Rev Matt Hale(Civil Case)..Defendant's Motion To Strike Docket Entry 208

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLORADO

Civil Action No. 14-cv-00245-MSK-MJW

REVEREND MATT HALE,

Plaintiff,

v.

FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS,

Defendant.

 

DEFENDANT’S MOTION TO STRIKE DOCKET ENTRY 208

 

The Court should exercise its inherent authority to manage its docket by striking from the record the document entitled “Evidence of Defendant’s Current, Ongoing Unlawful Activity.” Doc. 208. To file that document, Mr. Hale used his privilege of sending the Court sealed “Special Mail.” Id. at 34 (Mr. Hale labeled his envelope “Special Mail”); see also 28 C.F.R. § 540.2(c) (“Special Mail” includes correspondence sent to U.S. Courts); id. § 540.18(a)

(“outgoing special mail may be sealed by the inmate and is not subject to inspection”). Mr. Hale’s filing is not a motion. Rather, as explained below, he appended a letter he had tried to send to a correspondent, but which the BOP had rejected. By filing this document on this Court’s docket through the Special Mail procedure, Mr. Hale has made the Court his personal bulletin board for posting materials to his followers that, in the judgment of BOP correctional officials, should never have been allowed to leave the ADX.

The letter that Mr. Hale submitted to the Court is an “article” he intended for mass dissemination to his followers. See Doc. 208 at 11-33. BOP officials in the ADX Special Investigative Services (“SIS”) Department reviewed that article. See Ex. 1 ¶ 5 (Declaration of Lieutenant Amy Kelley).
The BOP declined to let Mr. Hale send that article to his followers. Mr. Hale uses some of the article to proclaim his innocence, but the article was not rejected for that reason. Id.

Rather, BOP officials determined that the article must be rejected because Mr. Hale used it to

reassert a leadership role over the Creativity Movement, a BOP-designated Security Threat Group (“STG”). Id. ¶¶ 8-10. As the BOP has explained in earlier filings in this case, inmates are not allowed to lead, direct, or conduct the business of an STG, either within the prison or on the street. See, e.g., Motion for Summary Judgment, Doc. 186 at 77 ¶ 42 & 116-17. Leadership was the clear purpose of Mr. Hale’s article. For example, he wrote: “I urge you rather to fight for my freedom so that I can fight again for you. Let me put my charisma and drive to good use on your behalf for I know that if you do I will unite and push our movement forward in ways that have never been seen before.” Ex. 1 ¶ 9 (emphasis in original). Mr. Hale wants “[t]he cause of my freedom [to] become the cause celebre of the entire Racial Loyalist movement. I’m counting on you”—his followers—“to make that happen.” Id. ¶ 10.

SIS officials also had concerns with language in the article where Mr. Hale casts himself in the role of victim and the BOP in the role of oppressor. Id. ¶ 11 (“I can’t [lead the movement] from this prison cell where I am stymied and harassed by my captors at every turn,” and “I have never been broken by our enemies and I never will be.”). The BOP found that this is the same kind of victimhood language Mr. Hale has historically used “to encourage his followers to take matters into their own hands and to declare open war on federal employees or members of the judiciary[.]” Id. In the judgment of SIS officials, this language was particularly concerning “when read in tandem with” the language seeking “direction, leadership, and control of the STG.” Id.

These are security decisions that ADX officials are authorized and trained to make, and their judgment in these matters is entitled to deference. See, e.g., Overton v. Bazzetta, 539 U.S. 126, 132 (2003) (courts “must accord substantial deference to the professional judgment of prison administrators, who bear a significant responsibility for defining the legitimate goals of a corrections system and for determining the most appropriate means to accomplish them”); Beard v. Banks, 548 U.S. 521, 530 (2006) (courts must defer to prison officials on “disputed matters of professional judgment”). Mr. Hale was entitled to use the BOP’s administrative remedy process to voice any objection to the officials’ decision. Instead, he used this Court’s docket to accomplish an end-run around the BOP’s correctional judgment.

The filing by Mr. Hale, and the subsequent posting of the article by Mr. Hale on the Court’s website, enabled him to get around the BOP’s rejection of that correspondence. Since the article was posted on the Court’s docket, it has appeared on various websites. Id. ¶ 12.

The Court should exercise its authority to manage its docket by striking docket entry 208 from the record. As the Tenth Circuit has emphasized, “[t]he power of district courts to manage their dockets is deeply ingrained in our jurisprudence.” United States v. Schneider, 594 F.3d 1219, 1225 (10th Cir. 2010) (citing Link v. Wabash R.R. Co., 370 U.S. 626, 630-31 (1962); United States v. Nicholson, 983 F.2d 983, 988 (10th Cir. 1993)). The document was clearly immaterial, impertinent, and improper. Cf. Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(f) (“The court may strike from a pleading an insufficient defense or any redundant, immaterial, impertinent, or scandalous matter.”). Allowing Mr. Hale to post rejected correspondence on the Court’s docket undermines the BOP’s authority to manage him and to make judgments about how to control the security risks he poses. Under the circumstances here, striking the filing is well within the Court’s “great discretion regarding trial procedure applications (including control of the docket and parties)[.]” Nicholson, 983 F.3d at 988 (observing that such “decisions are reviewed only for abuse of discretion”).

For these reasons, the Court should issue an order striking docket entry 208 from the record. In doing so, the Court should also instruct Mr. Hale that any further attempt to publicly file correspondence, or information contained in correspondence, that BOP officials have rejected pursuant to the procedures for reviewing his mail, may result in filing restrictions imposed by the Court. See Lornes v. No Named Defendant, 703 F. App’x 712, 713 (10th Cir. 2017) (holding that a district court may “impose filing restrictions as appropriate. ‘Federal courts have the inherent power to regulate the activities of abusive litigants by imposing carefully tailored restrictions in appropriate circumstances.’”) (quoting Andrews v. Heaton, 483 F.3d 1070, 1077 (10th Cir. 2007)).

 

Respectfully submitted on March 12, 2018.

ROBERT C. TROYER

United States Attorney
s/ Susan Prose

Susan Prose

Assistant United States Attorney
1801 California Street, Suite 1600
Denver, Colorado 80202
Tel.: (303) 454-0100; Fax: (303) 454-0404
Email: susan.prose@usdoj.gov
Counsel for the Federal Bureau of Prisons

 

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLORADO
CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE (CM/ECF)
 

I hereby certify that on March 12, 2018, I directed that the foregoing document and the

exhibit referenced therein be served on the following non-CM/ECF participant by United States
mail addressed as follows:

Matthew Hale

Reg. No. 15177-424
ADX – Florence
P.O. Box 8500
Florence, CO 81226
s/ Susan Prose

Susan Prose

United States Attorney’s Office