Friday, April 1, 2011

Discovering the Imprisoned Innocent: The Effects of Skinner and Connick on the Use of Section 1983 to Gain Access to Exculpatory Evidence


By Ralph Mayrell

The imprisoned innocent received mixed messages from the Supreme Court this month in decisions concerning his access to exculpatory evidence.  While offering prisoners a new avenue to access DNA evidence, the Court limited the ability of the wrongly convicted to sue the district attorney.  Providing an alternative to habeas corpus, the Court in Skinner held that a prisoner could state a claim for DNA testing that might prove his innocence under Section 1983.  However, the Court in Connick held that an innocent former prisoner could not sue a district attorney’s office for damages under Section 1983 on the basis of a single failure to reveal exculpatory evidence.
 

The Court in Skinner held that a prisoner could state a claim under Section 1983 requesting access to DNA evidence.  Skinner is a Texas prisoner convicted of multiple murders and sentenced to death.  He has maintained his innocence and tried to use Texas’s Article 64 to gain access to potentially exculpatory DNA evidence.  The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied his Article 64 request twice, holding first that he failed to demonstrate the evidence would have led to his acquittal, and later holding that he had some responsibility for the failure of the evidence to appear in his trial.
 

In response, Skinner filed a Section 1983 claim in a Texas federal district court against the district attorney who held the evidence, arguing that Article 64 as construed by the Court of Criminal Appeals harmed his access to due process.  Prior law suggested that a defendant could not use Section 1983 to gain immediate release from prison or imply that a conviction was incorrect.  The Court held that this prior law did not preclude the use of Section 1983 to gain access to evidence that may or may not exculpate a convicted defendant.  It rejected the argument that habeas corpus is the exclusive means for a prisoner to access exculpatory DNA evidence.


In contrast to Skinner, the Court in Connick limited the options available to acquitted ex-prisoners to gain relief under Section 1983 when they discover that a district attorney failed to reveal exculpatory evidence.  The defendant had been convicted of an attempted armed robbery and later had not testified in his own defense at a murder trial as a result of his prior conviction.  After years of unsuccessful appeals, his private investigator discovered that the district attorney was aware of evidence proving that he had not attempted the robbery.  As a result, the Louisiana Court of Appeals reversed his armed robbery and murder convictions and sent him to retrial for the murder conviction, where he testified and was acquitted. 
 

In light of the failure of the district attorney to reveal exculpatory evidence—a Brady violation—Thompson filed a Section 1983 damages claim against the district attorney’s office.  The Court held against Thompson because the office was liable only for a failure to train its attorneys as evinced by repeated Brady violations, and Thompson had not displayed multiple violations.  A similar argument was also made in respect to his claims against Connick, the district attorney.  The absence of a showing of repeated Brady violations indicated to the Court that the plaintiff had not shown a deliberate failure to train.
 

These decisions leave the imprisoned innocent with more tools to gain access to exculpatory evidence, such as crime scene DNA evidence, but limit their ability to punish prosecutors who fail to obey their constitutional duty to reveal exculpatory evidence.  These opinions together effectively increase the burden upon the imprisoned innocent to engage in self-help with respect to proving their innocence, while decreasing the enforceable duty of prosecutors to ensure they do not prosecute the innocent.  Such a shift, even combined with the broader reading of Section 1983 made available under Skinner, places poorer, less educated, and more vulnerable populations at even greater risk of remaining among the imprisoned innocent. 

The IDEA and a Child's Right to Free Public Education

By Jerry Maddox

Imagine that you are the parent of a student with medical and developmental disabilities. Your child requires augmentative communication technology and tube feeding services at school. You have just learned that while at school, your child was repeatedly placed in a windowless closet while she was restrained in a stroller. Furthermore, your child was unsupervised the entire time.  On one such occasion, your child fell and fractured her skull, which worsened her existing seizure disorder and caused her to be homeschooled for the rest of the school year. If this happened to your child, would you believe that her rights to obtain a free, appropriate public education had been violated? Would you believe that your child was eligible to receive damages for the physical harm and mental anguish caused by the seclusion technique?



This scenario happened to Ms. Padilla, whose daughter suffered serious harm at the hand of her public school teachers. In Padilla v. Sch. Dist. No. 1 of Denver, the Tenth Circuit held that the administrative remedies under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) precluded the availability of any section 1983 remedies and denied Ms. Padilla’s damages claims.


