Federal halfway house placement addressed
in new amicus brief, Muniz v. Sabol, No. 06-2692
The legal battle over federal halfway house placement continues. In December 2002, Bureau of Prisons (BOP) officials announced that community corrections center placements would be limited to the last ten percent of a prisoner’s good time-adjusted sentence, breaking with 40 years of BOP policy allowing all prisoners to serve up to the last six months of their good time-adjusted sentence in community corrections centers, known as halfway houses.
The BOP’s new policy adversely affected prisoners serving less than a six-year sentence because they were limited to serving ten percent of their sentence in a halfway house. Prisoners immediately challenged the new rules that also affected the practice of direct commitment to halfway houses. Their legal victories prompted the BOP to engage in formal rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act, which regulates how agencies, including the BOP, create and modify rules (the BOP failed to do this in 2002, when they implemented the change). The BOP adopted the final rule in February 2005. Prisoners once again sued.
FAMM, with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Massachusetts Criminal Justice Act Board have weighed in on the latest case with an amicus brief in the First Circuit in Muniz v. Sabol, No. 06-2692 (click link to download and read brief). This is not the first time that FAMM has been involved in a halfway house challenge. We assisted in cases resulting from the 2002 rule change, and most recently in Levine v. Apker. Read FAMM's brief and background on Levine here.
Like our amicus brief in Levine, the Muniz brief challenges the legality of the BOP’s final rule, arguing that the BOP failed to take into account facts or address objections to the rule change placed in the public record by FAMM and a number of organizations and individuals when the rule was open for public comment.
The Supreme Court has ruled that under the Administrative Procedure Act, a final rule is invalid if it is arbitrary and capricious. Our brief points out that the BOP did not adequately account for objections, facts, and comment put in the record during the comment period and thus the resulting rule is invalid because it is arbitrary and capricious.
Many thanks to FAMM Litigation Advisory Board members Peter Goldberger in Ardmore, Pennsylvania and Todd Bussert in New Haven, Connecticut; Michael Waldman of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson in Washington, D.C.; and Charles Rankin of Rankin and Sultan of Boston, Massachusetts. Michael Waldman, with Peter Goldberger and Todd Bussert, also drafted FAMM’s public comment on the 2005 rulemaking.