Brown v. Fischer

Summary

The court annulled a prison disciplinary determination finding the petitioner guilty of making threats and false statements. It held that the misbehavior report relied on unreliable hearsay and that the handwriting exemplars did not independently constitute substantial evidence; because the petitioner had already served the penalty, the court ordered expungement of the violations from his institutional record.

Holdings

1. A misbehavior report not written by an officer who witnessed the charged conduct cannot constitute substantial evidence unless the record contains facts establishing some indicia of reliability for the hearsay it contains. Because the record provided no information permitting assessment of the unnamed informants' reliability, the report did not constitute substantial evidence.
2. A hearing officer may independently compare handwriting samples without expert testimony, but the samples must contain sufficient similarities to constitute substantial evidence that they were written by the same person. The samples here did not meet that standard.
3. When the petitioner has already served the administrative penalty, the appropriate remedy is expungement of all references to the violations from the petitioner's institutional record.

Questions Presented

1. Whether the misbehavior report and related hearsay information constituted substantial evidence supporting the prison disciplinary determination.
2. Whether the hearing officer could rely on a comparison of handwriting samples without expert testimony and whether the samples provided substantial evidence of petitioner's authorship.
3. What remedy was appropriate because petitioner had apparently already served the administrative penalty.

Disposition

other