Inmate's religious freedom case fails over technical roadblocks

In this prisoner rights case, the plaintiff argues to the Second Circuit that a mandatory program that required him to accept responsibility for his sex crimes violates his statutory and constitutional religious rights because the program required him to tell a falsehood in violation of his religion, the falsehood being that he is guilty of the crimes. Plaintiff loses the case.

The case is Tripathy v. McCoy, issued on May 29. Since plaintiff says he never committed any sex crimes, the program, he says, would require him to lie. His religion prohibits such lying. 

The problem for plaintiff is that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), under which plaintiff brings this lawsuit, does not provide for compensatory damages, as it is a Spending Clause legislation and, for reasons too complicated to lay out here, such statutes do not provide for pain and suffering awards unless they expressly say so. The other problem for plaintiff is that he cannot recover injunctive relief against participation in the program because he is no longer in jail and any such application is moot. (Plaintiff is out of jail because a state court said he received ineffective assistance of counsel at his criminal trial). As the Second Circuit has already held that RLUIPA provides for no compensatory damages, plaintiff cannot assert otherwise, as one Second Panel has no authority to overrule a prior panel decision from a different case, and plaintiff cannot show that any intervening change in the law (such as through a U.S. Supreme Court ruling) undermines the reasoning of these prior adverse precedents. 

Plaintiff (or his lawyers who joined the case on appeal) is smart enough to argue that a different religious freedom statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, does provide for pain and suffering damages, but the Second Circuit notes that cases under RFRA do not undermine the bad RLUIPA cases because RFRA is not a Spending Clause statute and is not useful in this analysis.

That brings us to plaintiff's First Amendment religious freedom claim. The First Amendment and Section 1983 (which enforces the First Amendment) has no damages caps, but plaintiff runs into a different procedural issue: qualified immunity, which shields public defendants from lawsuits when the case raises a novel issue of law. This is such a case, the Court of Appeals (Sullivan, Jacobs and Nardini) holds, because "no binding precedent establishes that a generally applicable program violates the Free Exercise Clause by requiring an inmate who is an incarcerated felon to accept responsibility for the conduct underlying his conviction."