Court Opinion

ID: 9476572
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:59:21.376725+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:23.544503
License: Public Domain

JON O. NEWMAN, Circuit Judge, with whom PIERCE, Circuit Judge, concurs
(dissenting from denial of rehearing in banc):
As Judge Oakes points out, the panel decision clearly conflicts with decisions of the Supreme Court and this Court by failing even to consider whether the inmate’s thirty-day confinement in segregation, found by the District Court to have resulted from false charges brought by a corrections officer, violates the substantive due process component of the Fourteenth Amendment. Whether a violation has occurred requires consideration of two issues.
The first is whether the inmate’s interest in not being placed in segregation is protected by substantive due process. Following Hewitt v. Helms, 459 U.S. 460, 466-68, 103 S.Ct. 864, 868-70, 74 L.Ed.2d 675 (1983), we have recognized that the source of an inmate’s liberty interest in remaining in the general prison population is state law, rather than the Constitution. Deane v. Dunbar, 777 F.2d 871, 875 (2d Cir.1985). That interest unquestionably enjoys the protection of procedural due process. Whether a liberty interest grounded only on state law also enjoys the protection of substantive due process is a fair question.
The second issue is whether substantive due process is violated by segregation of a sentenced inmate on the basis of charges known to be false by the corrections officer who initiated them. Unquestionably imprisonment for a conviction obtained by a prosecutor’s knowing use of false testimony is a denial of due process. Napue v. *196Illinois, 360 U.S. 264, 79 S.Ct. 1173, 3 L.Ed.2d 1217 (1959); Alcorta v. Texas, 355 U.S. 28, 78 S.Ct. 103, 2 L.Ed.2d 9 (1957); Mooney v. Holohan, 294 U.S. 103, 112, 55 S.Ct. 340, 341, 79 L.Ed. 791 (1935). The extent to which this principle applies in the context of prison disciplinary proceedings is also a fair question.
However we might decide these two issues, this case should be reheard in banc because the panel, in clear conflict with authoritative law of the Supreme Court and this Court, has decided this case as if substantive due process does not exist.
I dissent from the denial of rehearing in banc.