Supreme Court Urged To Enforce The Thirteenth Amendment’s Ban On Involuntary Servitude

In a rare legal filing, a group of Filipino nurses is calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment, which famously abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. Simply for quitting abusive working conditions and seeking legal counsel, the nurses were indicted and threatened with jail time by prosecutors in Suffolk County, New York. A state court later ruled that the prosecutions violated the nurses’ rights under the Thirteenth Amendment.

But despite that decision, last year, a federal appeals court tossed a civil rights lawsuit filed by the nurses and granted the prosecutors absolute immunity for their actions. Thanks to a 1976 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, prosecutors are completely shielded from civil rights lawsuits.

Known as prosecutorial immunity, this protection is even broader than “qualified immunity,” which became infamous in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Unlike qualified immunity, which shields all government employees from liability unless they violated a “clearly established” right, prosecutorial immunity is nigh-on absolute. The only exception is when a prosecutor acts clearly beyond their scope of authority.

Represented by the Institute for Justice, the nurses’ cert petition points out that their case is a “paradigmatic example” of the types of abuses Congress sought to end in the aftermath of the Civil War. Among the many measures taken to better protect the rights of Black Americans newly emancipated by the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1871.

Prompted by the Ku Klux Klan’s vicious attacks (often aided and abetted by local law enforcement), this sweeping federal law, codified today as Section 1983, was designed to let individuals sue state and local government officials who violated their constitutional rights.

But legal shields like prosecutorial and qualified immunity clearly undermine the intent behind Section 1983. That’s especially pressing since civil litigation is often the only way a victim can even attempt to hold a rogue prosecutor accountable.

Filipinos working overseas are the lifeblood of the Philippines, sending $38 billion to their friends and family back home last year. According to the World Bank, a tenth of the nation’s economy comes from remittances, while roughly 40% of those remittances come from the United States alone. And health care is one of the most popular fields for expat Filipinos. Roughly 1 in 4 Filipino adults working in the United States are frontline health care workers.

But this desire for greater opportunity was all too easily exploited by politically connected corporations. Sentosa Care, one of the largest nursing home chains in New York, regularly recruited nurses from the Philippines to work in its facilities.

But when the nurses arrived in New York, they found themselves swindled. Compared to what their contracts had promised, the nurses were given less pay and time off, unpredictable shifts in abysmal facilities, and were housed in cramped and shoddy apartments. Worst of all, anyone who wanted to quit before their three-year contract was up would risk a $25,000 penalty. For perspective, at the time, the GDP per capita in the Philippines was just over $1,450.

Looking to escape from their unexpected involuntary servitude, 10 nurses sought help from the Philippine consulate, which referred them to Felix Vinluan, an immigration and employment attorney. After consulting with the nurses, Vinluan advised them that Sentosa had breached their contracts. Accordingly, he told the nurses they could leave and seek employment elsewhere, so long as they resigned after their shifts were over. With their working conditions intolerable, those 10 nurses quit in April 2006.

Sentosa went on the warpath. In a series of transparent intimidation tactics to punish the nurses for quitting, Sentosa registered complaints with the state’s nurse-licensing agency and the Suffolk County police. The company also filed a civil suit to bar Vinluan from speaking to any more Sentosa employees.

Even though the resignations didn’t harm any patients and the shifts were covered, Sentosa nevertheless contended that by quitting their jobs, the nurses had “abandoned their patients” and should be punished.

At first, those efforts were rebuffed. Police declined to investigate. Regulators concluded that the nurses “had not committed professional misconduct” and found that “no patients were deprived of nursing care.” And a court tossed the civil suit against Vinluan.

But Sentosa was undeterred. With its political connections, Sentosa landed a meeting with Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota and urged the DA to file criminal charges. Almost one year after the nurses quit, in 2007, Suffolk County indicted the 10 nurses who quit on multiple counts of criminal endangerment and conspiracy.

Prosecutors even charged Vinluan with criminal solicitation and conspiracy for advising the nurses and for filing a discrimination claim on their behalf with the U.S. Department of Justice.

The charges were clearly unfounded. Yet over the next two years, the nurses and Vinluan lived in fear that they could be convicted, thrown in jail, and have their licenses revoked, ruining their livelihoods.

Thankfully, in 2009, a state appellate court issued a rare “writ of prohibition,” which blocked the prosecutions from moving forward. The nurses and their attorney, the court unanimously declared, were “threatened with prosecution for crimes for which they cannot constitutionally be tried.” Prosecuting the nurses for quitting their jobs, the court ruled, was “the antithesis of the free and voluntary system of labor envisioned by the framers of the Thirteenth Amendment.”

As for Vinluan, the case against him was based on “the exercise of ordinarily protected First Amendment rights” and would “eviscerate the right to give and receive legal counsel.” Instead of harming patient health, “the greatest risk created by the resignation of these nurses was to the financial health of Sentosa.”

Bolstered by that ruling, the nurses and Vinluan filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court to hold the Suffolk County prosecutors accountable. But citing the Supreme Court’s precedent on prosecutorial immunity, the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals dismissed their lawsuit last year.

Even though prosecutors “may have unlawfully penalized the plaintiffs for exercising the right to quit their jobs on the advice of counsel,” the court held, they are nevertheless “entitled to absolute immunity for their actions during the judicial phase of the criminal process.”

Unless the Supreme Court takes the nurses’ case, there will be no recourse for victims of indentured servitude.