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206

OCTOBER TERM, 1997

Syllabus

PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
et al. v. YESKEY

certiorari to the united states court of appeals for
the third circuit

No. 97–634. Argued April 28, 1998—Decided June 15, 1998

Respondent Yeskey was sentenced to 18 to 36 months in a Pennsylvania
correctional facility, but was recommended for placement in a Motiva-
tional Boot Camp for ﬁrst-time offenders, the successful completion of
which would have led to his parole in just six months. When he was
refused admission because of his medical history of hypertension, he
sued petitioners, Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections and several
ofﬁcials, alleging that the exclusion violated the Americans with Disabil-
ities Act of 1990 (ADA), Title II of which prohibits a “public entity”
from discriminating against a “qualiﬁed individual with a disability” on
account of that disability, 42 U. S. C. § 12132. The District Court dis-
missed for failure to state a claim, holding the ADA inapplicable to state
prison inmates, but the Third Circuit reversed.

Held: State prisons fall squarely within Title II’s statutory deﬁnition of
“public entity,” which includes “any . . . instrumentality of a State . . .
or local government.”
§ 12131(1)(B). Unlike the situation that ob-
tained in Gregory v. Ashcroft, 501 U. S. 452, there is no ambiguous
exception that renders the coverage uncertain. For that reason the
plain-statement requirement articulated in Gregory, if applicable to fed-
eral intrusion upon the administration of state prisons, has been met.
Petitioners’ attempts to derive an intent not to cover prisons from the
statutory references to the “beneﬁts” of programs and to “qualiﬁed indi-
vidual” are rejected; some prison programs, such as this one, have bene-
ﬁts and are restricted to qualiﬁed inmates. The statute’s lack of ambi-
guity also requires rejection of petitioners’ appeal to the doctrine of
constitutional doubt. The Court does not address the issue whether
applying the ADA to state prisons is a constitutional exercise of Con-
gress’s power under either the Commerce Clause or the Fourteenth
Amendment because it was addressed by neither of the lower courts.
Pp. 208–213.

118 F. 3d 168, afﬁrmed.

Scalia, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.