Delaney v. Selsky

• Decision Date: 02 October 1995
• Docket Number: No. 92-CV-320.,92-CV-320.
• Parties: Shawn DELANEY, Plaintiff, v. Donald SELSKY, Director of Special Housing and Inmate Discipline for the New York State Department of Correctional Services; Dominic Mantello, Superintendent of Coxsackie Correctional Facility; and Thomas A. Coughlin, Commissioner, Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of New York

899 F. Supp. 923

Shawn DELANEY, Plaintiff, v. Donald SELSKY, Director of Special Housing and Inmate Discipline for the New York State Department of Correctional Services; Dominic Mantello, Superintendent of Coxsackie Correctional Facility; and Thomas A. Coughlin, Commissioner, Defendants.

No. 92-CV-320.

United States District Court, N.D. New York.

October 2, 1995.

Shawn Delaney, Sonyea, New York, pro se.

Robert Abrams, Attorney General of the State of New York, Albany, New York (Helena M. Heath, Assistant Attorney General, of counsel), for Defendants.

MEMORANDUM, DECISION & ORDER

McAVOY, Chief Judge.

The Court returns to this matter upon defendants' motion for reconsideration in light of Sandin v. Conner, ___ U.S. ___, 115 S.Ct. 2293, 132 L.Ed.2d 418 (1995). In its earlier order, the Court, inter alia, denied defendants' motion for summary judgment on behalf of Defendants Selsky and Mantello as to Mr. Delaney's Fourteenth Amendment due process claim for lack of adequate notice and opportunity to be heard. The Court also deferred judgment on Defendants Selsky and Mantello's qualified immunity claim.

I signed that order on June 17, 1995. Two days later, the Supreme Court handed down Sandin. On the basis of that case, defendants now move for reconsideration of this Court's decision to deny their motion for summary judgment on behalf of Defendants Selsky and Mantello as to Mr. Delaney's due process claim. Also on the strength of Sandin, defendants take up the qualified immunity issue again and ask this Court to rule that Defendants Selsky and Mantello are entitled to its protection.

I. BACKGROUND

A. Standard for Reconsideration

A court may justifiably reconsider its previous ruling if: (1) there is an intervening change in the controlling law; (2) new evidence not previously available comes to light; or (3) it becomes necessary to remedy a clear error of law or to prevent manifest injustice. Doe v. New York City Dep't of Soc. Servs., 709 F.2d 782, 789 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 864, 104 S.Ct. 195, 78 L.Ed.2d 171 (1983). Defendants' motion for reconsideration relies on the first prong of this test, an intervening change in the law. Because the due process issues this case raises were on their way to trial when the Supreme Court decided Sandin, and because Sandin profoundly altered the standards for determining when prisoners suffer a deprivation of constitutionally-protected liberty interests, defendants' motion for reconsideration is hereby granted.

B. Facts

On October 15, 1990, the New York Department of Correctional Services ("DOCS") sanctioned Mr. Delaney in a Tier III hearing before Hearing Officer Koch. The sanction was 365 days in the Special Housing Unit ("SHU"). D's Ex. B. At the time of the hearing, Mr. Delaney was already in keeplock and had 197 days left to serve there. Hearing Officer Koch decided that Mr. Delaney's keeplock and SHU time should run concurrently. At the conclusion of a subsequent administrative review of the disciplinary hearing, Defendants Selsky and Mantello amended the penalty by ordering that Mr. Delaney serve the keeplock and SHU sentences consecutively. Defendant Mantello informed Mr. Delaney of this change on October 16, 1990, one day after the disciplinary hearing.

C. Plaintiff's Due Process Claim

Defendants' stipulated facts contain evidence that Defendants Selsky and Mantello reviewed and modified Mr. Delaney's sanction to his detriment without granting him prior notice or a hearing. See Defendants' Rule 10(j) Statement. Applying pre-Sandin case law, this Court concluded in its earlier order that Mr. Delaney had presented a genuine issue of material fact as to whether Defendants Selsky and Mantello extended his sentence to SHU in violation of his procedural due process rights. The Court must now consider whether the changes in due process law that Sandin effected require a different ruling on defendants' motion for summary judgment.

