Unlike typical litigants, pro se prisoners are unable to deliver filings to court or to have an attorney do so on their behalf. Such prisoners are forced to rely on their prisons’ mailing systems to file documents, which often results in those documents reaching the court after the applicable deadlines. Accordingly, the Supreme Court created a “prison mailbox rule” in Houston v. Lack, under which some filings by prisoners are considered filed when they are given to prison officials for mailing, rather than when they reach the court.

Defining the exact reach of that prison mailbox rule has created considerable discord among lower courts, especially in light of the Court’s subsequent holding in Fex v. Michigan and its adoption of formal procedural rules governing the timing of prisoners’ court filings. This Comment tackles three different issues left unresolved by the Supreme Court. Focusing particularly on the Court’s instructions about when courts should apply a prison mailbox rule, this Comment provides a solution to each of those three issues and then combines those answers into a simple, easy-to-apply framework. The proposed framework provides a step-by-step process for determining whether a prison mailbox rule applies to a particular type of filing by a particular litigant, bringing some much-needed clarity and uniformity to the debate surrounding Houston.

与典型的诉讼当事人不同，自诉囚犯无法向法庭提交文件或让律师代表他们这样做。这些囚犯被迫依靠监狱的邮寄系统来归档文件，这通常会导致这些文件在适用的截止日期之后到达法庭。因此，最高法院在休斯顿诉莱克案中制定了“监狱邮箱规则”，根据该规则，囚犯提交的一些文件在交给监狱官员邮寄时被视为提交，而不是在到达法院时提交。

定义该监狱邮箱规则的确切范围在下级法院之间造成了相当大的不和，特别是考虑到法院随后在 Fex 诉密歇根案中的判决，并采用了正式的程序规则来管理囚犯向法院提交文件的时间。本评论解决了最高法院未解决的三个不同问题。本评论特别关注法院关于法院何时应适用监狱邮箱规则的指示，为这三个问题中的每一个问题提供了解决方案，然后将这些答案组合成一个简单、易于应用的框架。拟议框架提供了一个分步流程，用于确定监狱邮箱规则是否适用于特定诉讼当事人提交的特定类型的文件，从而为围绕休斯顿的辩论带来一些急需的清晰度和统一性。