Opinion ID: 7016477
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The impact of Sandin

Text: In June 1995, the Supreme Court rejected Hewitt’s analysis. Sandin v. Conner, 515 U.S. 472, 480-84, 115 S.Ct. 2293, 132 L.Ed.2d 418 (1995). The Court acknowledged that states could create liberty interests that will be protected by the Due Process Clause but held that “these interests will be generally limited to freedom from restraint which, while not exceeding the sentence in such an unexpected manner as to give rise to protection by the Due Process Clause of its own force, nonetheless imposes atypical and significant hardship on the inmate in relation to the ordinary incidents of prison life.” Id. at 483-84, 115 S.Ct. 2293 (internal citations omitted). The Court explained, “[t]he time has come to return to the due process principles we believe were correctly established and applied in Wolff and Meachum.” Id. at 483, 115 S.Ct. 2293. The Court also approved Morrissey’s requirement that prisoners seeking due process protection show “they had suffered a grievous loss of liberty even after [being] sentenced to terms of imprisonment.” Id. at 480, 92 S.Ct. 2593 (internal quotation marks omitted). Thus, Sandin affirmed the validity of Morrissey and Meachum, the cases on which Tracy explicitly rests. Hewitt, which the Supreme Court disapproved, was decided five years after Tracy. Moreover, Sandin was an internal prison discipline case. The prisoner faced no loss of good time credits and was not taken out of the community and placed in a prison cell. Neither the facts nor the analysis of San-din would lead a reasonable prison official to believe that Tracy, which applied to prisoners conditionally released to live in the community and which applied a Mor-rissey/Meachum analysis, was no longer valid precedent. The Tracy analysis is consistent with Morrissey, Wolff, and Mea-chum because the Tracy court found a grievous deprivation of liberty. Although the court also referred to the state’s policies and practices, it used them to demonstrate entitlement and not, as was condemned in Sandin, to establish a liberty interest in the first place. See Sandin, 515 U.S. at 480-84, 115 S.Ct. 2293. As a result, there is no apparent reason why reasonable prison officials would believe Tracy had been undermined by Sandin. Nevertheless, defendants argue that in 1996, a prison official could have had a reasonable doubt concerning Tracy’s validity, based on (1) Sandin itself; (2) decisions from the First Circuit and from district courts in this circuit finding no liberty interest in temporary release after Sandin; and (3) dicta in Kim v. Hurston, 182 F.3d 113 (2d Cir.1999), indicating that Sandin placed Tracy in some doubt, id. at 117. Defendants first argue that Sandin found statutes and regulations irrelevant to the existence of a liberty interest and imposed as the sole test whether “the alleged deprivation ‘imposes atypical and significant hardship on the inmate in relation to the ordinary incidents of prison life.’ ” Defs.’ Br. at 10 (quoting Sandin, 515 U.S. at 484, 115 S.Ct. 2293). Defendants also argue that Sandin created a more stringent test than grievous loss to establish that a prisoner had been deprived of a liberty interest. Because Tracy relied on a grievous deprivation and on prison policies, defendants suggest that Sandin undermined both aspects of Tracy. Defendants’ argument fails on both counts. First, Sandin did not dispense with statutory or regulatory language creating an entitlement. It simply held that the regulation at issue in that case did not create a liberty interest because the plaintiff had not shown an atypical or significant deprivation. The Court specifically recognized that states can create liberty interests protectable under the Due Process Clause by statute, regulation, or policy, when loss of those interests would constitute a grievous deprivation. Sandin, 515 U.S. at 483-84, 115 S.Ct. 2293. Thus, if an inmate has not suffered a deprivation so severe as to violate the Due Process Clause by its own force, the inmate must, in the intra-prison disciplinary context, show both an atypical and significant deprivation and a source for entitlement to protection of that interest in state law or policy. The requirement that the deprivation be “atypical and significant ... in relation to the ordinary incidents of prison life” is a refinement of Morrissey’s grievous loss of liberty standard for the intra-prison disciplinary situation. 