D. Summary Judgment Standard

Under Fed.R.Civ.Pro. 56(c), if there is "no genuine issue as to any material fact ... the moving party is entitled to a judgment as a matter of law ... where the record taken as a whole could not lead a rational trier of fact to find for the nonmoving party." Matsushita Elec. Indus. Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574, 106 S.Ct. 1348, 89 L.Ed.2d 538 (1986), on remand, 807 F.2d 44 (3d Cir.1986), cert. denied, 481 U.S. 1029, 107 S.Ct. 1955, 95 L.Ed.2d 527 (1987). The burden to demonstrate that no genuine issue of material fact exists falls solely on the moving party, Heyman v. Commerce and Indus. Ins. Co., 524 F.2d 1317 (2d Cir.1975), and the trial court must resolve all ambiguities and draw all inferences in favor of that party against whom summary judgment is sought. Eastway Constr. Corp. v. City of New York, 762 F.2d 243, 249 (2d Cir.1985), modified, 821 F.2d 121 (2d Cir.), cert. denied 484 U.S. 918, 108 S.Ct. 269, 98 L.Ed.2d 226 (1987).

II. DISCUSSION

A. Sandin and its Aftermath

Reversing a judicial trend towards expanding prisoners' constitutionally-protected liberty interests, the Supreme Court stated in Sandin that although States may create liberty interests protected by the Due Process Clause,

these interests will generally be 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.

Sandin, ___ U.S. at ___, 115 S.Ct. at 2300 (citations omitted). The Court thus instructed federal courts to focus their liberty interest inquiries on the nature of alleged deprivations, rather than on negative inferences from the "shalls" that dot prison regulations designed mainly to guide the conduct of corrections officers. Id. at ___, 115 S.Ct. at 2299. More specifically, the Court held that where disciplinary segregation is substantially similar to the conditions imposed upon inmates in administrative segregation and protective custody, disciplinary segregation does not present "the type of atypical, significant deprivation in which a state might conceivably create a liberty interest." Id. at ___, 115 S.Ct. at 2301.

In the months that have passed since Sandin, a few courts in this circuit, including this one, have had opportunities to consider its impact on the due process rights of prisoners confined to administrative or disciplinary segregation. This court held in Eastman v. Walker, 895 F.Supp. 31 (N.D.N.Y. 1995), that where a prison regulation states that a prisoner's keeplock status "shall" be changed within seventy-two hours, the "decision to keep an inmate in keeplock for ninety-six hours instead ... to ensure institutional security and safety is not `atypical' and does not impose a `significant hardship'," violative of an inmate's liberty interest. Id. at 33, 34.

The Western District reached a similar conclusion in Carter v. Carriero, 1995 WL 522806 (W.D.N.Y.1995). The court first noted that New York prison regulations allow inmates to be placed in SHU for disciplinary confinement, detention, administrative segregation, protective custody, keeplock confinement, and "for any other reason, with the approval of the deputy commissioner for facility operations." Id. at *4 (citing 7 N.Y.C.R.R. § 301.1-.7). It went on to hold that given the similarities between SHU disciplinary segregation and administrative confinement in New York prisons, a penalty of 270 days in SHU disciplinary segregation does not impose "atypical and significant hardship on the inmate in relation to the ordinary incidents of prison life." Therefore, the plaintiff's deprivation did not implicate a constitutionally-protected liberty interest that entitled him to the procedural protection he claimed he was due. Id. at *4-6.

The Southern District reach a similar conclusion in Uzzell v. Scully, 1995 WL 412546 (S.D.N.Y.1995). Uzzell claimed that his due process rights were violated when a corrections officer placed him in keeplock, an administrative segregation unit where he remained for twenty-three days, without the twenty-four hours' notice of charges against him that the Supreme Court set forth in Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U.S. 539, 94 S.Ct. 2963, 41 L.Ed.2d 935 (1974), as a requirement of procedural due process. Id. at *1. Applying Sandin, the Court held that because prisoners do not have a protected liberty interest in remaining free from keeplock, the State can confine prisoners there without giving them twenty-four hours' prior notice of the charges against them. Id. at *1-2.

B. Sandin's Effect on Mr. Delaney's Due Process Claim

Mr. Delaney claims that Defendants Selsky and Mantello violated his due process rights by extending his term of disciplinary confinement without granting him prior notice or a hearing. In effect, Mr. Delaney argues that once he had been sentenced to 365 days of SHU confinement, to run concurrently with the 197 days remaining on his keeplock confinement, he acquired a liberty interest in remaining free from an "extra" 197 days in SHU. On this argument, when Defendants Selsky and Mantello altered the SHU sentence so that it would begin to run at the conclusion of Mr. Delaney's keeplock sentence, they "added" 197 days to his SHU confinement without affording him the procedural protections to which he was entitled.

Relying upon Sandin, Defendants Selsky and Mantello now argue that Mr. Delaney's confinement to disciplinary segregation in SHU, whether for 168, 197, or 365 days, does not implicate a constitutionally-protected liberty interest. The factual basis for this assertion is the substantial similarity between the conditions of confinement in SHU and in administrative segregation. See, e.g., Carter, supra. at *4-6.

1. Duration of Confinement

Defendants ignore the fact that even where the conditions of disciplinary confinement "mirror those...