182
Ginsburg, J., dissenting
Ante, at 170. But the BOP's recently installed proof of delivery procedures require no convoys of armored vehicles to "escor[t]" prisoners to the post office. Ibid. There is little danger that Hollywood will confuse the rescuers of Private Ryan, see ibid., with a BOP Unit Team member, putatively delivering certified mail to inmates in his charge at least since 1988, instructed a decade later to linger for the additional moments required to secure for each delivery a signature in a logbook.5 The Due Process Clause requires nothing of the Government in cases of this genre beyond the practicable, efficient, and inexpensive reform the BOP has already adopted.
Notice consistent with due process "will vary with circumstances and conditions." Mennonite Bd., 462 U. S., at 802 (O'Connor, J., dissenting) (emphasis deleted) (internal quotation marks omitted). Given the circumstances and conditions of imprisonment, the Government must have cause to be confident that legal notices to prisoners will be delivered inside the prison with the care "one desirous of actually informing the [addressee] might reasonably adopt to accomplish it." Mullane, 339 U. S., at 315. The uncertain mail-room to cell delivery system formerly in place at FCI Milan
5 The majority worries that a firmer rule on delivery might "also apply, for example, to members of the Armed Forces both in this country and overseas." Ante, at 170. Of course, many active-duty military personnel, both on and off military bases, maintain personal mailboxes and interact with local postal authorities as does any other resident. The majority is right that other members of the Armed Forces—soldiers in combat, for example—are in respects material to this case similarly situated to Dusenbery: Government authority determines their whereabouts and restricts their movements, and that same authority receives their mail at a central delivery location and must make arrangements to distribute it further. It is at least doubtful, however, that a soldier, oblivious to a pending action, would return home to find her property irrevocably forfeited to her Government because she had the misfortune to be in a combat zone too long.
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