What happened
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to let indigent Indiana prisoner Danny Howell proceed without paying filing costs, dismissed his certiorari petition and directed the clerk not to accept further noncriminal petitions from him unless he pays the docketing fee and complies with the court's filing rules.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the denial of leave to proceed in forma pauperis, using the order to criticize the court's practice of imposing prospective filing bars on indigent litigants deemed to have abused the court's process.
Jackson wrote that Howell is an indigent inmate serving a 70-year sentence and said the court barred essentially all future filings because he had previously submitted a handful of petitions deemed frivolous. A categorical forward-looking filing bar, she wrote, may be questionable for any litigant who cannot afford court costs but is "an intolerable one as to incarcerated individuals."
The dissent framed Howell's case as part of a broader expansion of the court's Martin filing-bar practice. Jackson said Howell had filed six petitions over 14 years, with the prior one in 2018, and that all six challenged aspects of his conviction, a record she contrasted with earlier prolific filers whose dozens of petitions led to the doctrine's development.
Jackson argued that the court has expanded Martin into a routine order and now invokes it after only a few petitions. According to the dissent, more than half of the petitioners whose filings were categorically rejected under Martin in the past 22 years were prisoners, based on information from the clerk's office.
The practical consequence, Jackson warned, is that Martinized petitioners are barred from future in forma pauperis noncriminal petitions even when raising new claims based on changes in law or prison conditions. She concluded that the court should not apply frequent-filer filing bars to prisoners like Howell who seek to proceed in forma pauperis.