In Maxwell v. Dinis, to be argued on Nov. 2, the Supreme Court will address a federal inmate’s ability to use a habeas statute, 28 U.S.C. § 2241, to contest the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ refusal to accelerate his transfer to a halfway house or home confinement.
By way of background, when the BOP designates a federal inmate spend time in a halfway house or in home confinement, that portion of the sentence is still considered part of the inmate’s term of imprisonment under federal law and, as such, is overseen by the BOP. That said, such a portion of a sentence is formally distinct from, for example, a term of federal supervised release, which begins after the term of imprisonment is completed and is overseen by a probation officer and a federal district court.
The special character of how a federal inmate serves a sentence in a halfway house or home confinement gives rise to the procedural question that the court is considering in Maxwell.
What claims Maxwell is trying to pursue
In 2007, William Maxwell conspired with members of the mob-related organized crime group, La Costa Nostra, to take over a Texas-based mortgage-loan company, FirstPlus Financial Group, Inc., and drain it of its assets. Specifically, Maxwell and others threatened the CEO of FirstPlus by saying that they would accuse him of bribery, money laundering, and other offenses, and took more than $14 million from the company, leaving it with less than $2,000 in its accounts. Convicted at trial in 2015 of numerous offenses, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Maxwell did not have infractions while in prison, was moved to a low-security facility, and sought to accelerate his transfer to a halfway house or home confinement by participating in programs established by the First Step Act of 2018 under 18 U.S.C. § 3624(g)(1) and (2). Maxwell argued that the BOP failed to count some of these activities and that he was entitled to between 42 and 48 months of time credit that he did not receive. (Even under the BOP’s stricter calculations, according to the government Maxwell is eligible to be transferred to a halfway house on Jan. 22, 2027.)
The district court rejected Maxwell’s habeas petition, reasoning that he had failed to exhaust his administrative remedies. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit affirmed on the alternative ground that the circuit had adopted a bright-line rule that habeas relief under Section 2241 is unavailable unless the inmate’s claim would automatically entitle the inmate to accelerated release. According to the circuit court, since neither Maxwell’s requested relief of being transferred to a halfway house or home confinement “would entitle him to accelerated release,” he could not seek habeas relief.
Some legal background
What makes Maxwell’s situation tricky is that he is not attacking the validity of his conviction or sentence, which is what is contemplated by the federal habeas statute itself. And under the court’s precedent, it is at best unclear that a federal inmate can challenge conditions of his confinement, such as an inmate’s placement in solitary confinement or in a maximum-security facility. When state inmates have brought such claims about the conditions of confinement, the court has said that they must bring those claims in federal court under a civil rights statute, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, not via habeas.
But at least two initial points seem to weigh in Maxwell’s favor. First, in the 2023 case of Jones v. Hendrix, the court said that habeas remains available as a procedural mechanism for a federal prisoner to “challenge ‘the legality of his detention’ without attacking the validity of his sentence.” What Maxwell is trying to do (contest the BOP’s refusal to accelerate his transfer to a halfway house or home confinement) can plausibly be described as challenging the legality of his detention without challenging the lawfulness of his sentence. Second, and perhaps more importantly, in 1973, the court held in Preiser v. Rodriguez that a state prisoner must use a habeas petition – and not Section 1983 – to challenge the New York Department of Correctional Services’ denial of good-conduct time credits.
The arguments
Maxwell begins his argument for why Section 2241 is available to him by relying on language tracing back to a concurring opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia. Specifically, in Skinner v. Switzer, the court stated that habeas relief is available for claims seeking to “reduce the prisoner’s level of custody” (quoting Scalia’s concurrence in Wilkinson v. Dotson). Maxwell also draws upon the language in Jones quoted above and the case of Preiser to argue that the situation in Preiser is a close analog to his circumstances and the court’s language in Jones leaves further room for challenges to the legality of an inmate’s detention.
Maxwell also points out that if habeas relief is unavailable, he has no other alternatives. The court has severely limited plaintiffs’ abilities to bring a civil-rights suit under Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents, for example, and a Section 1983 claim is inapplicable to suits against federal officials. The Administrative Procedures Act is also likely inapplicable because of a statute that limits review of the bureau of prisons’ decisions, as is injunctive relief through a suit in equity.
Notably, the government agrees with Maxwell that alternatives to habeas are unavailable. The government also declines to defend the lower court’s rule that habeas relief is limited to claims that automatically entitle the inmate to accelerated release. But the government endorses a narrower approach to when habeas relief is available than Maxwell. According to it, an inmate may seek habeas relief when arguing that his imprisonment has been unlawfully prolonged, a standard that does not require the inmate to show an entitlement to a sentence reduction. At the same time, the government’s standard would not extend to just any challenge to the “level of custody,” such as allowing an inmate’s classification in a maximum-security prison to be cognizable in habeas.
As for Maxwell, the government contends that his claim should be rejected for failure to exhaust all of his administrative remedies, the ground on which the district court dismissed the claim. On the “merits,” although the government says that Maxwell’s claim is of a type that may be brought in habeas, the government argues that, by statute, Congress has barred courts from reviewing the bureau of prisons’ classification of where an inmate “is placed during his term of imprisonment.” In the government’s view, this statute is fatal to Maxwell’s position.
Because the government declined to defend the court of appeals’ rule, the Supreme Court appointed a “friend of the court,” or amicus. The amicus contends that Maxwell’s and the government’s positions both create line-drawing problems. As to Maxwell’s position, the amicus argues that, given the wide continuum of conditions of incarceration that inmates face within the BOP’s system, determining whether a particular change in custody is meaningfully less restrictive would be difficult as a practical matter and require a fact-intensive, prisoner- and facility specific inquiry. As to the government’s position, the amicus argues that it has not offered any recognizable standard for deciding when an inmate’s imprisonment has been unlawfully prolonged.
In an effort to avoid those line-drawing problems, the amicus argues that habeas relief should instead be available in three relevant circumstances: (1) if the inmate’s claim implies that his physical detention must be shortened or terminated; (2) he is entitled to earlier release on bail or parole; or (3) the sentencing court ordered him to serve his sentence in a place it lacked jurisdiction to send him.
It is unclear whether the justices will find the amicus’ proposed circumstances appealing. But the amicus’s sustained attacks on the difficulties in applying Maxwell’s and the government’s position may well attract their interest.
