Opinion ID: 2257808
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Rhode Island Precedent

Text: Until today this Court has never required legislative creation of a private cause of action as a precondition for a damages recovery based upon the unlawful deprivation of a state constitutional right. On the contrary we have previously recognized that a cause of action would lie directly under the Rhode Island Constitution and we have permitted a monetary recovery thereunder, despite the absence of any legislative authorization for the courts to recognize such a cause of action or to provide such monetary relief. See, e.g., Annicelli v. Town of South Kingstown, 463, A.2d 133 (R.I.1983); E & J, Inc. v. Redevelopment Agency of Woonsocket, 122 R.I. 288, 405 A2d 1187 (1979). [44] Moreover, we have not previously waited for the General Assembly or for the State Constitution itself to specify a remedial mechanism before judicially enforcing state constitutional provisions by providing other forms of relief. See, e.g., Avanzo v. Rhode Island Department of Human Services, 625 A.2d 208 (R.I.1993) (affirming Superior Court judgment of declaratory and injunctive relief for deprivation of the plaintiffs' public-assistance benefits without due process of law as required by article 1, section 2 of the Rhode Island Constitution); Pimental v. Department of Transportation, 561 A.2d 1348 (R.I.1989) (declaring that drunk-driving roadblocks violate article 1, section 6's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures). This Court's decision in Oster v. Tellier, 544 A.2d 128 (R.I.1988), serves as a further example that this Court need not await action by the General Assembly before enforcing state constitutional rights. There this Court affirmed a Superior Court judgment denying the plaintiffs' request for a specific monetary remedy for the defendants' violation of Rhode Island's equal-protection clause, id. at 129, but did so not because the court lacked the power or the authority to remedy a constitutional violation without legislative authorization but rather because the plaintiffs failed to proffer evidence to prove the monetary amount by which they were allegedly overassessed. Id. at 132. Although the instances in which this Court has recognized the possibility of a monetary recovery for a state constitutional violation have thus far been limited to takings actions brought directly under our State Constitution's just-compensation clause, until today the Court has never stated that it was powerless to do so in the absence of a prior legislative enactment authorizing a private cause of action. In both Annicelli and E & J, Inc. we addressed whether the plaintiffs had stated causes of action for injuries resulting from regulatory takings prohibited by article 1, section 16. And in both cases we recognized that a private cause of action lies directly under that constitutional provision. [45] And we did so despite the complete absence of any express legislative or constitutional authorization for allowing such a claim. [46] It is significant that the Bandonis come before this Court seeking relief for the deprivation of fundamental rights. The rights of crime victims are expressly set forth in our Constitution's Declaration of Rights, the repository of Rhode Islanders' fundamental rights. Compare In re Constitutional Convention, 55 R.I. 56, 62, 178 A. 433, 437 (1935) (referring to the enumerated rights listed in article 1 of the Rhode Island Constitution as in substance and effect    fundamental rights) and R.I. Const. art. 1, preamble (declaring that the rights enumerated in article 1's declaration of rights are essential and unquestionable and that they shall be established, maintained, and preserved, and shall be of paramount obligation in all legislative, judicial and executive proceedings) with Pontbriand v. Sundlun, 699 A.2d 856, 870 (R.I.1997) (holding that plaintiffs seeking monetary and other relief under a constitutionally based cause of action for invasion of privacy did not state a constitutional claim because no fundamental right was involved there). Other examples abound of this Court's enforcing state constitutional rights invoked by criminal defendants despite the complete absence of any specific textual authorization in the Constitution for the Court to do so. See, e.g., Pimental v. Department of Transportation, 561 A.2d 1348 (R.I.1989) (declaring police drunk-driving roadblock to be violative of article 1, section 6, of the Rhode Island Constitution, notwithstanding any indication that this provision in our Constitution was self-executing). In Pimental we did not proclaim that the defendant was required to await legislative action before raising a state constitutional defense, nor did we refuse to craft a judicial remedy vindicating his constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures merely because the Constitution did not explicitly provide for our judicial review or because the Legislature had not expressly allowed us to deploy the remedy we selected to vindicate the defendant's constitutional rights. Notwithstanding the aforementioned opinions of this Court indicating that the Judiciary is not prohibited from providing monetary or other forms of relief for constitutional violations until the Legislature states that we are empowered to do so, defendants here contend that this Court should refrain from providing a remedy for plaintiffs, relying heavily on this Court's established proposition that the creation of new causes of action is a legislative function. Accent Store Design, Inc. v. Marathon House, Inc., 674 A.2d 1223, 1226 (R.I.1996) (no private cause of action for public authority's alleged noncompliance with public works bonding statute because General Assembly could easily have exercised its power to create a cause of action    