this court made clear and dikes versus housman a decision that under the teaching of the supreme court decision to stop vs sparkman a judge's motivation to undertake a judicial act is irrelevant to any proper analysis of judicial immunity and as in the present case the plaintiffs in dikes ought to circumvent judicial pleading around it claiming that what they were really on about not subject to the protection of the protection of judicial immunity in the present case that if the plaintiffs cite various judicial acts by judge hayes but then they attempt to avoid judicial immunity by alleging at various points in the complaint they sprinkled throughout the complaint sort of as a talismanic phrase that the product of policies customs practices and in fact they allege that judge hayes had in essence conspired with the montgomery its mayor its chief of police the former chief of police and judicial correction services to quote develop ratify and administer for the improper purpose of generating revenue various really proud and they all fairly took place within the courtroom within the confines of the courtroom they were quintessential acts that a judge does so your argument is that the only thing they really allege other than is this alleged conspiracy only to sort of an overarching you might say forensic alchemy if we know or these acts that we've placed in the complaint which obviously had an effect on the district judge he was that in this case everything they referenced in cited to was in fact a judicial act related to sentencing probation commutation of sentence and is this is that supreme court said in  versus waco six years after the dykes case that if judicial immunity means anything it means that a judge will not be deprived of immunity because the action he took was in error was in excess of his authority did and i believe this is where respectfully he was led in arrow he ruled this quoting from his memorandum opinion in this case plaintiff's allege that the city and judge hayes created a series of policies to increase municipal revenue through stops ticketing and a recess these are systemic and related policies practices and customs that you know these policies resulted in million dollars of fines and four and note that montgomery raise more than three times as so that the the charges would be greater and you know that that is not addressed to one case that is a policy wouldn't i mean excepting that the allegation for the for the truth that is a policy as opposed to an action and that individual cases that well actually in alabama law each said to has to be set up as a separate case so this is a function of the underlying alabama law and what so what is matter the plaintiffs have dropped the chiefs from count twelve as evidence by their briefs similarly the plaintiffs have declined to argue two of the statutory positions stated in count twelve that's eighteen u s c fifteen eighty one fifty ninety three know the the police chiefs are answer i got it thank you that's what that's what's argued what remains is the claim for fault for forced labor based on voluntary work opportunities given at the jail and a claim for false imprisonment and again the latter claim is just against me as brief make it clear that both claims are based on a single alleged wrong and the wrong is these inadequate hearings there were hearings they claim they were inadequate held before the plane of spawn's and costs were converted to jail time and they paragraph two seventy of their complaint commit this conversion their claim is that the hearings were an adequate it's very clear and i find really missing here is anything that ties are that the police chief or mayor statute thus the with authority to supervise the jail people were allowed or required to work off their fines by washing police cars and cleaning up the jail and are good time credits given in connection with work done in prison every day in this country including in the federal court over the but i mean i think the allegation is as i understand it was you get twenty five dollars more a day off of your fine if you work that's the violation that's that but it doesn't make a violation because you knowingly have to by means of a threat of jail time the jailers were not first of all we don't know that the police chief even knew that this was going on do the i knew the inmates were washing the cars and right people are giving credit for watching the cars there's no allegation that they know the specific you know communications between the jail in the in the court and what the court was doing in connection with sentencing with respect to information about voluntary work programs so the fact that you can see an inmate doing work does not mean that it's anything more than a work release program it doesn't mean that you know that there's first of all that they're in there unlawfully which is really what the gist of their secondly you don't know you know the police chief doesn't of a town this size and not knowing the specifics of what's happening what's being communicated to that jail from that jail or to the court and what the court saying with that information and so to the extent that there was any reduction it is the court that's making the reduction is not the jail or the jailers getting opportunity to dailor is to the extent and also you have to do the deal or does the jailer have the responsibility to keep up with who served their time and who hasn't served their time that jailer himself has to coerce by means of a threat of a jail sentence by means of additional punishment if you look at the minute call case and there's a new case along the same lines under fifteen ninety nine the problem becomes if you have work and because you do not do the work in the jail you are confined to solitary confinement you get additional days the  prolong it but it's our last day sure always we're always feeling good about that ok but i do have some things and i'm sure you will have some question it's hard to believe that we're here in the middle district of alabama more than one hundred fifteen years after judge thomas good jones delivered his grand jury charge in the  and we're actually hearing appellee appellants argue that their jail program was really just a voluntary community service program and the judge hayes should be on from his administrative policies that allowed that program to operate by agreeing that jailers could credit twenty five dollars a day to the fifty dollars a day that our clients were being credited for sitting in montgomery's debtors prison for example angela mccullough was sitting out her debt what concerns me about the scariest miss morgan is not i mean there are disturbing allegations in the complaint ye a bar particularly it appears to me that on the judicial side that everything that the judges oh i had to do basically ok yeah let me address the judicial immunity argument first of all the and the ball related arguments the only said that only claims of individual capacity immunity are left and i don't know judge westry why he's even here arguing my understanding is he now has been substituted for the of visual capacity klein against the presiding