Inmate loses case alleging correction officer confiscated his legal mail

This inmate sued a county jail in upstate New York, claiming that a correction officer interfered with his right to receive mail by searching his cell for his legal correspondence and then confiscated and transmitted that correspondence to the prosector's office in his state criminal matter. Was this legal?

The case is Saeli v. Chautauqua County, a summary order issued on December 6. Plaintiff says that after the CO went through his stuff, the documents were ultimately lost. Not to mention CO Gilmore's decision to send the correspondence to the DA's office. Your instinct would be that plaintiff has a case. But the Court of Appeals says he does not.

This case is brought under the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel. The Court of Appeals notes that it has not fully developed this theory of liability, i.e., what constitutes "unreasonable interference" with a criminal defendant's right to access counsel. Plaintiff says that the CO's conduct on its face, taking the legal documents and sending them to the DA's office, violates the Sixth Amendment, and that cases around the country say that opening marked legal mail, by itself, implicates the Sixth Amendment. While this appeal potentially raised an open issue of law for the Court of Appeals to clarify, these other cases are not enough for plaintiff to win, and the Second Circuit does not use this case to develop the law any further.

While plaintiff claims the CO interfered with his attorney-client relationship, the Court (Chin, Carney and Sullivan) rules against him because he cannot satisfy the strict Iqbal pleading standards that the Supreme Court adopted in 2009, which require the plaintiff assert non-conclusory allegations that support a plausible claim for relief. "For starters, Saeli provides scant detail about how he learned of Gilmore’s alleged conduct, or the basis for his conclusory assertion that Gilmore 'was advised' to and did purposefully search Saeli’s cell for his legal correspondence. More to the point, he makes no allegations about whether the document was marked or otherwise identifiable as legal mail, nor does he include any facts regarding how Gilmore would or should have recognized it as such." 

I note that this case was argued by law students from Seton Hall University Law School. They do not recall the pre-Iqbal days, when "notice pleading" was the name of the game, and you did not have to satisfy the pleading standards that the Supreme Court imposed on plaintiffs more than 15 years ago. Iqbal was the most important civil procedure case decided by the Supreme Court in my lifetime, and its application here was certainly frustrating for the law students. 

Plaintiff does win on one issue: the case returns to the district court to allow plaintiff to amend the complaint to add more detail.