In what may well have been the most comprehensive hearing on civil asset forfeiture ever held, the Tennessee Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held a day-long hearing on Tennessee’s forfeiture laws at the Nashville Public Library on Monday, July 24th. The hearing featured testimony from District Attorneys past and present, police officers, legislators, attorneys, scholars, local and national advocacy groups, individuals affected by Tennessee’s forfeiture laws, and others interested in the topic. Video footage of the Committee’s hearing is available at the links that follow:
Panelists: Glenn R. Funk (District Attorney, Nashville and Davidson County); D. Michael Dunavant (District Attorney, Tennessee’s 25th Judicial District, President Trump’s nominee for U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee); Stephen D. Crump (District Attorney, Tennessee’s 10th Judicial District); Carlos Lara (Lieutenant, Metro Nashville Police Department)
Panelists: State Representative Mike Carter (R-Ooltewah); State Representative John Ray Clemmons (D-Nashville); State Representative William G. Lamberth (R-Cottontown); State Representative Martin Daniel (R-Knoxville); State Representative Harold M. Love, Jr. (D-Nashville); State Representative G.A. Hardaway (D-Memphis)
Panelists: Vikrant Reddy (Senior Research Fellow, Charles Koch Institute); Lee McGrath (Senior Legislative Counsel, Institute for Justice); Hedy Weinberg (Executive Director, ACLU of Tennessee); Julie Warren (State Director, Tennessee/Kentucky Right on Crime)
Panelists: George Frank Lannom (Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers); Joy Radice (Professor of Law, University of Tennessee College of Law); John Morris Miles (Attorney, Union City); Ben Raybin (Attorney, Nashville); Kyle Mothershead (Attorney, Nashville); Elliot Ozment (Attorney, Nashville)
Panelists: Jackie Sims (Tennessee State Conference of the NAACP); Christopher M. Bellamy (President, Napier-Looby Bar Association); Samuel Lester (Street Outreach and Advocacy Coordinator, Open Table Nashville)
The hearing record will remain open for public comment until August 23, 2017. If you would like to submit comments for consideration, please email Jeff Hinton, Southern Regional Director for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, at [email protected]. Following the conclusion of the public comment period, the Tennessee Advisory Committee will consider all commentary and prepare a final report and recommendation.
Selected press coverage of the hearing is available below.
Last week, news broke of White County General Sessions Judge Sam Benningfield’s wildly unconstitutional standing order that White County inmates who declined to submit to sterilization would receive an additional 30 days in jail. In an order dated July 26, 2017, Judge Benningfield has formally rescinded his prior order with the caveat that he will still be handing out a eugenics discount to anyone who “demonstrate[s] to the court their desire to improve their situations” by being sterilized.
Even as partially rescinded, however, Judge Benningfield’s policy of determining the length of an inmate’s sentence based on whether the inmate has agreed to submit to sterilization remains illegal. As previously explained:
In America, reproductive freedom is a fundamental constitutional right, and the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution forbids the government from treating people differently based on whether or not they choose to exercise their right to reproductive freedom. Tennessee’s criminal code also contains several specifically-designated mitigating factors and enhancement factors that judges are permitted to consider during sentencing. Whether a defendant has submitted to sterilization is not among them.
White County’s backdoor eugenics program needs to be terminated in its entirety. The program is a moral outrage and a blight on the entire legal profession. Nobody—and certainly no member of the Bar—should tolerate it. If Judge Benningfield will not resign his office, he should be removed.
On Wednesday evening, News Channel 5 broke the unspeakable outrage that a judge in White County, Tennessee, had signed a standing order providing for a 30-day “reduction” in jailtime if an inmate submits to sterilization. According to the report, 70 inmates have already accepted this “eugenics discount” in exchange for early release. Somehow, each aspect of the story is even more shocking than the next.
To begin, General Sessions Judge Sam Benningfield—the mastermind behind White County’s backdoor eugenics program—defended his efforts without any apparent sense of shame, telling Channel 5’s Chris Conte that: “I hope to encourage [inmates] to take personal responsibility and give them a chance, when they do get out, to not to [sic] be burdened with children.”
