Argued
December 6, 2017
ON WRIT
OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE
SEVENTH CIRCUIT
Petitioner Charles Murphy was awarded a judgment in his
federal civil rights suit against two of his prison guards,
including an award of attorney's fees. Pursuant to 42
U.S.C. §1997e(d)(2), which provides that in such cases
"a portion of the [prisoner's] judgment (not to
exceed 25 percent) shall be applied to satisfy the amount of
attorney's fees awarded against the defendant, " the
district court ordered Mr. Murphy to pay 10% of his judgment
toward the fee award, leaving defendants responsible for the
remainder. The Seventh Circuit reversed, holding that
§1997e(d)(2) required the district court to exhaust 25%
of the prisoner's judgment before demanding payment from
the defendants.
Held:
In cases governed by §1997e(d), district courts must
apply as
much of the judgment as necessary, up to 25%, to satisfy an
award of attorney's fees. The specific statutory language
supports the Seventh Circuit's interpretation. First, the
mandatory phrase "shall be applied" suggests that
the district court has some nondiscretionary duty to perform.
Second, the infinitival phrase "to satisfy the amount of
attorney's fees awarded" specifies the purpose or
aim of the preceding verb's nondiscretionary duty. Third,
"to satisfy" an obligation, especially a financial
obligation, usually means to discharge the obligation in
full. Together, these three clues suggest that a district
court (1) must act (2) with the purpose of
(3) fully discharging the fee award. And the
district court must use as much of the judgment as necessary
to satisfy the fee award without exceeding the 25% cap.
Contrary to Mr. Murphy's suggestion, the district court
does not have wide discretion to pick any "portion"
that does not exceed the 25% cap. The larger statutory scheme
supports the Seventh Circuit's interpretation. The
previously governing provision, 42 U.S.C. §1988(b),
granted district courts discretion to award fees in
unambiguous terms. It is doubtful that Congress, had it
wished to confer the same sort of discretion in
§1997e(d), would have bothered to write a new law for
prisoner civil rights suits alone; omit all of the words that
afforded discretion in the old law; and then replace those
old discretionary words with new mandatory ones. This
conclusion is reinforced by §1997e(d)'s surrounding
provisions, which like paragraph (2), also limit the district
court's pre-existing discretion under § 1988(b).
See, e.g., §§1997e(d)(1)(A) and (B)(ii).
The discretion urged by Mr. Murphy is exactly the sort of
unguided and freewheeling choice that this Court has sought
to expunge from practice under §1988. And his suggested
cure for rudderless discretion-to have district courts
apportion fees in proportion to the defendant's
culpability-has no basis in the statutory text or roots in
the law. Pp. 2-9.
844 F.3d 653, affirmed.
GORSUCH, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which
ROBERTS, C. J., and Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito, JJ., joined.
Sotomayor, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GINSBURG,
BREYER, and KAGAN, JJ., joined.
OPINION
GORSUCH JUSTICE.
This is
a case about how much prevailing prisoners must pay their
lawyers. When a prisoner wins a civil rights suit and the
district court awards fees to the prisoner's attorney, a
federal statute says that "a portion of the
[prisoner's] judgment (not to exceed 25 percent) shall be
applied to satisfy the amount of attorney's fees awarded
against the defendant. If the award of attorney's fees is
not greater than 150 percent of the judgment, the excess
shall be paid by the defendant." 42 U.S.C.
§1997e(d)(2). Whatever else you might make of this, the
first sentence pretty clearly tells us that the prisoner has
to pay some part of the attorney's fee award before
financial responsibility shifts to the defendant. But how
much is enough? Does the first sentence allow the district
court discretion to take any amount it wishes from
the plaintiff's judgment to pay the attorney, from 25%
down to a penny? Or does the first sentence instead mean that
the court must pay the attorney's entire fee award from
the plaintiff's judgment until it reaches the 25% cap and
only then turn to the defendant?
