Opinion ID: 776026
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Actual Injury

Text: 34 The named plaintiffs are injured by the Board's policies and practices relating to its parole and parole revocation proceedings: plaintiffs are subjected to discriminatory treatment on account of their disabilities in violation of both the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act. This treatment is sufficient to constitute an actual injury. Furthermore, as a consequence of the Board's unlawful discrimination, plaintiffs were unable to comprehend various parts of the parole and parole revocation process or denied the opportunity to attend the required hearings, and may even have been wrongfully incarcerated or denied parole. This too constitutes actual injury. 35 We comment briefly on the Board's contention that the deprivation of a fair parole hearing can not in itself constitute such injury. The Board contends that California Penal Code 3041 does not create a fourteenth amendment due process right to such a hearing. However, following Ellis v. District of Columbia, 318 U.S. App. D.C. 39, 84 F.3d 1413, 1418 (D.C. Cir. 1996) (holding that, until Supreme Court speaks more directly to the issue, prisoners' right to pre-release revocation hearing unaffected by holding in Sandin v. Conner, 515 U.S. 472, 132 L. Ed. 2d 418, 115 S. Ct. 2293 (1995)), we hold that the statute is sufficiently determinate to require such hearings as a matter of constitutional right. Thus, we need not find a constitutional violation to establish actual injury under the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act. In addition to prohibiting discriminatory treatment, those statutes prohibit defendants from denying plaintiffs the benefits of [their] services, programs, or activities. Here, under the facts found by the district court, the plaintiffs were denied such benefits by virtue of the Board's failure to make accommodations that would enable them to attend or comprehend parole and parole revocation hearings. This, in itself, constitutes actual injury. 36 Our holding is consistent with Lewis, in which the plaintiffs' asserted injury resulted from inadequate library facilities. The Supreme Court held that there was no right to library facilities, but only a right to access to courts, and that in most cases prisoners had failed to show how the prison's library policy infringed upon that right, given that other means of accessing the courts were available. It did, however, find actual injury in two instances, one of which was when a prisoner was so stymied . . . that he was unable to file a complaint to remedy an arguably actionable harm. 518 U.S. at 351. Thus, Lewis simply requires that in order to show actual injury plaintiffs must identify an actual right that has been violated. Here, actual injury exists because plaintiffs' rights to be free from discriminatory treatment, as provided by the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act, have been violated, and because they have been deprived of services or programs provided by the Board: fair parole and parole revocation hearings. Either violation, standing alone, is sufficient to constitute actual injury.