PRO or CON
By Chris Finnie – former Contributing Author to Crime, Justice and America magazine. Originally published in 2002 and reposted with permission from Crime, Justice and America magazine
In July of this year, two California inmates filed a suit with the Ninth Circuit of Appeals saying that the parole board was discriminating against them because they were drug addicts. However, their argument goes, this is illegal because they are disabled because of this addiction. Therefore, this discrimination violates their rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
The district court dismissed the complaint on the grounds that ADA does not apply to “the substantive decision-making process of parole proceedings.” However, the claim survived in the circuit court, which reversed the ruling of the district court and remanded the claim for further proceedings.
Looking at the ruling, you can see why the court wanted it somewhere else. They basically agreed with both sides. On the one hand, the court agreed that drug addiction qualifies as a disability. On the other, that a history of addiction can be considered by a parole board if the board performs “an individualized assessment of the threat they [addicted inmates] pose to the community.” It also appears that the court only considers denying parole as discriminatory if inmates can show that the board was “categorically excluding from consideration for parole all people with substance abuse histories.”
Here are the two sides of the court’s ruling.
PRO:
Charles W. Thompson and Stephen are state prisoners serving terms of fifteen years to life for second-degree murder. They both have a history of drug addiction and claim this substantially limited their judgment; as well as the ability to learn, comprehend the long-range effects of their acts, and maintain stable social relationships and employment. Both have received treatment for substance abuse while in prison, and have been drug-free since 1990 and 1984, respectively.
Both were eligible for parole in 1993 and claim they were denied parole release dates because of their substance abuse histories. They say that the Board of Prison Terms follows an unwritten policy of automatically denying parole to prisoners with substance abuse histories. The two prisoners filed their case themselves and it has been bouncing back and forth in various courts ever since.
The Ninth Circuit Court ruled that the plaintiffs must allege four elements to qualify for ADA consideration:
- That they have a disability
- That they are otherwise qualified to participate in or receive the benefit of some public entity’s services, programs, or activities
- That they were either excluded from participation in or denied the benefits of these services, programs, or activities
- That such exclusion, denial of benefits, or discrimination was by reason of the plaintiff’s disability
In their favor, the Ninth Circuit Court noted that, “Drug addition that substantially limits one or more major life activities is a recognized disability under the ADA.” The court further qualified the category by saying, “While the term ‘qualified individual with a disability’ does not include an individual who is currently engaging in the illegal use of drugs, the ADA does protect individuals who have successfully completed or are participating in a supervised drug rehabilitation program and are no longer using illegal drugs.” The court also ruled that parole hearings are public programs or activities as defined by the ADA and cite a Supreme Court ruling that the ADA applies to prisons in the 1998 case of Pennsylvania Department of Corrections v. Yeskey. However, points three and four are more problematic.
CON:
The defendants — which included the Governor, Secretary of Youth and Corrections Agency, Director of the Department of Corrections, Commissioner of the Board of Prison Terms, and Chairman of the Board of Prison Terms —argued that their decision does not rely on a history of substance abuse. But the court ruled that, while written documents of the Board of Prison Terms do not disclose any consideration of drug addiction, this does not prove they didn’t act on an unwritten policy.
The court, however, looked at it from a different point of view. They pointed out that parole decisions are already curtailed by federal anti-discrimination guarantees such as the ones that apply to race. However, the court did admit that, while race cannot be considered in whether or not a parolee might be dangerous, Title II of the ADA does not “categorically bar a state parole board from making an individualized assessment of the future dangerousness of an inmate by taking into account the inmate’s disability.” Further, they wrote, “A person’s disability that leads one to a propensity to commit crime may certainly be relevant in assessing whether that individual is qualified for parole. In addition, the parole board
might show that legitimate penological interests justify consideration of an inmate’s disability status beyond that appropriate in other settings.”
Because of this, the court stated that the parole board “undeniably does have legitimate penological interests in considering the plaintiffs’ substance abuse backgrounds during the individualized inquiry for parole suitability.”
So, while the court does agree that prison “programs or activities” include such things as parole and disciplinary hearings — putting them within the meaning of the ADA — their only objection to denying parole on the basis of drug addiction appears to be if it is applied as a blanket rule. Specifically, the court said that “a broad rule categorically excluding parole decisions from the scope of Title II is not the law.”
So, while they did reverse the ruling of the district court, they “decline to express an opinion on the merits of Plaintiffs’ claims without further record development.” In other words, they’ve tossed it back into another court and we’ll just have to wait and see how it all turns out.
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