by Chuck Sharman

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit partially reversed summary judgment granted in favor of officials with the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) in a challenge to two of its mail policies brought by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), the nonprofit publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News. The appellate Court’s decision on December 11, 2025, sent the case back to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington to determine whether DOC officials should be barred from enforcing their mail restriction and, if so, whether they should be required to give notice to publishers whose materials are rejected. Also remanded was the question whether HRDC’s civil rights were violated with long delays for policy determinations before its publications were delivered to prisoners.

Problems arose for HRDC after the DOC adopted the two new mail policies in 2018; Policy One barred prisoners from possessing “case law documents,” while Policy Two prohibited any prisoner from possessing legal materials pertaining to another prisoner. “Relying on those policies,” the Ninth Circuit recalled, officials at Coyote Ridge Corrections Center (CRCC) “refused to deliver copies of The Habeas Citebook that were mailed [by HRDC] to inmates …” The DOC’s Publication Review Committee (PRC) later overturned the rejections, but HRDC was never notified, and delivery of the books to prisoner recipients continued to be held up in the CRCC mailroom—“in … one case for 493 days.”

The Habeas Citebook “assist[s] pro se prisoners with habeas litigation, and it contains sample pleadings with party names redacted,” the Court explained. HRDC mailed 18 copies to prisoners at CRCC between June 2019 and June 2020; at least 16 of those were rejected. The mailroom notified HRDC in each case that the book was rejected because it “contains case law” in violation of the stated policies. The notice also advised that no appeal was necessary because the rejection would be automatically reviewed by the PRC.

Except it wasn’t. Defendant guard Sgt. John D. Turner, the CRCC mailroom supervisor, was so sure that the book violated the policy that he delayed forwarding the rejections to the PRC for two months. He also failed to notify HRDC within 10 days of each rejection, as the policy explicitly required. Even after the PRC got the rejections for review and overturned them, the mailroom continued to hold up delivery of the books, with delays lasting from 14 to 493 days. As the Court recalled, “[s]everal prisoners never received the book before their release from [CRCC].”

Meanwhile, the DOC took the policies under review in March 2020, rescinding the ban on “case law documents” in November of that year. The other policy banning possession of legal materials relating to another prisoner remains in effect—even though, as the Court noted, “prisoners can access this same information through other sources, including LexisNexis, which is available in the prison law library.”

Legal Challenge Begins

HRDC then filed suit against Turner and CRCC Superintendent Jeffrey Uttecht in the district court in 2021. Proceeding under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the nonprofit alleged that the policies, both as written and as applied, violated its First Amendment free-speech rights. The suit also alleged that the delayed delivery violated HRDC’s Fourteenth Amendment due-process rights. The district court granted summary judgment to Defendants, reasoning that (1) the challenge to Policy One was mooted when the DOC rescinded the policy; (2) the delays were temporary, so they did not rise to the level of a First Amendment violation; and (3) Uttecht did not personally participate in the rejections at issue.

On appeal, the Ninth Circuit largely reversed that decision in 2023, finding that (1) the policy change did not moot HRDC’s claim for damages and (2) the questions of the delayed deliveries and Uttecht’s involvement were best left to a jury to determine. But on remand, the district court granted summary judgment to Defendants again. They were entitled to QI on the claim for damages from Policy One, the district court said, and it refused HRDC’s motion to enjoin enforcement of Policy Two because it was found to be justified for “penological reasons.” A motion to require timely notice of PRC decisions was also denied because the district court said it lacked jurisdiction over the PRC except to enjoin adherence to a clearly unconstitutional policy—which it had just determined Policy Two was not. It further found no evidence of Uttecht’s personal involvement. And it agreed with Turner that any delivery delays resulted from justifiable “security inspections,” granting him QI from HRDC’s claim for related damages.

HRDC timely appealed, and the case returned to the Ninth Circuit once more. The Court began by agreeing with the district court that there was no injunctive relief available from Policy One—because it had been rescinded—and that Defendants were entitled to QI on the related damages claim because there was no judicial notice to warn that enforcing the policy violated HRDC’s rights. As for Policy Two, however, the Court rejected the contention that the district court lacked jurisdiction to enjoin enforcement. “Whatever the extent of Superintendent Uttecht’s role in ‘proceduralizing’ the DOC policies at issue, we are satisfied that [his] responsibility for establishing policy and strategic direction … is enough to permit injunctive relief,” the Court declared. “Likewise, Sgt. Turner has not argued, nor could he, that his role in the mailroom did not include enforcing DOC policy.”

Turning to HRDC’s constitutional challenge to Policy Two, the Court noted that it had promulgated two different tests to determine whether a prison restriction reasonably relates to a justifiable penological interest, as required under Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78 (1987). The first test, from Mauro v. Arpaio, 188 F.3d 1054 (9th Cir. 1999) (en banc), asks whether prison officials “might reasonably have thought that the policy would advance [the prison’s] interests.” The second test, from Walker v. Sumner, 917 F.2d 382 (9th Cir. 1990), asks whether officials have “identif[ied] the specific penological interests involved and then demonstrate[d] both that those specific interests are the actual bases for their policies and that the policies are reasonably related to the furtherance of the identified interests.”

The district court relied on Mauro, the Court noted. But when HRDC presented evidence refuting the claimed connection between the policy and the stated penological interest, the correct test became Walker. Turner testified that he had “no idea” why prisoners could view case law in the prison law library but not in books mailed to them. He also couldn’t recall a single time when case law in a book mailed to a prisoner had triggered an Intelligence & Investigations Unit review of the text for a security threat. The DOC also had no steps in place to deter prisoners from learning about one another’s cases from sources other than books, including the prison law library. In fact, the prison agency had no data on the frequency of prisoner-on-prisoner violence precipitated by one prisoner “paper checking” the legal history of another.

PLRA No Bar to
Constitutional Rights

The district court also cited the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e, for giving “substantial deference” to prison officials in their administration decisions. But “[t]he PLRA does not subjugate constitutional rights to public safety,” the Court chided. Therefore denial of HRDC’s motion for an injunction was reversed and remanded for the district court to apply the correct test from Walker.

The Court also vacated the grant of QI to Turner on HRDC’s claim for damages arising from the delivery delays. “With no penological justification for withholding the book after the [PRC’s] decision, existing precedent clearly establishes that not delivering the book was unlawful,” the Court declared. Moreover, the “delays in getting the books delivered are undisputed and unexplained” by Turner’s testimony—that he guessed any subsequent delay must have been due to “security inspections.” Since Turner ran the mailroom, the obvious question is who demanded these inspections. But the district court never asked, even though there “is sufficient circumstantial evidence to create a question of fact regarding whether Sgt. Turner was responsible for the delivery delays.”

Finally, the Court remanded HRDC’s request for an injunction requiring notice of rejections under Policy Two, while affirming the grant of QI to prison officials on the Fourteenth Amendment claim for damages arising from their failure to provide notice. The law in this regard was not clearly established, the Court said—even though its earlier ruling in the case pointed to Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U.S. 396 (1974), which held that “the decision to censor or withhold delivery of a particular letter must be accompanied by minimum procedural safeguards.” But since the district court ignored the Court’s earlier direction to determine “whether it would be unduly burdensome for Coyote Ridge to provide notice of the [PRC’s] decision,” that issue was remanded again. See: Hum. Rts. Def. Ctr., Inc. v. Uttecht, 161 F.4th 1141 (9th Cir. 2025). 

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