Prosecutors Who Grossly Violate The Constitution Must Be Held Accountable

When attorney Felix Vinluan heard how a local nursing home provider was treating Filipino nurses, he was outraged. But by providing those nurses with solid legal advice, he found himself criminally prosecuted. The prosecutors knew the charges were bogus but filed them on behalf of their corporate allies. Today, years later, Felix and the nurses are still struggling to hold the prosecutors accountable for their gross behavior.

The trouble began more than 15 years ago when a group of nurses signed contracts with Sentosa while still in the Philippines. Sentosa is a New York-based company with a spotty history that included mistreatment of both patients and employees. From the moment the nurses arrived and started their jobs, Sentosa broke promises made in their contracts, switching their place of employment and housing them horrible living conditions.

After trying for months to get their employer to honor the terms of their contracts, the nurses reached out to the Philippine consulate, who put them in touch with Felix. Felix advised the nurses that because Sentosa broke the contract, they could quit their jobs. However, the nurses needed to give enough notice to ensure that patients would still be cared for. The nurses followed his advice and Sentosa, in return, embarked on a campaign of intimidation and retaliation.

First, the company claimed that the nurses left their post without warning and tried to get both the nurse-licensing agency and the local police to find fault. But an investigation by the agency concluded that the nurses did nothing wrong and the police took no action.

But Sentosa kept working its political connections and arranged a meeting with the Suffolk County district attorney and his assistant, Thomas Spota, III and Leonard Lato. Nearly a year after the nurses quit, Spota and Lato filed criminal charges against them and their attorney Felix.

For two years the nurses and Felix fought the charges. When a court finally threw out the bogus cases, it was unsparing in its conclusions. The decision said that charging Felix was “an assault on the adversarial system of justice upon which our society, governed by the rule of law rather than individuals, depends,” and that the prosecution was “without or in excess of jurisdiction.”

The court held that the prosecution was not only a clear violation of Felix’s First Amendment rights to do his job as an attorney, but also a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on involuntary servitude by trying to punish the nurses for refusing to continue working in an abusive job.

Following the Civil War, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act to allow all Americans, but especially recently freed slaves, to appeal to federal courts when their civil rights were being violated. Today that law is known as Section 1983 and it is still used to hold state government officials who violate the U.S. Constitution accountable.

But the courts have imposed loopholes that let government officials escape lawsuits, known as immunity doctrines. Perhaps the most well-known is qualified immunity. But even more difficult to overcome is the doctrine of prosecutorial immunity.

The nurses and Felix launched their federal lawsuit, but it was dismissed by the district and appeals courts. The courts simply held that prosecutors could never be sued if they charged someone under a criminal statute.

Now, the nurses and Felix are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider prosecutorial immunity. Congress did not write this immunity into the law; it’s a court-created doctrine. The Institute for Justice, which has filed the Supreme Court appeal, asks the Court to consider the long history of Americans being able to hold officials responsible when they clearly violated the law and the Constitution.

This wasn’t the only black spot on District Attorney Spota’s career. He was eventually convicted of a number of crimes after he tried to cover up police abuse in Suffolk County, but neither he nor his assistant were ever held accountable for their dirty prosecution on behalf of Sentosa. Serving as a prosecutor for the government carries with it incredible power, and without the ability to hold people who abuse that power responsible, our basic rights are at risk.