The
facts of our case illustrate the problem we face. After a
jury trial, the district court entered judgment for Charles
Murphy in the amount of $307, 733.82 against two of his
prison guards, Officer Robert Smith and Lieutenant Gregory
Fulk. The court also awarded Mr. Murphy's attorney $108,
446.54 in fees. So far, so good. But then came the question
who should pay what portion of the fee award. The defendants
argued that, under the statute's terms, the court had to
take 25% (or about $77, 000) from Mr. Murphy's judgment
before taxing them for the balance of the fee award. The
court, however, refused that request. Instead, it ordered
that Mr. Murphy "shall pay 10% of [his] judgment"
(or about $31, 000) toward the fee award, with the defendants
responsible for the rest. In support of this allocation, the
district court explained that it commonly varied the amount
prisoners pay, though the court offered no explanation for
choosing 10% instead of some other number. On appeal, a
unanimous panel reversed, explaining its view that the
language of §1997e(d)(2) requires a district court to
exhaust 25% of the prisoner's judgment before demanding
payment from the defendants. 844 F.3d 653, 660 (CA7 2016). So
there we have both sides of the debate, and our question, in
a nutshell: did the district court have latitude to apply 10%
(or some other discretionary amount) of the plaintiff's
judgment to his attorney's fee award instead of 25%? See
582 U.S. ___ (2017) (granting certiorari to resolve this
question).
As
always, we start with the specific statutory language in
dispute. That language (again) says "a portion of the
judgment (not to exceed 25 percent) shall be applied to
satisfy the amount of attorney's fees awarded."
§1997e(d)(2). And we think this much tells us a few
things. First, the word "shall" usually creates a
mandate, not a liberty, so the verb phrase "shall be
applied" tells us that the district court has some
nondiscretionary duty to perform. See Lexecon Inc. v.
Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, 523 U.S. 26,
35 (1998) ("[T]he mandatory 'shall' . . .
normally creates an obligation impervious to judicial
discretion"). Second, immediately following the verb we
find an infinitival phrase ("to satisfy the amount of
attorney's fees awarded") that specifies the purpose
or aim of the verb's non-discretionary duty. Cf. R.
Huddleston & G. Pullum, Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language, ch. 8, §§1, 12.2, pp. 669, 729-730
(2002). Third, we know that when you purposefully seek or aim
"to satisfy" an obligation, especially a financial
obligation, that usually means you intend to discharge the
obligation in full.[1]Together, then, these three clues suggest
that the court (1) must apply judgment funds toward
the fee award (2) with the purpose of (3) fully
discharging the fee award. And to meet that
duty, a district court must apply as much of the judgment as
necessary to satisfy the fee award, without of course
exceeding the 25% cap. If Congress had wished to afford the
judge more discretion in this area, it could have easily
substituted "may" for "shall." And if
Congress had wished to prescribe a different purpose for the
judge to pursue, it could have easily replaced the
infinitival phrase "to satisfy ..." with "to
reduce ..." or "against . . . ." But Congress
didn't choose those other words. And respect for
Congress's prerogatives as policymaker means carefully
attending to the words it chose rather than replacing them
with others of our own.
Mr.
Murphy's reply does more to hurt than help his cause.
Consider, he says, college math credits that the college
prospectus says shall be "applied to satisfy" a
chemistry degree. No one, the argument goes, would understand
that phrase to suggest a single math course will fully
discharge all chemistry degree requirements. We quite agree,
but that is beside the point. In Mr. Murphy's example, as
in our statute, the word "satisfy" does not suggest
some hidden empirical judgment about how often a
math class will satisfy a chemistry degree. Instead it serves
to tell the college registrar what purpose he must
pursue when handed the student's transcript: the
registrar must, without discretion, apply those credits
toward the satisfaction or discharge of the student's
credit obligations. No doubt a college student needing three
credits to graduate who took a three-credit math course would
be bewildered to learn the registrar thought he had
discretion to count only two of those credits toward her
degree. So too here. It doesn't matter how many fee
awards will be fully satisfied from a judgment without
breaking the 25% cap, or whether any particular fee award
could be. The statute's point is to instruct the judge
about the purpose he must pursue-to discharge the fee award
using judgment funds to the extent possible, subject to the
25% cap.