3 Nor does Sandin create a test for identifying a liberty interest different from that set out in Morrissey, Wolff, and Mea-chum. After drawing the appropriate test from Wolff and Meachum, the Sandin court indicated that in the intra-prison disciplinary context, deprivation of a state-created liberty interest generally must impose an atypical and significant hardship “in relation to the ordinary incidents of prison life” in order to trigger due process protection. Sandin, 515 U.S. at 484, 115 S.Ct. 2293. Sandin’s reliance on Wolff, which found an important liberty interest in the retention of good time credits, and its earlier citation with approval of Morrissey, a parole revocation case, negate any suggestion that Sandin’s particularized test should be applied outside the intra-prison disciplinary context. Because Anderson, like the petitioners in Morrissey and the plaintiffs in Tracy, lived outside the prison, a comparison to the ordinary conditions of prison life is inappropriate. Morrissey itself established that once the State has given an inmate the freedom to live outside an institution, it cannot take that right away without according the inmate procedural due process. Defendants also argue, relying on Richardson v. Selsky, 5 F.3d 616 (2d Cir.1993), that because there was a split in the district courts concerning the impact of San-din on Tracy, they are entitled to qualified immunity. The district courts did indeed differ on the impact of Sandin. 4 However, we do not agree that this split concerning Tracy’s, continuing vitality suggests that defendants are entitled to qualified immunity. Richardson’s discussion of clearly established rights addressed a very different situation from the one presented in this case. In Richardson, we first found that the right in question — the right to an independent examination of an informant’s credibility — had not been clearly established either by our court or by the Supreme Court. Richardson, 5 F.3d at 623. We then noted contradictory authority on this issue within the Southern District of New York and said: “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.” Id. The situation here is very different. As a preliminary matter, none of the cases cited by defendants had been decided at the time DOCS revoked Anderson’s temporary release status. More important, Richardson does not govern this case because we clearly established that there is a right to a hearing prior to final revocation of temporary release status before any of the district court cases was decided. See Tracy, 572 F.2d at 396-97. We will follow a precedent from this circuit unless a Supreme Court decision or an en banc holding of this court implicitly or explicitly overrules the prior decision, see, e.g., United States v. Ianniello, 808 F.2d 184, 190 & n. 11 (2d Cir.1986). Because Sandin did not overrule Tracy implicitly or explicitly, neither the defendants nor the district courts were free to ignore Tracy. The First Circuit’s conclusion that a prisoner on work release status is not entitled to a hearing prior to revocation of that status and reincarceration, Dominique v. Weld, 73 F.3d 1156, 1161 (1st Cir.1996), also is not relevant to the determination of whether Sandin placed Tracy in reasonable doubt in this circuit. See Young, 160 F.3d at 903 (holding that a right is clearly established if, among other things, it is recognized by the Supreme Court or this circuit). Moreover, the Dominique court ignored Sandin’s explicit approval of the holdings in Morrissey, Meachum, and Wolff. Nor does Kim’s dictum indicate that Sandin undermined Tracy. We said in Kim that “[t]o the extent that [Tracy] rested on” the narrow discretion accorded to the State in granting admission to a work release program, “it was placed in some doubt by the Supreme Court’s decision in Sandin.” Kim, 182 F.3d at 117. Because Young v. Harper, 520 U.S. 143, 152-53, 117 S.Ct. 1148, 137 L.Ed.2d 270 (1997), which found that a prisoner had a liberty interest in continued participation in a pre-parole program, had been issued at the time we decided Kim, we did not explore whether Tracy used state law and policy in an impermissible way. Kim, 182 F.3d at 118. In addition, we did not need to decide any qualified immunity issues because Kim’s temporary release status was revoked before Sandin was decided. Id. at 120. In fact, however, Tracy relied on state law only to the extent permissible and necessary under Sandin, Morrissey, and Wolff. That is, the Tracy court first found that expulsion from the work release program was a grievous loss. Tracy, 440 F.Supp. at 933-34. Only then did the court turn to state law to determine whether it offered protection to the substantial interest plaintiffs had in continuing in their work release status. Id. at 934-35. Finally, the lack of relevance Sandin has to work release and similar programs became even more apparent — albeit after the actions under review on this appeal— when the Supreme Court decided Young. Relying almost exclusively on Morrissey and without employing a Sandin analysis, the Young court held that plaintiff had a liberty interest in Oklahoma’s pre-parole program, which is quite similar to New York’s work release program. Young, 520 U.S. at 148-53, 117 S.Ct. 1148; see also Kim, 182 F.3d at 118 (describing Kim’s work release program as “virtually indistinguishable from either traditional parole or the [pre-parole] program considered in Young ”). Although Young had not been decided when New York revoked Anderson’s work release status and thus does not enter into the qualified immunity analysis, it graphically demonstrates why defendants acted unreasonably in comparing the apples of revoking a work release program with the oranges of an intra-prison disciplinary transfer.