This Corcoran inmate hand-wrote a case the Supreme Court ended

From the isolated depths of California State Prison, Corcoran, inmate Antonio A. Hinojosa hand-wrote his way toward the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Monday, he lost. In being heard, though, he also made a point.

In a 6-2 decision that could affect other state prisoners, the Supreme Court rejected Hinojosa’s challenge to a California law that cost him good-time credits. The lost credits would have helped Hinojosa win earlier release from a 16-year sentence for armed robbery and related crimes.

“That is a terrible ruling to get from the Supreme Court,” Los Angeles-based defense attorney Caleb Mason, a former prosecutor who has studied the issue, said in an interview Monday. “I guess it means litigants will have to find a way to get a case before the state supreme court.”

Still, Hinojosa’s argument persuaded Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dissented. Their written reasoning, including a denunciation of the majority’s “flimsier” arguments, was more than the court gives most of the 7,000-plus petitions received annually.

Last year, out of all the petitions received, the court issued only 186 written opinions.

The unsigned ruling Monday, issued without oral argument, answered a procedural question involving how courts handle inmates’ habeas corpus petitions.

In substance, the new ruling reversed a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that questioned the 2010 California law cutting certain good-time credits. The law stopped good-time credits from accumulating for validated prison gang members placed in secure housing units.

Before the 2010 law, some prisoners could keep accruing credits for eventual early release while in secure housing. The law added gang membership to other violations or infractions that ruled out good-time credit accumulation for the inmates in secure housing.

In 2009, Corcoran prison officials validated the vividly tattooed Hinojosa as a member of the Mexican Mafia. Although he challenged the determination, it eliminated his shot at future good-time credit. He was allowed to keep what he had already earned since his guilty plea in 2003.

All told, Hinojosa calculated that the 2010 policy change meant he’d stay in the San Joaquin Valley prison’s Secure Housing Unit for a year longer than he would have under the prior rules.

The 2010 law “discriminated against all inmates housed in the SHU for administrative purposes, merely because prison officials labeled them as a prison gang associate,” Hinojosa hand-wrote in one of his early court filings.

The court filings show Hinojosa persistently challenging Corcoran officials on their actions, first through administrative proceedings and then in court. Originally from Orange County in Southern California, Hinojosa periodically revealed his frustrations with the system he thought was stacked against him.

“Two of my . . . appeals have been ignored on several occasions,” Hinojosa wrote prison officials in July 2010, adding that his was a “citizen complaint.”

In February 2015, against the odds, the 9th Circuit sided with Hinojosa’s complaint that the 2010 state law violated the Constitution’s ban on ex post facto laws. These are laws that punish someone retroactively, for past actions that were formerly not illegal.

“In punishing Hinojosa for his in-prison gang-related misconduct, the state has effectively increased his prison sentence for his underlying crimes. And it has done so by means of a regulation that was enacted after Hinojosa committed those crimes,” Judge Carlos T. Bea wrote.

Attorney General Kamala Harris’ office sought Supreme Court review, contending in a brief that the 9th Circuit’s reasoning “makes no sense at all” and noting that the 2010 law had previously survived a challenge from an alleged Mexican Mafia member at Pelican Bay State Prison.

Hinojosa has since been released from prison.

This story was originally published May 16, 2016 at 5:48 PM with the headline "This Corcoran inmate hand-wrote a case the Supreme Court ended."