Retreating
now, Mr. Murphy contends that whatever the verb and the
infinitival phrase mean, the subject of the
sentence-"a portion of the judgment (not to
exceed 25 percent)"-necessarily suggests wide judicial
discretion. This language, he observes, anticipates a
range of amounts (some "portion" up to
25%) that can be taken from his judgment. And the existence
of the range, Mr. Murphy contends, necessarily means that the
district court must enjoy discretion to pick any
"portion" so long as it doesn't exceed the 25%
cap.
But
that does not logically follow. Under either
side's reading of the statute the portion of fees taken
from the plaintiff's judgment will vary over a
range-whether because of the district court's
discretionary choice (as Mr. Murphy contends), or because of
the variance in the size of fee awards themselves, which
sometimes will be less than 25% of the judgment (as Officer
Smith and Lieutenant Fulk suggest). If the police have two
suspects in a robbery committed with a red getaway car, the
fact that one suspect drives a red sedan proves nothing if
the other does too. The fact that the statute contemplates a
range of possible "portion[s]" to be paid out of
the judgment, thus, just doesn't help identify which of
the two proposed interpretations we should adopt for both
bear that feature.
Nor
does the word "portion" necessarily denote
unfettered discretion. If someone told you to follow a
written recipe but double the portion of sugar, you would
know precisely how much sugar to put in-twice whatever's
on the page. And Congress has certainly used the word
"portion" in just that way. Take 16 U.S.C.
§673b, which defines the National Elk Refuge to include
the "[e]ntire portion now in Jackson Hole National
Monument except that portion in section 2 lying west of the
east right-of-way line of United States Highway Numbered 187,
" among other similar plots-descriptions sufficiently
determinate that the statute itself can later give the total
number of acres of covered land ("six thousand three
hundred and seventy-six acres, more or less"). So the
question is how has Congress used the word
"portion" in this statute? And as we have
explained, the text persuades us that, subject to the 25%
cap, the size of the relevant "portion" here is
fixed by reference to the size of the attorney's fee
award, not left to a district court's unguided choice.
Even if
the interpretive race in this case seems close at this point,
close races still have winners. Besides, stepping back to
take in the larger statutory scheme surrounding the specific
language before us reveals that this case isn't quite as
close as it might first appear. In 1976, Congress enacted
what is now 42 U.S.C. § 1988(b) to authorize
discretionary fee shifting in civil rights suits. Civil
Rights Attorney's Fees Awards Act, 90 Stat. 2641. For
years that statute governed the award of attorney's fees
in a large variety of civil rights actions, including
prisoner civil rights lawsuits like this one. But in the
Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Congress reentered the
field and adopted §1997e's new and specialized fee
shifting rule for prisoner civil rights suits alone. See 110
Stat. 1321-71.
Comparing
the terms of the old and new statutes helps to shed a good
deal of light on the parties' positions. Section 1988(b)
confers discretion on district courts in unambiguous terms:
"[T]he court, in its discretion, may allow the
prevailing party ... a reasonable attorney's fee
as part of the costs" against the defendant. (Emphasis
added.) Meanwhile, §1997e(d) expressly qualifies the
usual operation of § 1988(b) in prisoner cases. See
§1997e(d)(1) (providing that "[i]n any action
brought by a prisoner . . . in which attorney's fees are
authorized under section 1988 . . . such fees shall not be
awarded, except" under certain conditions). And as
we've seen §1997e(d)(2) proceeds to use very
different language to describe the district court's job
in awarding fees. It does not say "may, " it does
not say "reasonable, " and it certainly does not
say anything about "discretion." If Congress had
wished to confer the same discretion in §1997e(d) that
it conferred in § 1988(b), we very much doubt it would
have bothered to write a new law; omit all the words that
afforded discretion in the old law; and then replace those
old discretionary words with new mandatory ones. See
Russello v. United States, 464 U.S. 16, 23 (1983)
(refusing to conclude that "the differing language"
in two statutory provisions "has the same meaning in
each").
