportionment
provision that would have done just what the majority claims. An
earlier version of §1997e(d)(2) provided:
“Whenever a monetary judgment is awarded
in an action described in paragraph (1), a portion of the judgment
(not to exceed 25 percent) shall be applied to satisfy the amount
of attorney’s fees awarded against the defendant.
If the award
of attorney’s fees is greater than 25 percent of the judgment,
the excess shall be paid by the defendant.” Prison Litigation
Reform Act of 1995, S. 1279, 104th Cong., 1st Sess., §3(d), p. 16
(1995) (emphasis added).
The italicized clause plainly expressed what the
major- ity contends the current provision means,
i.e., that
a defendant’s liability for the attorney’s fee award begins only if
any portion of the award remains unpaid after the prevailing
prisoner-plaintiff has contributed 25 percent of the judgment. But
Congress removed this clause before finalizing the bill, thus
electing to keep the 25-percent ceiling for the
prisoner-plaintiff’s contribution to the fee award and rejecting a
25-percent floor for the defendant’s contribution. See H. R. Conf.
Rep. No. 104–378, p. 71 (1995).
The majority alternatively disclaims the ability
to discern what motivated the deletion and pronounces that “[i]t
shows that, at some stage of the bill’s consideration, its
proponents likely shared [the majority’s] understanding” of how the
first sentence works.
Ante, at 8–9, n. 2. In the
majority’s view, it is more likely that Congress drafted two
redundant sentences than two conflicting ones.
Ibid. That
supposition, however, is purely speculative. Here is what is known
for certain: Congress had before it language that would have
accomplished exactly the statutory function the majority today
endorses and Congress chose to excise that language from the text.
Our precedent instructs that “[w]here Congress includes limiting
language in an earlier version of a bill but deletes it prior to
enactment, it may be presumed that the limitation was not
intended.”
Russello v.
United States, 464 U. S.
16 –24 (1983). See also
INS v.
Cardoza-Fonseca, 480
U. S. 421 –443 (1987) (“ ‘Few principles of statutory
construction are more compelling than the proposition that Congress
does not intend
sub silentio to enact statutory language
that it has earlier discarded in favor of other
language’ ”).
C
The rest of the statutory text confirms that
district courts have discretion to choose the amount of the
judgment that must be applied toward the attorney’s fee award.
Specifically, that grant of discretion is evident from Congress’
use of two discretion-conferring terms, “portion” and “not to
exceed.”
The first word, “portion,” is defined as “[a]
share or allotted part (as of an estate).” Black’s Law Dictionary
1182 (7th ed. 1999). “Portion” thus inherently conveys an
indeterminate amount. Take, for instance, the following sentence:
“My dinner guest has requested a portion of apple pie for dessert.”
How much is a “portion” of pie? For a marathon runner, a “portion”
might mean a hearty serving, perhaps an eighth of a whole pie; for
someone on a diet, however, a “portion” might mean a tiny sliver.
The dinner host can figure it out based on the circumstances.
Similarly, in this context, referencing a “portion” of the judgment
tells us that some amount of the judgment up to 25 percent of the
whole is to be applied to the attorney’s fee award, but not exactly
what amount. That decision is left to the sound discretion of the
district court, depending again on the circumstances.
The majority dismisses as insignificant
Congress’ use of this discretion-conferring term, arguing that
under either side’s reading of the statute, the “portion” of fees
taken from the prisoner-plaintiff’s judgment will vary. See
ante, at 5. True enough,[
5] but that fact does not justify the majority’s brushoff.
Congress’ deliberate choice to use the indeterminate,
discretion-conferring term “portion” in §1997e(d)(2) reveals much
about the statute’s meaning.