but it chose not to do so); see also Ferreira v. Strack, 652 A.2d 965 (R.I. 1995); Kalian v. People Acting Through Community Effort, Inc., 122 R.I. 429, 408 A.2d 608 (1979). However, defendants' reliance on the Accent Store Design, Inc. line of cases is decidedly misplaced when, as here, a constitutional violation is alleged. [47] The analysis in this case is predicated on the existence of an affirmative constitutional right that is expressly given to crime victims and not merely on an alleged but unexpressed right created by extrapolation from another party's statutory duty. The statute at issue in Accent Store Design, Inc. did not confer any .positive right upon the plaintiff subcontractors; rather, it only placed an express duty on governmental authorities who awarded public works contracts to require the posting of a bond. Moreover the bonding requirement was not inextricably tied to any constitutional right. In the case at bar the victims possess an affirmative constitutional right by virtue of article 1, section 23, over and beyond any express statutory rights afforded them under the Victim's Bill of Rights Act. Further, as previously noted, the constitutional right here necessarily builds upon and incorporates those earlier-enacted statutory rights. For these reasons, the Accent Store Design, Inc. decision and other statutory-based line of cases are inapplicable to the judicial enforcement of constitutional rights. [48] The case at bar also differs from the line of decisions of this Court refusing to imply a monetary cause of action to enforce a statutory provision when other remedies for its violation were provided for by the Legislature. See, e.g., Pontbriand v. Sundlun, 699 A.2d 856 (R.I.1997); In re John, 605 A.2d 486 (R.I.1992); Citizens for Preservation of Waterman Lake v. Davis, 420 A.2d 53 (R.I. 1980) ( Citizens II ). Those cases deal strictly with statutory rights, as opposed to constitutional ones. Where the former are involved, this Court has often deferred to the Legislature when the statute is clear and unambiguous in providing for other types of relief. Unlike statutory rights, however, constitutional rights express the will of the People and are to be protected from alteration by the will of legislative majorities. [49] In addition, in those cases the Legislature had provided adequate alternative remedial schemes to vindicate the particular rights at issue. See Pontbriand, 699 A.2d at 868; In re John, 605 A.2d at 488; Citizens II, 420 A.2d at 57. In the case at bar, however, crime victims whose statutory and constitutional rights have been ignored are left without any remedy whatsoever since the Legislature has not acted to give victims remedial protection when they are deprived of their entitlement to address the court before sentencing or the acceptance of a plea bargain. I also do not believe that G.L.1956 ง 12-28-7 [50] can be relied upon for the proposition that the Legislature was well aware of the existing governmental noncompliance with the statutory rights it created for crime victims, yet it still chose not to provide such victims with a cause of action for damages. It is of critical importance to note that ง 12-28-7 purports to preclude only one type of potential relief that otherwise may have been judicially available for felony-crime victims, namely, the vacating of an otherwise lawful conviction or the voiding of an otherwise lawful sentence or parole determination. Thus the very existence of ง 12-28-7 conclusively establishes thatโnotwithstanding the absence of an express private right of action in either the State Constitution or the Victim's Bill of Rights legislationโthe General Assembly must have intended and expected that crime victims would still be able to file lawsuits and to obtain relief against those persons and entities that denied them their rights as crime victims. The reason this is so is that if the Legislature had no such intention or expectation, it would have no need or reason to enact a law excluding just one type of relief (the vacating of felony sentences, convictions, and parole determinations) from the full panoply of judicial remedies otherwise available to crime victims. I submit that the General Assembly's enactment of ง 12-28-7 makes no sense whatsoever if it had truly intended to exclude crime victims from obtaining all types of judicial relief. Rather, the more logical interpretation of ง 12-28-7 is that, knowing full well that if it failed to exclude a particular remedy such relief would otherwise still be available to crime victims, the General Assembly decided to do so and enacted ง 12-28-7 to take away just this one remedial option from the courts. If the General Assembly and/or the framers truly had intended to prevent all crime victims from having any cause of action for monetary damages, it would have been a simple matter for them to say so expressly, either in the Constitution itself or in ง 12-28-7, by inserting the language that other states have used in their constitutions (cited by the majority in footnote 6 of its opinion) when they wished to bar such relief altogether. But neither the framers nor the General Assembly chose to do so, thereby indicating that they did not wish to bar such a cause of action. What ง 12-28-7 shows is that when the General Assembly wanted to prevent courts from awarding particular kinds of relief to crime victims, it knew how to do so. But conspicuously absent from the statute's terms is any preclusion of a monetary-damages award or of any other type of judicial relief for the violation of crime victims' rights except the vacating of felony convictions, sentences, and parole determinations. Accordingly I conclude that the General Assembly had no intention by its silence to bar the courts from awarding such traditional legal and equitable remedies.