The New York Court of Appeals, Corrections Officers, and § 1983

Although it’s several months old, I just came across this fascinating (and rather disturbing) decision by the New York Court of Appeals from last November. In short, the Court of Appeals upheld section 24 of the N.Y. Correction Law, even though that statute precludes the New York state courts from entertaining any damages actions (including § 1983 claims alleging federal constitutional violations) by state prisoners against state correctional officers. In other words, the court sustained a state law that precluded state courts from entertaining, inter alia, federal question lawsuits raising constitutional claims.

To be fair, the statute, along similar lines to the federal Westfall Act, provides that any damages claim arising out of the official acts of a corrections officer can be brought in the New York Court of Claims as a claim against the state itself. But there’s a very serious constitutional question here: May states so thoroughly constrain (and perhaps even preclude) their own courts from entertaining such a federal question lawsuit?

I think the answer is a resounding “no,” but it requires a little bit of unpacking, which I attempt below the fold.

It is axiomatic that, as a general matter, the state courts are not just entitled, but obliged, to entertain federal question lawsuits by virtue of the Supremacy Clause. As a result, there are three general principles (as enunciated by Justice Stevens in 1990) that govern attempts by states to preclude enforcement of federal questions in state courts:

1. A state court may not deny a federal right, when the parties and controversy are properly before it, in the absence of “valid excuse.”
2. An excuse that is inconsistent with or violates federal law is not a valid excuse.
3. When a state court refuses jurisdiction because of a neutral state rule regarding the administration of the courts, [the Court] must act with utmost caution before deciding that it is obligated to entertain the claim.

With regard to the New York statute at issue here, the Court of Appeals concluded that the statute was “a neutral state rule regarding the administration of the courts,” and thereby upheld it. According to the majority, “if a state does not extend jurisdiction to its courts to litigate a certain type of claim, it may deprive those courts of jurisdiction over a related federal claim. In that situation, there is no Supremacy Clause violation because there is no discrimination against the federal claim in favor of similar state claims.” Indeed, “[b]y restricting the forum for a certain type of claim to a particular state court, the Legislature did nothing more than exercise its prerogative to establish the subject matter jurisdiction of state courts in a manner consistent with New York's conditional waiver of sovereign immunity, which does not allow civil rights claims to proceed against the state in Supreme Court.”

There is a certain logic to the majority’s argument: New York isn’t facially discriminating against § 1983 claims; it is funneling all damages claims against corrections officers to the New York Court of Claims (where it substitutes the state for the officer-defendants). That’s why I think this presents something of a close case… But there are three independent arguments for why I think the majority’s analysis is ultimately incorrect:

First, section 24 of the New York Correction Law has the effect of immunizing officer-defendants in the Court of Claims. Because the statute substitutes the State of New York as a defendant in the Court of Claims, it effectively (if not formally) bestows absolute immunity upon state corrections officers from suit under § 1983. But as the Court held in Martinez v. California in 1980, “Conduct by persons acting under color of state law which is wrongful under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 . . . cannot be immunized by state law. A construction of the federal statute which permitted a state immunity defense to have controlling effect would transmute a basic guarantee into an illusory promise; and the supremacy clause of the Constitution insures that the proper construction may be enforced.” (emphasis added).

Second, the State of New York cannot be held liable under § 1983, even in the New York Court of Claims. A long line of cases, dating back to Monell v. New York City Dep’t of Social Services and Will v. Michigan Dep’t of State Police holds that states are not “persons” within the meaning of § 1983. Thus, even though the New York Constitution waives New York’s sovereign immunity from § 1983 suits in the New York Court of Claims, § 1983 cannot be invoked against a State—sovereign immunity or no sovereign immunity. In other words, section 24 both (a) immunizes the officer-defendant; and (b) read together with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of § 1983, prevents the maintenance of a § 1983 claim against the State itself. In total, then, section 24 does not transfer jurisdiction over § 1983 claims against state correction officers from the New York Supreme Court to the New York Court of Claims; it eviscerates them.

Third, and related to the first two points, I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court has already rejected this argument—and unanimously at that—in Howlett ex rel. Howlett v. Rose, in 1990. There, the Court concluded that “the Florida court's refusal to entertain one discrete category of § 1983 claims, when the court entertains similar state-law actions against state defendants, violates the Supremacy Clause." One of the arguments presented in Howlett was that “a federal court has no power to compel a state court to entertain a claim over which the state court has no jurisdiction as a matter of state law.” In responding to this idea, Justice Stevens invoked a series of analogies:

It is settled that a court of otherwise competent jurisdiction may not avoid its parallel obligation under the Full Faith and Credit Clause to entertain another State's cause of action by invocation of the term “jurisdiction.” A State cannot “escape this constitutional obligation to enforce the rights and duties validly created under the laws of other states by the simple device of removing jurisdiction from courts otherwise competent.” Similarly, a State may not evade the strictures of the Privileges and Immunities Clause by denying jurisdiction to a court otherwise competent. As our discussion of Testa, McKnett, and Mondou establishes, the same is true with respect to a state court’s obligations under the Supremacy Clause. The force of the Supremacy Clause is not so weak that it can be evaded by mere mention of the word “jurisdiction.” Indeed, if this argument had merit, the State of Wisconsin could overrule our decision in Felder v. Casey, 487 U.S. 131 (1988), by simply amending its notice-of-claim statute to provide that no state court would have jurisdiction of an action in which the plaintiff failed to give the required notice. The Supremacy Clause requires more than that.

In other words, as Judge Jones wrote in his dissent in the New York Court of Appeals, “once a state opens its courts to hear section 1983 actions, it may not selectively exclude certain section 1983 actions by denominating state policies as jurisdictional.” Judge Jones's dissent also quotes an ABA guide to § 1983 litigation in state court for the proposition that: “The most flagrant example of a state court system selectively excluding § 1983 cases is the refusal of the New York courts to entertain § 1983 actions against state correctional officials.”

So it seems. And given the analysis above, I cannot see how such a hostile attitude to federal claims is possibly constitutional.