To illustrate the significance of Congress’ use
of the word “portion,” imagine that §1997e(d)(2) contained no
qualifying “not to exceed” parenthetical, and instead provided only
that “a portion of the judgment shall be applied to satisfy the
amount of attorney’s fees awarded against the defendant.” As
applied to the typical scenario,
i.e., where the attorney’s
fee award exceeds the prisoner-plaintiff’s money judgment, the most
natural reading of the statute absent the limiting parenthetical is
that the amount of the judgment applied to the fee award must be
more than zero and less than 100 percent. That is because, as
explained above, “portion” means something less than the whole but
does not have a fixed value.[
6]
If the majority were correct in its reading of “to satisfy,” how-
ever—that it requires the district court to endeavor to discharge
fully the attorney’s fee award from the prisoner-plaintiff’s
judgment before turning to the defendant for a contribution—then,
in the typical case, absent the parenthetical, we would have to
conclude that “a portion of the judgment” always means “all of the
judgment” or perhaps “all of the judgment save a nominal amount.” I
do not think it reasonable to conclude that Congress intended to
ascribe such a strained meaning to “portion.” That the majority’s
reading of one term—“to satisfy”—forces an implausible reading of
another term—“portion”—strongly suggests that its reading is
incorrect.
Congress’ use of the word “portion,” therefore,
does not merely instruct that there are a range of possible
portions that can be paid out of the judgment. “Portion” makes
evident that the district court is afforded the discretion to
choose the amount of the judgment to be paid toward the fee award.
The addition of the “not to exceed 25 percent” parenthetical only
enhances this conclusion. The phrase “not to exceed,” which is
itself discretion conferring, sets an upper, but not a lower, limit
and thus cabins, but does not eliminate, the exercise of discretion
that “portion” confers.
D
The distinction between cabining and
eliminating discretion is also key to understanding the
relationship between §1997e(d) and 42 U. S. C. §1988(b),
as well as between §1997e(d)(2) and its surrounding statutory
provisions.
Section 1988(b), the Civil Rights Attorney’s
Fees Awards Act of 1976, authorizes a district court to award “a
reasonable attorney’s fee” to a prevailing party in an action to
enforce one or more of several federal civil rights laws. Section
1997e(d) in turn imposes limits on the attorney’s fees available
under §1988(b) when the prevailing plaintiff in one of the
specified civil-rights actions is a prisoner. In particular, the
district court may award attorney’s fees to the prisoner only if
“the fee was directly and reasonably incurred in proving an actual
violation of the plaintiff’s rights protected by a statute pursuant
to which a fee may be awarded under section 1988,” and “the amount
of the fee is proportionately related to the court ordered relief
for the violation” or “the fee was directly and reasonably incurred
in enforcing the relief ordered for the violation.” §1997e(d)(1).
In addition, as noted
supra, at 5, the district court may
not base an award of attorney’s fees “on an hourly rate greater
than 150 percent of the hourly rate established under [ 18
U. S. C. §3006A] for payment of court-appointed counsel”
and, if the prisoner-plaintiff was awarded damages, may not award
attorney’s fees in excess of 150 percent of the monetary judgment.
§§1997e(d)(2)–(3).
These provisions, of course, do not eliminate a
district court’s discretion when it comes to the award of
attorney’s fees to a prevailing prisoner-plaintiff; they merely
compress the range of permissible options. A district court still
has the discretion to decide whether to award attorney’s fees, just
as it ordinarily would under §1988(b); it simply must first ensure
that the threshold conditions set out in §1997e(d)(1) are
satisfied. A district court likewise still has the discretion to
determine what constitutes a reasonable amount of fees to award; it
simply must abide by the two 150-percent caps in doing so.
Just as these surrounding statutory provisions
in §1997e(d) set outward bounds on a district court’s exercise of
discretion while still preserving the exercise of discretion within
those bounds, so, too, does §1997e(d)(2). A district court is not
free to require the defendant to pay the entire attorney’s fee
award, nor is it free to require the prisoner-plaintiff to give up
more than 25 percent of his judgment to pay the fee award. But
within those boundaries, the district court is free to decide which
party should pay what portion of the fee award.
The majority suggests that affording discretion
to district courts when it comes to the apportionment of attorney’s
fee awards is in tension with our adoption of the lodestar method
as the presumptive means of calculating a reasonable fee award
under §1988.
Ante, at 7. Prior to the lodestar’s
development, several lower courts utilized 12 “sometimes subjective
factors.”
Pennsylvania v.
