This is how qualified immunity works, Part II

Section 1983 lawyers know that qualified immunity can doom the lawsuit before it starts. Unless the plaintiff asserts the violation of a clearly established right, the case cannot proceed. A clearly established right is determined by Second Circuit and Supreme Court precedent. This case illustrates how the plaintiff can survive qualified immunity . 

The case is Matzell v. Annucci, issued on April 4. This is a prisoner's rights case. Plaintiff's Fourteenth Amendment claim will proceed to discovery because defendants are not entitled to qualified immunity. In this blog post, I show how, in this same case, plaintiff was unable to survive the qualified immunity defense on the same set of facts on his Eighth Amendment claim.

Plaintiff was sentence to jail on a drug offense. The judge also sentenced plaintiff to the Shock program, which is a rehabilitation bootcamp program that allows inmates to be released from prison early. If the judge sentences you to Shock, you cannot be removed from that program unless there are medical or mental health issues. But jail officials kicked plaintiff out of the Shock program because of a prison substance abuse violation. That determination violated the New York Penal Law, and a state appellate court ruled in plaintiff's favor on this issue. Plaintiff then sued the state under the Eighth Amendment (prohibiting cruel and unusual punishments) and the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause, which prohibits governmental actions that shock the conscience. While there was no Eighth Amendment case on point when state officials removed plaintiff from the shock program in 2017-2018, there was in fact a Fourteenth Amendment case on point in plaintiff's favor.

First, plaintiff identifies the violation of his substantive due process right because "the general liberty interest in freedom from detention is perhaps the most fundamental interest that the Due Process Clause protects." The Court of Appeals (Chin, Leval and Lee) states, "Defendants' decision to disqualify Matzell from enrolling in Shock diverged from the sentencing court's order and implicated his liberty interest in having his sentence implemented in a manner consistent with law and the sentencing court's order." This decision to remove plaintiff from the shock program also "shocks the conscience" under settled due process principles, as state officials did not comply with state law in making this decision, which caused plaintiff to spend another 500+ days in jail when he could have been a free man, enjoying himself. 

The ultimate question is whether state officials violated clearly established law, as determined by binding precedent in place in 2017-18. Not only did it violate state law when jail officials removed plaintiff from the Shock program, but the Second Circuit held in 2006 that "any alteration to a jail sentence imposed by a judge, unless made by a judge in a subsequent proceeding, is invalid." Earley v. Murray, 451 F.3d 71 (2d Cir. 2006). While Earley and related cases "did not specifically involve excluding an incarcerated individual from Shock, Supreme Court case law does not 'require a case directly on point,'" and a "general constitutional rule already identified in the decisional law may apply with obvious clarity to the specific language in question even if the specific conduct had not already been held unlawful." That principle often fails to get around a qualified immunity defense, because plaintiffs' lawyers will use that language when there is no case directly on point, but that language works here, and plaintiff can now proceed to discovery on his unlawful imprisonment claim.