Court once again holds that prosecutors cannot be sued even in egreguious cases of prosecutorial misconduct

This case provides a vehicle for the Court of Appeals to clarify when prosecutors are immune from any lawsuits arising from their official duties. The Court holds that district attorneys in Suffolk County cannot be sued under Section 1983 for prosecuting the plaintiffs for child endangerment and other allegations after plaintiffs left their positions as nurses working in nursing home facilities in Long Island.

The case is Anilao v. Spota, issued on March 9. On the advice of their attorney, plaintiffs quit their jobs claiming the nursing facility had breached its contracts with them, allowing them to resign without any legal repercussions once their shifts ended. Plaintiffs and their lawyer were prosecuted for child endangerment and other professional misconduct, and the jury indicted them for these crimes, but after State Supreme Court said the prosecutor was able to proceed with the case, Appellate Division dismissed all the charges, holding plaintiffs did not commit any crime in leaving their jobs and that their lawyer did not do anything wrong in providing them legal advice.

Prosecutors have absolute immunity for actions taken during the judicial phase of the criminal process. they can be sued (and invoke qualified immunity) if they act without any colorable claim of authority, or if the prosecution's decision had a jurisdictional defect. No matter how you slice it, it's quite hard to sue the prosecutor; otherwise, every criminal defendant would do so, particularity following their acquittals.The Court of Appeals reviews a few cases of pretty bad prosecutorial misconduct that did not allow the victims to sue them under Section 1983, including one case where prosecutors maliciously went after someone despite knowledge that the charges were false. 

There is no dispute on appeal that the District Attorney was authorized by statute to prosecute the plaintiffs for endangering children and physically disabled persons, for conspiring to do the same, and for soliciting others to do so.8 Neither the dissent nor the plaintiffs propose that the state Supreme Court of Suffolk County lacked jurisdiction over the offense. Instead, the plaintiffs submit only that the prosecutors in this case had no power to act as they did — not because they lacked the statutory authority to do so, but because their conduct violated the nurses’ rights[.] [U]nder our precedent absolute immunity shields Spota and Lato for their prosecutorial and advocative conduct even in the absence of probable cause and even if their conduct was entirely politically motivated.

Judge Chin dissents, stating that this is the rare case where prosecutors can be sued  under Section 1983. He writes:

In this case, the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office (the "DA's Office") brought criminal charges against ten nurses and their lawyer for "patient abandonment" because the nurses resigned their positions at a nursing home to protest their work conditions and the lawyer advised them of their rights and filed a discrimination claim on their behalf with the Department of Justice. The Appellate Division, Second Department, took the extraordinary step of issuing a writ of prohibition to bar the DA's Office from pursuing the charges, recognizing that the nurses and their attorney were "threatened with prosecution for crimes for which they [could not] constitutionally be tried." Vinluan v. Doyle, 873 N.Y.S.2d 72, 83 (2d Dep't 2009) (Eng, J.). Indeed, as the Second Department held, "these criminal prosecutions constitute[d] an impermissible infringement upon the constitutional rights of these nurses and their attorney." Id. at 75. . . . In the extraordinary circumstances presented here, where the prosecutors were "proceeding . . . 'without or in excess of jurisdiction,'" Vinluan, 873 N.Y.S.2d at 77 (quoting N.Y. C.P.L.R. § 7803(2)), they were not protected by absolute or qualified immunity