Torres v. Facility Commander of County Jail 2
- William Alsup
- 3:20-cv-06554
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 2
In Torres v. San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, Judge Alsup dismissed the conditions-of-confinement habeas petition without prejudice and granted permission to proceed without paying fees.
Joshua Anthony Torres and the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department; the dismissal leaves Torres free to file a separate civil-rights action concerning the jail conditions.
What happened
Joshua Anthony Torres, an inmate at the San Francisco County Jail, filed a petition challenging unconstitutional jail conditions, including limited access to educational and rehabilitative programs. He brought the case under the federal law governing challenges to custody.
The court ruled that challenges to confinement conditions must be brought as a civil-rights lawsuit, not as a custody challenge. It declined to convert the petition because doing so could impose a $400 filing fee and possible consequences under the prisoner litigation law. The court dismissed the case without prejudice, allowing Torres to file a civil-rights action if he chooses.
Judge Alsup granted Torres permission to proceed without paying the filing fee in this case, found that no appeal certificate was warranted, and directed the clerk to enter judgment and close the file.
The detailed version
- Torres v. Facility Commander of County Jail 2 · No. 3:20-cv-06554
- William Alsup
- Nov. 23, 2020
Background
Joshua Anthony Torres, an inmate in the San Francisco County Jail, filed a self-represented petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254, the federal law used to challenge certain unconstitutional convictions or custody. He alleged that conditions of confinement in the jail were unconstitutional, including insufficient access to educational and rehabilitative programs.
Court’s Analysis
The court explained that federal law generally provides two different paths for complaints about imprisonment. A petition under § 2254 is used to challenge the lawfulness of confinement or matters affecting its duration. A civil-rights complaint under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 is used for challenges to the terms and conditions of confinement. The court concluded that Torres’s claims concerned jail conditions and therefore were not proper subjects of a § 2254 petition.
The court noted that, in an appropriate case, it could treat a habeas petition as a § 1983 civil-rights complaint. It did not do so here because that conversion could create significant consequences for Torres. A civil-rights case would carry a $400 filing fee that a prisoner would have to pay through deductions from the prisoner trust account even if permission to proceed without prepaying fees were granted. A civil-rights case dismissed as malicious, frivolous, or for failure to state a claim could also count as a “strike” under the prisoner litigation law, unlike a habeas case.
Disposition
The court dismissed the case without prejudice to Torres filing a civil-rights action. It stated that any claims challenging his conviction or sentence could be brought in a habeas petition after he had presented them to the California Supreme Court in accordance with state procedures and that court had decided them; the form petition did not appear to show that he had done so. Judge William Alsup granted leave to proceed without prepaying fees, found that no certificate of appealability was warranted, directed the clerk to enter judgment and close the file, and ordered that the dismissal be entered.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.