Even worse, Judge Benningfield’s standing eugenics order has apparently been on file since May 15, 2017—meaning that an untold number of lawyers, judges, doctors, and law enforcement personnel have either acquiesced to it or simply turned a blind eye in the face of a policy that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court designates as a crime against humanity.
To be absolutely and unequivocally clear: eugenics is illegal. In America, reproductive freedom is a fundamental constitutional right, and the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution forbids the government from treating people differently based on whether or not they choose to exercise their right to reproductive freedom. Tennessee’s criminal code also contains several specifically-designated mitigating factors and enhancement factors that judges are permitted to consider during sentencing. Whether a defendant has submitted to sterilization is not among them.
The framing of Judge Benningfield’s eugenics program as a “voluntary sentencing reduction” is also deeply troubling. It is not. Simply stated: In White County, Tennessee, any inmate who refuses to be sterilized is punished with an additional 30 days in jail.
Such a program is profoundly coercive—especially for defendants convicted of minor crimes who may avoid jail time entirely if they submit to sterilization. Anyone familiar with the criminal justice system knows that this length of time is sufficient to send a person’s life into disarray, because an extra month in prison can and frequently does result in job loss, loss of one’s home, or loss of one’s children. Of note, under Tennessee law, everyone is also at risk of being imprisoned for 30 days at any time for even the slightest traffic infraction based on law enforcement’s discretion.
In addition to its rank illegality and immorality, it goes without saying that using the coercive power of the state to promote sterilization also has severe potential for abuse. As a historical matter, eugenics programs always target disfavored minorities—from Jews in Nazi Germany to black men in Tuskegee, Alabama. Firmly in keeping with this tradition, Judge Benningfield’s eugenics program is reserved for White County inmates and apparently targets those suffering from drug addiction. In this regard, it is no less disgusting.
Judge Benningfield’s eugenics program is an outrage. He need not serve on the bench any longer, and he need not keep his law degree any longer. Infuriatingly, this also is not the first time that an officer of the Court who has been charged with upholding the law has implemented a (very recent) sterilization program in Tennessee—a fact that is similarly unconscionable in its own right. If Tennessee’s administrators of the practice of law took a fraction of the effort that they’ve expended trying to prevent qualified immigrants from taking the bar exam and redirected it toward removing people like Judge Benningfield from the profession, perhaps further abuses like this would be avoided.
Compounding the outrage is that nobody has yet filed suit over Judge Benningfield’s eugenics program during the two months that it has been in effect. Whether initiated by the ACLU, a public defender, or a private defense attorney, such a lawsuit needed to be filed yesterday. If you or a client of yours is affected by White County’s eugenics program and you want assistance pursuing the case, please feel free to contact me at [email protected]. I will gladly take the case pro bono and donate the proceeds to the Holocaust Museum and the Tuskegee History Center. A program like this violates what the United States Supreme Court has declared to be “one of the basic civil rights of man,” and nobody—least of all the Bar—should tolerate it.
The defamation lawsuit filed against beloved Nashville restaurateur Randy Rayburn has been dismissed outright by Davidson County Circuit Court Judge Kelvin Jones. The costs of the lawsuit were also assessed against Plaintiff Tom Loftis, the aggrieved former director of The Randy Rayburn School of Culinary Arts at Nashville State Community College, who had sued Mr. Rayburn for a whopping $1.5 million over a March 2, 2016 Tennessean article that had reported that the program was turning out unqualified students.
The lawsuit, first reported by the Nashville Business Journal, drew national media coverage due in part to its “extraordinarily innocuous subject matter.” According to one media outlet, the lawsuit’s “attempt to fashion a libel lawsuit out of nothing bears far more resemblance to those filed by plaintiffs with fools for lawyers.” The Plaintiff in the case was represented by Nashville attorneys Gary Blackburn and Bryant Kroll.
