Miles v. Director - Bureau of Prisons
- Susan Nelson
- 0:21-cv-00932
- U.S. District Court · District of Minnesota
- 4
In Miles v. Director–Bureau of Prisons, Judge Nelson denied Miles’s fee-reimbursement motion, holding he remained liable for the appellate filing fee after withdrawing his appeal.
Kelvin Jerome Miles, whose $505 appellate filing fee was not returned after he withdrew his appeal.
What happened
In Miles v. Director–Bureau of Prisons, Kelvin Jerome Miles asked the court to return a $505 appellate filing fee taken from his inmate account. He said he had not received enough notice and would have withdrawn his appeal sooner if he had known the fee would be collected.
The court explained that filing an appeal made Miles responsible for the fee, and the court could collect it when funds became available. The Clerk had also told him that he could either pay the fee or apply to proceed without paying court costs, but he did neither during the required 30-day period. The court further explained that even approval to proceed without prepaying fees would not have eliminated his obligation to pay the fee.
Judge Susan Richard Nelson denied Miles’s Motion for Reimbursement of Fees. The court held that withdrawing the appeal did not entitle him to a refund, and that he remained responsible for the appellate filing fee.
The detailed version
- Miles v. Director - Bureau of Prisons · No. 0:21-cv-00932
- Susan Nelson
- May 17, 2023
Background
Kelvin Jerome Miles filed this action in April 2021. After he did not pay an initial partial filing fee, the court dismissed his complaint without prejudice for failure to prosecute in July 2021. The court also denied as moot his application to proceed without prepaying fees or costs and his motion to amend the complaint. In February 2022, the court denied as moot Miles’s motions to appoint counsel and to override exhaustion of administrative remedies because the case had already been closed.
Miles appealed the February 2022 order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit but did not pay the required $505 appellate filing fee. The Clerk notified him that he could either pay the fee or submit a completed application to proceed without prepaying fees or costs within 30 days. Miles did neither. The district court then ordered him to pay the unpaid balance and notified the prison authorities of that requirement.
Miles later notified the Clerk that he wanted to withdraw his appeal. The Eighth Circuit dismissed the appeal. Miles then reported that the $505 fee had been withdrawn from his inmate account without warning and requested that the money be returned. He repeated that request in additional letters and ultimately filed the Motion for Reimbursement of Fees.
Arguments and analysis
Miles argued that the fee was taken without prior notice, without giving him an opportunity to withdraw the appeal, and without giving him an opportunity to apply to proceed without prepaying fees based on imminent danger.
The court rejected those arguments. It explained that federal law makes a prisoner responsible for filing fees when the prisoner files an appeal and that this responsibility continues until the fee is fully paid. The court stated that it had determined, based on the financial information Miles provided at the beginning of the litigation, that he had sufficient funds to pay the fee. His lack of knowledge about the court’s authority to collect the fee did not excuse payment.
The court also found that Miles had been given an opportunity to apply to proceed without prepaying fees. The Clerk notified him of that option the day after he filed the appeal, but he did not submit the application within the 30-day period. The court further stated that even if Miles had been granted that status, he still would have been required to pay the filing fee over time.
Finally, the court relied on decisions holding that appellants are not entitled to refunds of filing fees. It concluded that the reason an appeal ends does not change the fee obligation: voluntary withdrawal, dismissal for a jurisdictional defect, and dismissal on the merits do not entitle an appellant to a refund.
Disposition
The court ordered that Miles’s Motion for Reimbursement of Fees be DENIED. Judge Susan Richard Nelson did not order the return of the $505 fee.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.