Opinion
2:16-cr-00279-JAD-PAL-1
02-14-2023
United States of America, Plaintiff v. Joshua Sadat Washington, Defendant
ORDER RESOLVING MOTIONS [ECF NOS. 432, 433]
Jennifer A. Dorsey U.S. District Judge
Joshua Sadat Washington seeks copies of various orders that the court has issued over the last couple of months, claiming he never received them. He further requests that the court mail those orders in a particular way to ensure that they get to him. Washington asks that the court label mailings “Legal Mail - Open only in the presence of the inmate.”
ECF No. 432.
ECF No. 433.
Id. at 1.
“Mail from the courts, as contrasted to mail from a prisoner's lawyer, is not legal mail,” and “the First Amendment does not prohibit opening such mail outside the recipient's presence.” The court is under no obligation to label its mail in the manner that Washington requests, and he does not identify any particular reason why such relief is warranted in his case. So I deny his request that court mail be labeled in that manner. But I grant his motion for copies of the court's recent orders. The docket shows that the Clerk's office manually mailed those orders to him. But because the court does not have a method of ensuring that the orders were indeed mailed, I grant his motion and direct the Clerk of Court to mail Washington copies of the recent orders issued in this case. However, the court will not continue to re-send copies of orders. Washington will need to address this issue with his facility, as the court will deny future requests for additional copies of documents it has properly sent once.
Hayes v. Idaho Correctional Center, 849 F.3d 1204, 1211 (9th Cir. 2017) (cleaned up).
See ECF No. 427; ECF No. 428; ECF No. 431. Each order's docket entry notes that copies have been “sent to the defendant manually.”
Conclusion
IT IS THEREFORE ORDERED that Defendant Joshua Washington's motion to re-send the court's orders [ECF No. 432] is GRANTED. The Clerk of Court is directed to mail Washington copies of the orders at ECF Nos. 427, 428, and 431.
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that Washington's motion “requesting copies to be delivered” in a particular manner [ECF No. 433] is DENIED.