Opinion ID: 2513166
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: When the Law Governing Administrative PRS Became Clearly Established

Text: 1. Clearly Established Law Prior to Earley. In Earley, we held that if a sentencing court does not explicitly impose a term of PRS on a criminal defendant, it is unconstitutional for DOC subsequently to impose one, irrespective of whether DOC is acting pursuant to a statute that makes such PRS a mandatory part of the sentence of the crime for which that defendant has been convicted. Earley, 451 F.3d at 76. Before Earley was decided, New York State courts had routinely upheld the administrative imposition of mandatory PRS under Jenna's Law. See, e.g., Deal v. Goord, 8 A.D.3d 769, 769-70, 778 N.Y.S.2d 319, 320 (3d Dep't 2004); People v. Crump, 302 A.D.2d 901, 902, 753 N.Y.S.2d 793, 793 (4th Dep't 2003); People v. Lindsey, 302 A.D.2d 128, 129, 755 N.Y.S.2d 118, 119 (3d Dep't 2003). The New York Court of Appeals, though, cast some doubt on the practice in its 2005 decision in People v. Catu, 4 N.Y.3d 242, 244-45, 792 N.Y.S.2d 887, 888-89, 825 N.E.2d 1081 (2005). There it held that a defendant who was not informed by the court of his PRS obligation at the time of his plea was entitled to have his plea vacated. However, because its decision rested on the constitutional obligation of the courts to inform a defendant of the direct consequences of a plea, of which it held PRS was one, the Catu court did not directly address the question of whether the administrative imposition of PRS was itself unconstitutional. Scott argues that the law was clearly established, more than 70 years prior to Earley, by the Supreme Court's decision in Hill v. United States ex rel. Wampler, 298 U.S. 460, 464, 56 S.Ct. 760, 80 L.Ed. 1283 (1936) (Cardozo, J. ). She relies on the Court's observation there that [t]he only sentence known to law is the sentence or judgment entered upon the records of the court. We are not persuaded. In Earley, we did indeed rely on Wampler and the quoted passage to decide that administrative sentencing to PRS is unconstitutional. Earley, 451 F.3d at 75-76 & n. 1. We said that [t]he state court's determination that the addition to Earley's sentence by DOCS was permissible is [] contrary to clearly established federal law as determined by the United States Supreme Court. Id. at 76. And in denying a motion for rehearing by the panel, we further noted that  Wampler undeniably stands for the proposition that the only valid terms of a defendant's sentence are the terms imposed by the judge. Earley v. Murray, 462 F.3d 147, 149 (2d Cir.2006) (denying petition for panel rehearing). But Earley was a habeas proceeding governed by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). And [u]nder AEDPA, an application for a writ of habeas corpus may not be granted unless the state court's adjudication of the claim was `contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.' Earley, 451 F.3d at 74 (emphasis added) (quoting 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1)). The conclusion, in the course of such a section 2254 review, that a legal proposition was clearly established for purposes of its application by professional state court judges does not require a conclusion that it was clearly established in the qualified immunity context, which governs the conduct of government officials who are likely neither lawyers nor legal scholars. See Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 380 n. 12, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000) (We are not persuaded by the argument that because Congress used the words `clearly established law' ... it meant in [AEDPA] to codify an aspect of the doctrine of executive qualified immunity....); Walczyk v. Rio, 496 F.3d 139, 154 n. 16 (2d Cir.2007) (noting that considerations informing limitations on habeas review are sufficiently distinct from those prompting recognition of qualified immunity to preclude easy analogy); see also McCullough v. Wyandanch Union Free Sch. Dist., 187 F.3d 272, 278 (2d Cir.1999) (The question [for qualified immunity purposes] is not what a lawyer would learn or intuit from researching case law, but what a reasonable person in the defendant's position should know about the constitutionality of the conduct.). Moreover, Wampler involved the non-judicial imposition of a sentence that was ordinarily reserved to the discretion of the sentencing judge but that the sentencing judge had not in that case imposed, not the imposition of a mandatory term of supervision that was explicitly required by statute. See Earley, 451 F.3d at 74 (recogniz[ing] differences between the facts of Wampler and those before us [in this case], viz., that Wampler involved a sentencing decision that was by law, within the discretion of the sentencing judge). A reasonable state official could therefore conclude, as did many New York courts in the pre- Earley decisions cited above, that inasmuch as the sentences were mandated by law rather than being in the discretion of the courts to impose, it was not unconstitutional under Wampler to impose such sentences administratively. Cf. Richardson v. Selsky, 5 F.3d 616, 623 (2d Cir.1993) (If the district judges in the Southern District of New York, who are charged with ascertaining and applying the law, could not determine the state of the law with reasonable certainty, it seems unwarranted to hold prison officials to a standard that was not even clear to the judges, especially since prescience on the part of prison officials is not required with respect to the future course of constitutional law.). Jenna's Law made PRS a mandatory part of sentences for specified crimes of violence. See N.Y. Penal Law § 70.45. There is a well-established general principle that, absent contrary direction, state officials and those with whom they deal are entitled to rely on a presumptively valid state statute, enacted in good faith and by no means plainly unlawful. Lemon v. Kurtzman, 411 U.S. 192, 208-09, 93 S.Ct. 1463, 36 L.Ed.2d 151 (1973); accord Vives v. City of N.Y., 405 F.3d 115, 117 (2d Cir.2005). In the presence of a statute that requires all sentences for certain crimes to be accompanied by mandatory PRS, and New York cases that routinely upheld the administrative imposition of that PRS, we conclude that it was not clearly established for qualified immunity purposes prior to Earley that the administrative imposition of PRS violates the Due Process Clause. 2. Clearly Established Law after Earley. Whether Earley itself sufficed clearly to establish the unconstitutionality of administratively imposed PRS for a reasonable New York State correctional official may be open to question inasmuch as two Departments of the New York Appellate Division thereafter continued to find the practice constitutional, conclusions that appear to reflect oversight rather than defiance of Earley. See Garner v. N.Y. State Dep't of Corr. Servs., 39 A.D.3d 1019, 831 N.Y.S.2d 923 (3d Dep't 2007); People v. Thomas, 35 A.D.3d 192, 826 N.Y.S.2d 36 (1st Dep't 2006). It was not until 2008 that the New York Court of Appeals held that administrative imposition of PRS by DOC was contrary to law. See Garner v. N.Y. State Dep't of Corr. Servs., 10 N.Y.3d 358, 859 N.Y.S.2d 590, 889 N.E.2d 467 (2008); People v. Sparber, 10 N.Y.3d 457, 859 N.Y.S.2d 582, 889 N.E.2d 459 (2008). In circumstances of such apparent judicial confusion as to the constitutional propriety of a statutory mandate, qualified immunity might well continue to shield state officials acting pursuant to that statute. See generally Wilson v. Layne, 526 U.S. 603, 617, 119 S.Ct. 1692, 143 L.Ed.2d 818 (1999) (holding that state officials cannot have been expected to predict the future course of constitutional law. (internal quotation marks omitted)); see also id. at 618, 119 S.Ct. 1692 (If judges thus disagree on a constitutional question, it is unfair to subject police to money damages for picking the losing side of a controversy.); Vives, 405 F.3d at 118 (refusing to find the law clearly established where several courts have specifically declined to find [it] unconstitutional). [5] To resolve this appeal, however, we need not and therefore do not decide precisely when it became clearly established that the administrative imposition of PRS, even when statutorily mandated, is unconstitutional. It suffices for us to conclude, as we do, that the law was not clearly established before our decision in Earley, the period during which PRS was imposed by DOC on Scott.