The State's policy to bill-in-full all OMH patients or ex-patients who sue the State violates plaintiffs' First Amendment right of access to the courts and Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection. The State's policy of using a set-off, without any predeprivation hearing, to reduce any award that a patient or ex-patient may receive against the State violates plaintiffs' Fourteenth Amendment right to due process.
“Whether the OMH assessment of full charges in response to lawsuits filed by Jed Rothstein and Limoni Brown against OMH employees up to the full amount of damages as a result of allegedly tortious conduct of OMH employees violates the First Amendment or Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
“Whether 42 U.S.C. § 1983 preempts the use of a tort award obtained as a result of tortious conduct by the OMH or its employees to satisfy care and treatment charges assessed pursuant to Mental Hygiene Law § 43.01 et seq.”
“Whether 42 U.S.C. § 110801[sic] preempts the use of a tort award obtained as a result of tortious conduct by the OMH or its employees to satisfy care and treatment charges assessed pursuant to Mental Hygiene Law § 43.01 et seq.”
Do you think that the issue, before we even get involved in constitutional concerns, might be whether or not there is *422 a viable counterclaim that can lawfully be asserted in response to the plaintiff's lawsuit? *** [I]f in fact the law is that *** your rights do not accrue until a fund is established which would establish the ability to pay, then maybe you don't have the right of a counterclaim at all.
will not pass upon a constitutional question although properly presented by the record, if there is also present some other ground upon which the case may be disposed of.... Thus, if a case can be decided on either of two grounds, one involving a constitutional question, the other a question of statutory construction or general law, the Court will decide only the latter.
In this case, we hold that, even though the Greenwich plaintiffs have shown cause and effect, in the strict sense that IDA and Warren County would not have filed their state court counterclaims “but for” the Greenwich plaintiffs' filing of their state court lawsuit, the Greenwich plaintiffs are nevertheless required to persuade the jury that the counterclaims were filed, not as a legitimate response to litigation, but as a form of retaliation, with the purpose of deterring the exercise of First Amendment freedoms.
An individual's constitutional right of access to the courts cannot be impaired, either directly ... or indirectly, by threatening or harassing an [individual] in retaliation for filing lawsuits. It is not necessary that the [individual] succumb entirely or even partially to the threat as long as the threat or retaliatory act was intended to limit the [individual's] right of access. The cases from this Circuit, as well as from others, make it clear that state officials may not take retaliatory action against an individual designed either to punish him for having exercised his constitutional right to seek judicial relief or to intimidate or chill his exercise of that right in the future.
For example, it is far from clear whether the majority's holding would preclude a state from seeking reimbursement for prison expenses from the proceeds of a prisoner's section 1983 suit unrelated to the conditions of his imprisonment. Presumably such reimbursement would undermine the purposes of section 1983 as directly as the claim for reimbursement in the present case supposedly does. As this example demonstrates, any attempt to restrict the scope of the majority's holding would simply reveal the holding's inherently arbitrary nature.
[U]nder the Iowa statute, the diverted payments satisfy a portion of the inmates' restitution orders—debts that constitute a judgment and lien against all their property and, significantly, are enforceable after their prison sentences have been served. Thus, from a financial standpoint, the inmates received virtually all the benefit of their § 1983 money judgment when the proceeds were applied to satisfy their restitution debts.
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