The
surrounding statutory structure of §1997e(d) reinforces
this conclusion. Like paragraph (2), the other provisions of
§1997e(d) also limit the district court's
preexisting discretion under § 1988(b). These provisions
limit the fees that would otherwise be available under
§1988 to cover only certain kinds of lawyerly tasks, see
§§1997e(d)(1)(A) and (B)(ii); they require
proportionality between fee awards and the relief ordered,
see §1997e(d)(1)(B)(i); and they restrict the hourly
rate of the prisoner's lawyer, see §1997e(d)(3). All
this suggests a statute that seeks to restrain, rather than
replicate, the discretion found in § 1988(b).
Notably,
too, the discretion Mr. Murphy would have us introduce into
§1997e doesn't even sit easily with our precedent
under §1988. Our cases interpreting §1988 establish
"[a] strong presumption that the lodestar figure-the
product of reasonable hours times a reasonable
rate-represents a 'reasonable' fee."
Pennsylvania v. Delaware Valley Citizens' Council for
Clean Air, 478 U.S. 546, 565 (1986). To be sure, before
the lodestar became "the guiding light of our fee
shifting jurisprudence, " Burlington v. Dague,
505 U.S. 557, 562 (1992), many lower courts used one of your
classic 12-factor balancing tests. See Delaware
Valley, 478 U.S., at 562, and n. 7. Ultimately, though,
this Court rejected undue reliance on the 12-factor test
because it "gave very little actual guidance to district
courts[, ] . . . placed unlimited discretion in trial
judges[, ] and produced disparate results." Id., at 563.
Yet, despite this guidance, Mr. Murphy effectively seeks to
(re)introduce into §1997e(d)(2) exactly the sort of
unguided and freewheeling choice-and the disparate results
that come with it-that this Court has sought to expunge from
practice under §1988. And he seeks to achieve all this
on the basis of considerably less helpful statutory language.
To state the suggestion is to reveal its defect.
Nor
does Mr. Murphy's proposed cure solve his problem. To
avoid reading §1997e(d)(2) as affording entirely
rudderless discretion, Mr. Murphy contends that district
courts should apportion fees in proportion to the
defendant's culpability. When a defendant has acted
egregiously, he says, the court should lower the
plaintiff's responsibility for the fee award and increase
the defendant's-even if that means applying only a
"nominal" amount of the plaintiff's judgment
toward the fee. But precisely none of this appears in
§1997e(d)(2) or, for that matter, enjoys any analogue in
§1988's lodestar analysis or even the old 12-factor
approach. Whatever you might have to say about Mr.
Murphy's culpability formula as a matter of policy, it
has no roots in the law. Nor is it clear, for what it's
worth, that the culpability approach would even help him. The
district court never cited the defendants' culpability
(or any other reason) to justify taking only 10% rather than
25% from Mr. Murphy's judgment. And it's tough to see
what the choice of 10% might have had to do with the
defendant's culpability in this case. The district court
actually remitted the jury's punitive damages
award- suggesting that, if anything, the defendants'
culpability had been already amply addressed.
At the
end of the day, what may have begun as a close race turns out
to have a clear winner. Now with a view of the full field of
textual, contextual, and precedential evidence, we think the
interpretation the court of appeals adopted prevails. In
cases governed by §1997e(d), we hold that district
courts must apply as much of the judgment as necessary, up to
25%, to satisfy an award of attorney's
fees.[2]
The
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