Delaware Valley Citizens’
Council for Clean Air, 478 U. S. 546, 563 (1986) . Because
that method “placed unlimited discretion in trial judges and
produced disparate results,”
ibid., this Court endorsed the
lodestar approach, pursuant to which a court multiplies “the number
of hours reasonably expended on the litigation times a reasonable
hourly rate,”
Blum v.
Stenson, 465 U. S. 886,
888 (1984) , and then considers whether to make adjustments to that
amount, see
id., at 898–901;
Hensley v.
Eckerhart, 461 U. S. 424, 435 (1983) . The majority
asserts that adopting Murphy’s reading of §1997e(d)(2) would lead
to “exactly the sort of unguided and freewheeling choice” this
Court sought to leave behind when it sanctioned the lodestar
approach.
Ante, at 7. That analogy, however, is inapt.
First, the question before us is whether
§1997e(d)(2) affords district courts any discretion in the
apportionment of responsibility for payment of an attorney’s fee
award, not how district courts reasonably should exercise that
discretion. When this Court embraced the lodestar approach, it did
so to provide guideposts to district courts as they exercised the
discretion granted to them by §1988(b) to “allow the prevailing
party . . . a reasonable attorney’s fee.” By no means did
this Court eliminate that exercise of discretion. Rather, the Court
has “reemphasize[d] that the district court has discretion in
determining the amount of a fee award.”
Hensley, 461
U. S., at 437; see also
Blum, 465 U. S., at 902,
n. 19 (“A district court is expressly empowered to exercise
discretion in determining whether an award is to be made and if so
its reasonableness”);
id., at 896 (explaining that the
proper standard of review of an attorney’s fee award is abuse of
discretion). As was the case for the District Court here, that
exercise of discretion can include, for example, whether a
defendant is entitled to a reduction in hours where a plaintiff did
not succeed on all his claims, and whether certain claimed expenses
are reasonable. See App. to Pet. for Cert. 22a–26a.
If the majority is concerned that district
courts are exercising the apportionment discretion afforded to them
by §1997e(d)(2) in an uneven or unguided manner, the solution is
not to read the conferral of discretion out of the statute
entirely. Instead, as occurred in the §1988(b) context, the Court
could endorse a method for apportioning attorney’s fee awards that
can consistently be applied across cases.[
7] Just as courts ultimately were capable, through
trial-and-error, of discerning an appropriate formula for assessing
the reasonableness of a given fee award, see
Delaware
Valley, 478 U. S., at 562–565, so, too, are they capable
of determining a sound approach to the apportionment decision
envisioned by §1997e(d)(2).[
8]
Second, even absent an equivalent method to the
lodestar inquiry, §1997e(d)(2) does not, unlike the old 12-factor
analysis for calculating fee awards, afford unlimited discretion.
Congress provided express bounds on a district court’s
apportionment discretion, requiring that it order the prevailing
prisoner-plaintiff to contribute at least some part of his money
judgment to the fee award but no more than 25 percent.
Finally, it is not obvious that the need for a
more regimented approach with respect to calculating the amount of
an attorney’s fee award under §1988(b) should dictate the need for
a similarly regimented approach with respect to the apportionment
of responsibility for that award under §1997e(d)(2). The two
decisions involve fundamentally different inquiries: The first is
focused on the prevailing-plaintiff’s attorney and is concerned
with determining a reasonable value for services rendered in
pursuing the action, and the second is focused on the parties and
is concerned with assessing the extent to which each party should
bear responsibility for payment of those services (within the
bounds set by Congress). In light of these distinctions, the Court
should hesitate to extrapolate wholesale from the considerations
that drove the adoption of the lodestar rule to constrain the
apportionment discretion afforded by §1997e(d)(2).
III
On my reading of the plain text of
§1997e(d)(2) and its surrounding statutory provisions and context,
the proper interpretation of the provision is clear: District
courts may exercise discretion in choosing the portion of the
prisoner-plaintiff’s monetary judgment that must go toward the
attorney’s fee award, so long as that choice is not greater than 25
percent of the judgment. Because the majority holds that a
prevailing prisoner-plaintiff must always yield 25 percent of his
monetary judgment or, if less, the full amount of the fee award in
every case, I respectfully dissent.