Kangaroo prison disciplinary hearing yields victory for inmate in Second Circuit

Inmates do have rights, you know. That includes rights arising from their discipline. You can't just punish an inmate for breaking prison rules. There has to be a hearing with a neutral decisionmaker, though the hearings are not quite like the ones we have outside the prison context. Still, the procedures have to be fair, even taking into account the deference prison officials enjoy in managing the inmates and the facility itself. Inmates rarely win their appeals from adverse disciplinary rulings, and rarer still are successful federal lawsuits arising from these disciplinary proceedings. This case presents the rare victory for the inmate.

The case is Elder v. McCarthy, issued on July 23. While a disciplinary hearing found that plaintiff had stolen money from another inmate's account by forging his name, a state court ruled the adverse findings were not supported in the record. Plaintiff now claims in federal court that the hearing violated the Due Process Clause because he received inadequate notice of the charges against him, there was no evidence proving his guilt, he was denied access to witnesses, and he was denied the assistance needed to defend himself. The inmate does not win on all of these claims, but he prevails on some of them, and that makes this case notable.

We have a series of rulings in this case. First, while plaintiff was entitled to have a correction officer assist in rounding up witnesses for his defense (something inmates cannot really do since they are locked up and cannot Sherlock Holmes their way around the facility), the officer assigned to assist plaintiff did not take the steps necessary to help him by, for example, reviewing the proper prison records that might have exonerated him. The record is so clear on this point that the Court of Appeals holds that plaintiff wins this claim on summary judgment, which is the first time I have seen this in the Second Circuit.

Another officer who was assigned to help plaintiff prepare for the hearing may have violated the due process clause in not carrying out plaintiff's reasonable requests to obtain copies of the documents that plaintiff was accused of forging. The officer even had a duty to review records that might not have been legally made available to the inmate. Nor did the inmate have enough time to review the records that were made available to him at the hearing. 

Procedural violations are one way to challenging adverse findings. But plaintiff also claims the evidence was not sufficient to support the findings. This is a much more difficult burden, particularly in the prison context, where administrators and hearing officers are given the benefit of the doubt and federal judges really don't like getting involved in disputes like this. But the Court of Appeals says the evidence against plaintiff was not sufficiently reliable to support the adverse finding, as the evidence the plaintiff had forged another inmate's name to get his money the entire proceeding rested on the false assumption that theft and forgery had actually occurred, and there was no direct evidence that the victim had even complained of forgery and theft, or that money was taken from his account against his will. 

Plaintiff can get damages for these violations, as the law was clearly-established that rights like this cannot be infringed. Interesting how this holding is reached at a time when immunity is the talk of the town in the police context and many civil rights lawyers complain that courts are defining "clearly established" too narrowly and allowing law enforcement off the hook. But here we are. There are cases on point that support plaintiff's claims, and that is enough to pierce the immunity.