They held him 525 days past his release. Will the courts let him fight back?

Former Louisiana inmate Percy Taylor did his crime and served his time. But the state held him 525 days past his release date, and nobody listened when he raised concerns.

Even the head of the state corrections agency, who knew for more than a decade that Louisiana was over-detaining thousands of inmates each year, sided against Taylor.

The problem involved missing credit for time served on a previous sentence. Taylor spent more than 20 years of his life incarcerated for selling marijuana and cocaine, and used the detention period to study the law. So he knew he should have gotten credit for revoked parole — something the state overlooked.

Taylor caught the miscalculation a year before his correct release date and spoke up, giving prison officials ample time to respond. If they had made an honest mistake, they could have fixed it. Instead, they ignored it. So Taylor filed a formal petition through proper channels.

When the prison ruled against him, Taylor appealed to James LeBlanc, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. Rather than stop a miscarriage of justice, LeBlanc affirmed the wrongful determination on Aug. 20, 2018.

Undeterred, Taylor went to court. A state commissioner called LeBlanc’s analysis “manifestly erroneous,” and issued a recommendation that later became an official order for Taylor’s release. He hand-delivered both documents to prison officials, but still they refused to budge. Taylor responded with yet another formal complaint and finally gained his freedom on Feb. 18, 2020.

This was not an isolated incident. The U.S. Department of Justice investigated LeBlanc’s agency and in January issued a scathing report. Auditors found that Louisiana was holding “thousands of individuals each year beyond their legal release dates,” and the state was “deliberately indifferent to the systemic overdetention.”

Taylor decided to do something about it. So once he was free, he filed a federal lawsuit against LeBlanc and other officials for violating his Fourteenth Amendment right to due process.

The first obstacle citizens must overcome when suing government employees is a judicially-created doctrine called “qualified immunity,” which works like a get-out-of-jail-free card not for inmates, but for the people in power. Government employees can use qualified immunity to avoid civil liability unless their misconduct is “clearly established” in prior cases as unconstitutional.

The U.S. Supreme Court created the rule in 1982, after previously setting a “good faith” standard in 1967. Since this move of the goalposts, government officials have used qualified immunity to escape accountability for torture, theft and retaliation, along with hundreds of other abuses.

Defenders of qualified immunity say the doctrine is necessary to shield officers from the consequences of split-second decisions made in the fog of conflict that later turn out to be wrong.

But what happened to Taylor did not occur in a dark alleyway or drop house. Nobody was serving a warrant or confronting a dangerous suspect.

LeBlanc works behind a desk. He violated the Constitution in slow-motion, deliberately, repeatedly and over an extended period of time.

The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana considered the circumstances and denied qualified immunity to LeBlanc for his deliberate indifference to violations of Taylor’s rights. This should have allowed Taylor’s case to proceed. But LeBlanc, who suddenly decided due process is important, filed a challenge at the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. My public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, represents Taylor for this part of his case.

History is on his side. As far back as 1968, courts have held that head jailers cannot keep inmates past their release dates. Yet many courts uphold qualified immunity, even when constitutional violations are deliberate.

The mayor and police chief in Castle Hills, Texas, conspired to jail a political rival on bogus charges in 2020. School officials in Colorado expelled a student for off-campus speech in 2019. And prison officials in Kansas kept a drug offender in solitary confinement for 22 years. All of these violations unfolded in slow motion, evincing careful calculation by the offending government employees, yet they still received qualified immunity.

Defenders lean on the “split-second” excuse, but Taylor endured 525 days of constitutional violations. Blocking him from his day in court would add one more injustice to the toll.

Daryl James is a writer at the Institute for Justice.