A federal appeals court says the Livingston County Jail can’t refuse to deliver letters in envelopes from ACLU attorneys to inmates.
The ACLU mailed letters from attorneys that included their State Bar of Michigan IDs to 25 inmates in envelopes marked “legal mail.” The ACLU was looking for clients to challenge the jail’s “postcard-only” policy regarding non-legal letters.
According to court filings, the jail neither delivered the letters nor informed the ACLU or the inmates the letters were not delivered. The jail argued that the rules for legal letters only applied in cases where an inmate had a pre-existing relationship with an attorney.
ACLU attorney Dan Korobkin said that’s a recipe for abuse.
“Organizations like the ACLU perform a very important watchdog function,” he said, “and you can’t hold prisoners incommunicado from organizations and public interest attorneys who are able and willing to help them.”
The Sixth Circuit US Court of Appeals said jail administrators not only violated the inmates’ First Amendment and due process rights, but their own rules for communications with inmates.
From the opinion: “We reject the Defendants’ overly restrictive interpretation of legal mail as contrary to our precedent and an unnecessary impingement on important First Amendment rights.”
Also: “The ACLU’s letters are precisely the type of communication that an attorney and an inmate would want kept confidential—the letters were addressed to a specific inmate, clearly marked “legal mail,” and included the name and bar number of a licensed Michigan attorney.”
Livingston County Jail administrator Tom Cremonte did not respond to a phone call seeking a response to the decision.
Korobkin and the Sixth Circuit said there’s nothing stopping guards from opening envelopes to check for contraband, as long as it’s done in the inmates presence and no one but the inmate reads the contents of the letters. The decision does not settle the issue of whether Michigan jails can adopt postcard-only letter policies, but the practice has been struck down in other states as too restrictive.