In his verbal ruling from the bench dismissing the lawsuit against Mr. Rayburn, Judge Jones noted that under Tennessee law, an allegedly defamatory statement must “be read as a person of ordinary intelligence would understand it in light of the surrounding circumstances.” Judge Jones also observed that whether a statement is capable of being understood as defamatory “is a question of law to be determined by the court.” Finding that Mr. Loftis’s Complaint could not satisfy these basic standards even at the motion to dismiss stage, Judge Jones dismissed Mr. Loftis’s lawsuit with prejudice and assessed him the costs of the litigation.
Said Daniel Horwitz, Mr. Rayburn’s lead counsel: “We are pleased that this baseless lawsuit has come to a quick and much-deserved end. The legal system should not be used to litigate hurt feelings or to deter people from speaking to the media. We are grateful that Judge Jones dismissed this frivolous lawsuit at its first appearance, and we are thrilled that Mr. Rayburn will be able to recommit his full attention to doing what he loves: running wonderful restaurants, serving his community, and feeding delicious food to his grateful patrons.”
Documents from the case and selected media coverage are available below.
In the most recent chapter of the seemingly endless litigation over Tennessee’s medical malpractice statute (known as the “Tennessee Health Care Liability Act,” or “HCLA”), the Tennessee Supreme Court has held that plaintiffs need not include a HIPAA-compliant authorization form in their pre-suit notice packages if only one defendant is being sued. Thus, in single-defendant medical malpractice cases, the Court’s holding operates to remove one of the many landmines that medical malpractice plaintiffs must navigate in order to get through the courthouse door.
“In Tennessee, people who want to file lawsuits involving the provision of health care services are first required to comply with a variety of procedural requirements that are unique to [medical malpractice] claims.”[1] In theory, the myriad pre-suit notice requirements contained in the HCLA are intended to “allow[] health care providers to evaluate the merits of potential health care liability claims before a suit is commenced, facilitat[e] communication among the parties, and encourage[e] early settlement negotiations.”[2] In practice, however, these procedural requirements operate “as a minefield to unwary litigants and frequently result in otherwise-valid claims being dismissed on technical procedural grounds.”[3] Consequently, in one of his prior publications, this author has characterized the HCLA’s pre-suit notice requirements as “red tape with fangs.”[4]
One pre-suit notice requirement of the HCLA—codified at Tenn. Code Ann. § 29-26-121(a)(2)(E)—compels plaintiffs to provide prospective medical malpractice defendants with “[a] HIPAA compliant medical authorization permitting the provider receiving the notice to obtain complete medical records from each other provider being sent a notice.”[5] In Bray v. Khuri—a wrongful death case involving a patient who committed suicide while receiving in-patient psychiatric care—Tennessee’s Court of Appeals held that the medical authorization form that the decedent’s surviving spouse had provided in her pre-suit notice package had not been HIPAA-compliant. As a result, the Court of Appeals held that the plaintiff’s lawsuit had to be dismissed outright before it could even begin.
On appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, the Bray plaintiff argued that whether or not her medical authorization form had complied with HIPAA (something that the parties disputed), she was not even required to comply with Tenn. Code Ann. § 29-26-121(a)(2)(E) because there was only a single defendant in the case. Intuitively, the argument had substantial force. If the purpose of Tenn. Code Ann. § 29-26-121(a)(2)(E) is to ensure that defendants could “obtain complete medical records from each other provider being sent a notice,” the plaintiff’s argument went, then it is difficult to imagine how or why this requirement would apply when there isn’t any “other provider being sent a notice” at all.[6]
In response, the defendant in Bray argued that compliance with Tenn. Code Ann. § 29-26-121(a)(2)(E) is necessary even when just a single provider is sued because defendants are prohibited from discussing potential lawsuits with their attorneys unless they have received a HIPAA-compliant authorization form. Specifically, the defendant argued, “HIPAA prohibits the disclosure of a patient’s medical records to counsel for evaluating the merits of a potential claim absent a valid medical authorization.”[7]
Flatly rejecting this argument, the Tennessee Supreme Court noted that “HIPAA regulations allow a healthcare provider to ‘use or disclose protected health information for treatment, payment, or health care operations,’” and that in turn, federal regulations expressly define “health care operations” to include “[c]onducting or arranging for legal services.”[8] The Court further noted that:
The United States Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”), in its Frequently Asked Questions (“FAQ”) for Professionals pages of its website, indicates that a healthcare provider may use or disclose protected health information for litigation “whether for judicial or administrative proceedings, . . . or as part of the covered entity’s health care operations.” HHS further recognizes that “[i]n most cases, the covered entity will share protected health information for litigation purposes with its lawyer, who is either a workforce member or a business associate.” HIPAA regulations define a “business associate” to include a person who provides legal services to or for a healthcare provider.[9]
Thus, the Tennessee Supreme Court concluded that “HIPAA does not require [defendants] to obtain a medical authorization to use a patient’s medical records in [their own] possession,” and that such records may be used to “consult with counsel to evaluate the merits of a potential claim” even without authorization from a patient.[10] As such, because neither the text nor the purpose of Tenn. Code Ann. § 29-26-121(a)(2)(E) indicated that it applied to medical malpractice cases involving just a single defendant, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling and permitted the plaintiff’s lawsuit to move forward.
The Court’s sensible and straightforward ruling in Bray represents a small victory for a narrow subset of medical malpractice plaintiffs in Tennessee. As a whole, however, the larger problems with the statute persist. It has been more than a hundred years since Roscoe Pound, the preeminent former Dean of Harvard Law School, condemned the “sporting theory of justice” that was in vogue during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when lawsuits turned on whether “the rules of the game been carried out strictly” rather than on what “substantive law and justice require.”[11] Since then, the legal system has evolved to reflect the broader understanding that “dismissals based on procedural grounds . . . run counter to the judicial system’s general objective of disposing of cases on the merits.”[12] Regrettably, however, in the realm of medical malpractice liability, the “sporting theory” of justice has largely returned to prominence in Tennessee.
Read the Tennessee Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Bray v. Khuri, authored by Justice Sharon Lee,here.
[1] Daniel A. Horwitz, All claims related to the provision of health care are now governed by the Health Care Liability Act, holds Tennessee Supreme Court, ScotBlog (Dec. 7, 2015), available at https://scotblog.org/2015/12/all-claims-related-to-the-provision-of-health-care-are-now-governed-by-the-health-care-liability-act-holds-tennessee-supreme-court/.
[2]Stevens ex rel. Stevens v. Hickman Cmty. Health Care Servs., Inc., 418 S.W.3d 547, 564 (Tenn. 2013).
[4]See Daniel A. Horwitz, The Law of Unintended Consequences: Avoiding the Health Care Liability Act Booby Trap, Nashville Bar Journal (June 2015) (feature article), available at http://issuu.com/nbanikki/docs/nbjjune15/17.
[6] Tenn. Code Ann. § 29-26-121(a)(2)(E) (emphasis added).
[7]Bray v. Khuri, __ S.W. 3d __, __ (2017), No. W2015-00397-SC-R11-CV (July 5, 2017), available at http://www.tba.org/sites/default/files/brayd_070517.pdf?fid=16e9ebec9f8d4e9e754ea118283ffe7c1c180148.
[11]See Daniel A. Horwitz, The Law of Unintended Consequences: Avoiding the Health Care Liability Act Booby Trap 8, available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2577156 (citing Roscoe Pound, The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice, Address at American Bar Association Convention (Aug. 26, 1906), available at 35 F.R.D. 273, 282 (1964)).
[12]Id. (quoting Bowers, 2003 WL 22994302 at *5; see also Childress, 816 S.W.2d at 316 (noting that “it is the general rule that courts are reluctant to give effect to rules of procedure . . . which prevent a litigant from having a claim adjudicated upon its merits.”)).