Inmate may recover punitive damages for unlawful confinement

It looks like this guy's life fell through the cracks of the New York criminal justice system. He was convicted of a crime and went to jail, but following his sentence the Department of Correctional Services on its added five years of post-release supervision to his sentence, without a court order. While the courts later said that DOCS maneuvers like this are illegal (you need a court order for this), no one altered plaintiff's PRS schedule, which limited his liberty after he was released from jail, and he wound up back in jail after he violated the terms of the PRS. Actually, he was twice incarcerated for violating the terms of his PRS even though the PRS should not have applied to him in the first place because the courts had already held that administratively-imposed PRS is unconstitutional. He sued the state for damages relating to his loss of liberty and the trial court gave him a dollar in damages. 

The case is Aponte v. Perez, issued on July 20. The Court of Appeals has to decide if plaintiff is entitled to a jury trial on his damages claim, which would include compensatory and punitive damages. The Court finds that plaintiff can in fact recover punitive damages and that the district court got it wrong in only awarding him nominal damages but that the district court now has to decide whether subsequent case law would still entitle him to compensatory damages.

The Court of Appeals (Calabresi, Carney and Robinson) first holds that plaintiff is eligible for punitive damages, as the Court has repeatedly admonished the State of New York in prior cases for continuing to detain prisoners unconstitutionally for violating PRS terms that DOCS and not a court had imposed. The State knew this was illegal but it did so anyway. The case returns to the district court for a jury trial to determine if plaintiff can get punitive damages, which are meant to punish wrongdoers for malicious and wanton constitutional violations.

What about compensatory damages? Surely plaintiff should get something for being unlawfully sent back to jail for violating the PRS terms that should never have been imposed, correct? Not quite. The problem for plaintiff is that the State could have asked a court to re-sentence plaintiff under the constitutional procedures set out in other Second Circuit cases on this issue. Had that happened, plaintiff would have suffered the same injury that he suffered under the unconstitutional confinement. The district court on remand will have to decide whether this complex legal and factual landscape would entitle plaintiff to compensatory damages or whether he would still only recover nominal damages of one dollar.