Procunier v. Martinez
Is it still good law? What later courts have actually done to this case.
Status
2,649 later cases cite Procunier v. Martinez; 438 of those citations sat close to treatment language and were flagged for reading, and all of them have been read. Citations that did not sit near treatment language were not flagged and were not read one by one, so a court that weakened this case without using any of that language would not appear here.
Relying on Procunier v. Martinez?
This page shows what later courts did to it. Ask about your specific facts and see whether it still carries your argument, with citations you can check.
Treatments
Overruled in Part
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The Supreme Court overruled Procunier insofar as it applied heightened scrutiny to incoming prison correspondence and publications, limiting Procunier to outgoing correspondence and applying Turner's reasonableness standard to incoming materials.
Thornburgh v. Abbott · Supreme Court of the United States · filed
Furthermore, we acknowledge today that the logic of our analyses in Martinez and Turner requires that Martinez be limited to regulations concerning outgoing correspondence. As we have observed, outgoing correspondence was the central focus of our opinion in Martinez. The implications of outgoing correspondence for prison security are of a categorically lesser magnitude than the implications of incoming materials. Any attempt to justify a similar categorical distinction between incoming correspondence from prisoners (to which we applied a reasonableness standard in Turner) and incoming correspondence from nonprisoners would likely prove futile, and we do not invite it. To the extent that Martinez itself suggests such a distinction, we today overrule that case; the Court accomplished much of this step when it decided Turner.
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Limited
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The Eleventh Circuit held that Procunier's surviving heightened standard for outgoing correspondence does not govern outgoing pen-pal solicitation that poses a direct threat to prison security; it applied Turner instead.
Perry v. Secretary, Florida Department of Corrections · Eleventh Circuit · filed
The personal correspondence in Martinez “did not, by its very nature, pose a serious threat to prison order and security.” Thornburgh, 490 U.S. at 411, 109 S. Ct. at 1880. Here, Mr. Upchurch’s affidavit states that the outgoing correspondence poses a direct threat to internal prison security because pen pals might give money to prisoners who will then use it to bribe officials and order hits on other inmates. Therefore Turner, not Martinez, is the appropriate standard in this case.
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The First Circuit declined to apply Procunier's fixed procedural safeguards to mail rejected for objective envelope defects rather than content censorship, using Mathews balancing instead.
Starr v. Corporal Knierman · First Circuit · filed
Martinez involved a state regulation that censored-- effectively barred the receipt or delivery of--inmate letters based solely on their content, without providing either the sender or inmate any procedural protections. . . . The policy at issue here is much different. . . . We therefore evaluate Starr's claims not by rote reference to the Martinez protections, but by balancing the factors in Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319, 335 (1976).
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Questioned
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The district court questioned whether Procunier's heightened procedural-safeguard approach remained proper after Supreme Court statements that Turner's reasonableness review applies whenever prison-administration needs implicate constitutional rights, although it applied Procunier as binding circuit law.
Prison Legal News v. Chapman · M.D. Georgia · filed
To answer this question, Eleventh Circuit precedent directs this Court to apply the heightened due process standard established by the Supreme Court in Procunier v. Martinez. . . . The Court questions the propriety of this approach in light of Justice Kennedy’s admonition that it is “quite clear that the standard of review we adopted in Turner applies to all circumstances in which the needs of prison administration implicate constitutional rights.”
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