The Padilla holding reflects the prevalent attitude in the current Circuit Court split about whether section 1983 should be available for violations of IDEA. The Second, Sixth, and Seventh Circuits have all recently held that individuals may sue under section 1983 to enforce IDEA. The First, Third, Fourth, Ninth, Tenth, and D.C. Circuits currently maintain that individuals may not sue under section 1983 to enforce IDEA. The Fifth, Eighth, and Eleventh Circuits have not yet ruled on this issue. Ms. Padilla’s daughter may have received section 1983 damages if she sued in the Second, Sixth, or Seventh Circuits.  As it stands today, a student’s jurisdiction determines whether section 1983 damages will be available for IDEA violations.


There are no cases pending in the Supreme Court’s docket regarding IDEA violations. If the Supreme Court were to review an IDEA violation case, it would likely rely on its analyses in Barnstable School Committee and Rancho Palos Verdes, and find that IDEA’s express, private remedial scheme is meant to preclude section 1983 enforcement. Before such a case gets to the Supreme Court, Congress should clarify its language so that the courts can accurately apply the IDEA statute. The IDEA statute allows a judge in a civil action to award the type of relief that the court determines is appropriate. This broad statement leaves open the possibility of any relief that the judge deems applicable to the case at hand. Such a flexible standard should be read to fit the current legislative landscape of section 1415(l). Congress must clarify section 1415(l) of the IDEA statute by explicitly inserting “section 1983” as a listed law. This will ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to enforce their right to a free, appropriate, public education.

The Plight of America’s Migrant Farmworkers


By Martha Buttry

Of the total farmworker population in the United States, forty-two percent are migrant and seasonal farmworkers, while many more are former migrants.  Migrant farmworkers pick lettuce in Colorado, apples in Washington, tobacco in North Carolina, and grapes in California, just to name a few, although the largest numbers of migrant farmworkers reside in California and Texas.  While the vast majority of migrant farmworkers hail from Mexico, others come from countries like Perú and Guatemala.  Some migrant farmworkers have their green card, others have a restricted work visa, while others have no documents and live in constant fear of deportation.   But most of these workers—regardless of individual traits, legal statuses, locations, nationality, or age—are deprived of many rights on a daily basis.


Farming is one of the most dangerous industries in the country.  The workers suffer heat stroke in the hot sun, are injured by the machines used during the harvest, and contract deadly diseases caused by their exposure to pesticides used in the field.  A worker I once met in Colorado had lost his eye to the machete used by his companion to cut lettuce.  Another worker, sorting potatoes in a warehouse, suffered carbon monoxide poisoning from the forklifts used in the unventilated facilities of his workplace.  While the regulatory regimes of OSHA and FIFRA protect against workplace injuries and pesticides poisoning in a limited sense, the agencies that enforce these regimes are inadequately equipped to protect the entire farmworker population.  Furthermore, workers often fear retaliation from their employers and fail to report violations of the OSHA and FIFRA standards.


Farmworkers also suffer at the hands of the immigration system.  Undocumented workers are at the mercy of the system: they can be deported at a minute’s notice.  Documented workers are not much better off.  H-2B workers are in constant fear of complaining of their employers’ misconduct; for if they complain the employer can choose not to invite them back for the following harvest season.  Even green card holders, or Legal Permanent Residents, can face the wrath of the immigration system.  They, too, have limited rights and can find themselves deported and barred from ever re-entering the United States.  This can occur if they commit a variety of “aggravated felonies,” which may include offenses that are neither aggravated nor felonies.  Even still, these immigrants are thrown into a system where they have no right to an attorney, where government-hired and often biased immigration judges are granted incredible deference, and where much of the relief to deportation is discretionary.


Several years ago, I worked for a statewide program that provided legal services to migrant farmworkers in Colorado.  The lechugeros, or lettuce workers, I met there said they were treated like animals, like ghosts.  They said that they felt like “voluntary slaves,” for they had few rights and few options.  One worker told me, “Nadie sabe quien somos.”  Nobody knows who we are.  “Y lose que saben,” added another, “no les importa.”  And those who know, don’t care.


César Chavez once said, “When the man who feeds the world by toiling in the fields is himself deprived of the basic rights of feeding, sheltering and caring for his own family, the whole community of man is sick.”


To cure this sickness there must be change.  So, it is about time we pay attention.