Juliet Anilao, et al. v. Thomas J. Spota, III, Individually and as District Attorney of Suffolk County, New York, et al.

This case presents a paradigmatic example of what the 1871 Reconstruction Congress wanted to remedy when it enacted what became 42 U.S.C. § 1983 as part of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871: State officials both violating the Thirteenth Amendment and punishing the victims’ lawyer for seeking the federal government’s protection for his clients. Petitioners are ten nurses who quit an abusive job and their lawyer who advised them and filed a federal discrimination claim on their behalf. Respondents are prosecutors who charged petitioners with felonies at the behest of the powerful company that employed the nurses. Respondents knew that New York’s nurse-licensing agency, the police, and a civil court had already found that petitioners did nothing wrong. A New York appellate court threw out the charges because they violated the First and Thirteenth Amendments, so the prosecutors lacked authority to bring them. But when petitioners sued under Section 1983, the Second Circuit granted respondents absolute immunity. It held that because respondents filed the unconstitutional charges under a statute they were entitled to enforce, they could not be sued. The questions presented are:

1. Whether a plaintiff can defeat a prosecutor’s absolute immunity from suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 by demonstrating that the prosecutor lacked any colorable authority to bring charges under the statute he invoked.

2. Whether the Court should reconsider the doctrine of absolute prosecutorial immunity.