judge which the lower court has not even determined yet whether in his  official or a state official if he isn't in this of all official really whether he has in the judicial even if policies around the force debtors prison and we think it's clearly different from any case they decided none of them have dealt with peonage programs we in jails called cited all four but then only talked about fifty ninety nine so if there's any confusion in our reply brief it shouldn't be said that we've abandoned our peonage claims along with our forced labor claims we are not the appellate in this case that is any abandoning they've done it and it also was done to avoid serious harm to them while she was serving this time because they weren't even allowed to see he had mental disabilities but they weren't allowed one one and johnson  judge does your further the scheme because it seems to me what the complaint is talking about is that the probation orders and the terms of those orders whether hearing for failure to pay their debts all of those appear to me those appear to be what the gist of this complaint and all others appear to me to be judicial acts  no individual capacity claims against him in any of the one thousand nine hundred three actions related to all of the things you just mentioned the only individual capacity claims claims against the judge so all the argument about he should get immunity for those things are just to make it look i guess like we don't know what we're doing when we drafted  industries versus trim law that talks about how when you are doing the analysis that you have to look at all the allegations taken together  we don't say that these inferences are in fact correct or that they're the only fair inference is to be drawn but taken together and at a point like us where we have been given no discovery it's been three years  we have no discovery to support further support the allegations that we have in good faith made of how we believe and our clients have said performed by a truck shot right and so and that that we don't really have much in the district court's order i'm trying to understand the basis for his reasoning and then when i look at the complaint to see what it is that supports the notion that what the judge is doing is furthering you know support rever of revenue generation it's all the things that i just listed earlier all of which to me it appears to me our judicial acts and if they are judicial acts as i understand the law i judge enjoys absolute immunity i would agree with you on that but i don't think for the kill it seven claims that are  generated but we argue that in addition to our claim that in general his policies under other other planes or and then astray if this i all that these claims i think would be administrative heart from the question of whether they were designed to raise revenue and i would point you to some supplemental letter briefs and the new jersey case the recent case of i guess it's kaiser are they said it was a very similar except here the difference is i think even greater income there was as far as i can tell only one judge there wasn't a presiding judge setting policy for all the judge on the court but they concluded that even at the summary judgment stage that it couldn't grant judicial immunity to him because it seemed like monster much of what he was doing maybe not all and maybe not all in our case but most the foot it was doing same to me the non judicial developing of policies of collecting fines and fees not the judicial function of imposing sentences or imposing fines and we clearly say in our complaint we're not doing judge hayes for his judicial decisions in the particular  cases of our clients not all of our clients even appeared before him that you can't tell who people appeared before in the month gum or a municipal court because they don't keep any records or money orders but that  probably shouldn't go there at this point i do think that this case is this thing we should pull from it all and it all if you read it closely what they really were concerned about is the difficult problem of plaintiffs trying to allege that a neutral policy is racially motivated under the arlington heights kinds of factors i and i are it seemed to me that the concern of the supreme court was sewing the attorney general of the united states for having instituted what was alleged to  attorney general to say based on nothing but those conclusory allegations and i look at this complaint it looks like there's a lot of that and his far right rightfully neutral policies that they allege war racially based and in fact judge lamberth recognize the importance of looking at what the particular clients are in applying the ball he dismissed and we disagree with it but we can't raise that yet off he dismissed our claims that were similar to claims we had sued for racial profiling and we argued that we had alleged enough to try to show the elements of the arlington heights to prove that racially neutral practices never the less were racially motivated  i agree with that but it's about that time that's about municipal immunity from punitive damages which are actually set out in the statute that's different from official me unity of the kind that is at issue here today absolutely judicial immunity you could just about change the names and have the same allegations reading from the opinion it states that it's really a qualified immunity case right it's only a qualified immunity case you're implemented the same things they charge against judge hayes this policy that was illegal because it had improper motivation and the court ruled that way maybe you haven't played enough just by saying they were involved in promote gating in i want to make it clear judge marm how the with the complaint says if you read it closely as to how this jail work program worked the judges converted fines and cost two days so there was a sentence that was given to these people the jailer had a sentence of a number of days the person worked in jail it was not in control of but one of the allegations i think had to do with you know the record keeping at the jail was not accurate estimate you know how many days somebody at work right now that's in the complaint that's a complaint and that's a complaint against the jailer for negligence and that's a whole different lawsuit that has no bearing on the police chiefs here and wanted to focus also that on the fact that mr morgan said that there we cited no cases that involved our situation in connection with the work program and in fact that is the reason that qualified immunity should be given to my folks not only is her factually speaking but there is no clearly established law on the point section fifteen eighty nine also has quite a lot of requirements  before someone can be held liable for it and it must be read narrowly it is a criminal statute it requires knowingly providing or obtaining the labor by means of and i quote that for threats of force physical  jailer did not obtain the relief in that way that the sentence existed to the extent that anyone volunteered to do they got the jail or did not do anything that was forcing them to sit there