Petition for Writ of Certiorari — Lackawanna Recycling Center, Inc., Petitioner v. William L. Burrell, et al.
Supreme Court briefApr 21, 2023
Ask Donna
What actually matters in this document.
Text
APPENDIX TABLE OF CONTENTS
OPINIONS AND ORDERS
Judgment of the United States Court of Appeals
for the Third Circuit (February 8, 2023).................. 1a
Opinion of the United States Court of Appeals
for the Third Circuit (February 8, 2023).................. 3a
Matey, Circuit Judge, Concurring in Part and
Dissenting in Part ............................................ 48a
Memorandum Opinion of the United States
District Court for the Middle District of
Pennsylvania (August 6, 2021) .............................. 70a
Report and Recommendation By Magistrate
Judge Joseph F. Saporito, Jr.
(March 1, 2021) ..................................................... 133a
REHEARING ORDER
Order of the United States Court of Appeals for
the Third Circuit Denying Petition for Rehearing
(March 8, 2023) ..................................................... 157a
STATUTORY PROVISIONS
Statutory Provisions Involved .............................. 159a
29 U.S.C. § 203—Definitions ......................... 159a
18 U.S.C. § 1589—Forced labor ..................... 172a
23 Pa.C.S. § 4352—Continuing
Jurisdiction Over Support Orders ................. 174a
App.1a
JUDGMENT OF THE UNITED STATES COURT
OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT
(FEBRUARY 8, 2023)
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT
________________________
WILLIAM L. BURRELL, JR.;
JOSHUA HUZZARD; DAMPSEY STUCKEY,
v.
TOM STAFF, Individually; LOUIS DENAPLES,
individually; DOMINICK DENAPLES;
LACKAWANNA RECYCLING CENTER INC;
COUNTY OF LACKAWANNA; LACKAWANNA
COUNTY SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT
AUTHORITY,
William L. Burrell, Jr.; Joshua Huzzard; Dampsey
Stuckey; *Anthony Cravath; *Anthony John
Goodwin, Sr.; *Derrick M. Lake; *Eugene R. Taylor;
*Ralph Wasko; *Timothy Alan Whited; *Torrance
Allen; *Gabriel Martinez; and *Gerard Nelson,
Appellants.
*(Pursuant to Rule 12(a), Fed. R. App. P.)
________________________
No. 21-2846
On Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Middle District of Pennsylvania
(District Court Civil No. 3-14-cv-01891)
District Judge: Honorable Robert D. Mariani
App.2a
Argued July 14, 2022
Before: GREENAWAY, JR., MATEY,
and NYGAARD, Circuit Judges.
JUDGMENT
This Cause came to be heard on the record from
the United States District Court for the Middle District
of Pennsylvania and was argued by counsel on July
14, 2022.
On consideration whereof, it is now hereby
ORDERED and ADJUDGED by this Court that the
order of the said District Court entered on August
31, 2021, be and the same is hereby AFFIRMED IN
PART, REVERSED IN PART, and REMANDED for
proceedings consistent with this Courts opinion.
Costs shall not be taxed in this matter.
All of the above in accordance with the Opinion
of this Court.
ATTEST:
/s/ Patricia S. Dodszuweit
Clerk
Dated: February 8, 2023
App.3a
OPINION OF THE UNITED STATES COURT
OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT
(FEBRUARY 8, 2023)
PRECEDENTIAL
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT
________________________
WILLIAM L. BURRELL, JR.;
JOSHUA HUZZARD; DAMPSEY STUCKEY,
v.
TOM STAFF, Individually; LOUIS DENAPLES,
individually; DOMINICK DENAPLES;
LACKAWANNA RECYCLING CENTER INC;
COUNTY OF LACKAWANNA; LACKAWANNA
COUNTY SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT
AUTHORITY,
William L. Burrell, Jr.; Joshua Huzzard; Dampsey
Stuckey; *Anthony Cravath; *Anthony John
Goodwin, Sr.; *Derrick M. Lake; *Eugene R. Taylor;
*Ralph Wasko; *Timothy Alan Whited; *Torrance
Allen; *Gabriel Martinez; and Gerard Nelson,
Appellants.
________________________
No. 21-2846
On Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Middle District of Pennsylvania
(Pursuant to Rule 12(a), Fed. R. App. P.)
App.4a
(District Court Civil No. 3-14-cv-01891)
District Judge: Honorable Robert D. Mariani
Argued July 14, 2022
Before: GREENAWAY, JR., MATEY,
and NYGAARD, Circuit Judges.
(Filed: February 8, 2023)
OPINION OF THE COURT
NYGAARD, Circuit Judge.
Plaintiff child support debtor-civil contemnors
brought several claims against Lackawanna County,
the County’s Solid Waste Management Authority,
Lackawanna County Recycling Center, Inc. (the private
corporation to which the Authority outsources the
operation of its Recycling Center, or the “Corporation”)
and the Corporation’s owners (brothers Louis and
Dominick DeNaples), arising out of plaintiffs’ nearly
unpaid labor at the Recycling Center. The District
Court dismissed all claims, and plaintiffs appealed.1
We will affirm dismissal of plaintiffs’ Thirteenth
Amendment and Pennsylvania Wage Payment and
Collection Law claims in full, and of their Trafficking
Victims Protection Act (“TVPA”) and Racketeer
1 Plaintiffs do not appeal the dismissal of their claims against
defendant Tom Staff, an administrator employed by Lackawanna
County who regulated the Work Release Program and the
Community Service Program at the Lackawanna County Prison.
“All defendants” thus means the County, the Authority, the
Corporation, and the DeNaples brothers.
App.5a
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”)
claims against the DeNaples brothers.2
However, we will reverse dismissal of their
TVPA claims against the County, the Authority, and
the Corporation; their RICO claims against the Corporation; their Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”)
and Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act claims against
the County, the Authority, and the Corporation; and
their unjust enrichment claims against the County,
the Authority, and the Corporation.3
I.
Background
Plaintiffs William Burrell, Jr., Joshua Huzzard,
and Dampsey Stuckey were held in civil contempt
and sentenced to incarceration for not paying child
support. They challenge Lackawanna County’s policy
of conditioning incarcerated civil contemnor child
support debtors’ access to regularly paid work release
on first working for half of their sentences sorting
through trash at the Recycling Center, in purportedly
dangerous and disgusting conditions, for sixty-three
cents per hour (five dollars per day), nominally as
“community service.”
Burrell first filed a complaint in September 2014
and a First Amended Complaint (“FAC”) in December
2014, both pro se, describing the County’s policy of
conditioning work release on work at the Center, the
Center’s hazardous conditions and subminimum wages,
2 Plaintiffs do not appeal the dismissal of their RICO claims
against the County and the Authority.
3 Plaintiffs press their Fair Labor Standards Act claims on
behalf of a FLSA collective and the rest of their claims on behalf
of a Rule 23 class.
App.6a
and alleging, as relevant here, Thirteenth Amendment,
TVPA, RICO, and state‐law claims. Although Burrell
did not expressly invoke FLSA, the FAC alleged that
he was paid five dollars per day to work forty hours
per week at the Center.
The District Court dismissed the amended complaint before service of process. A panel of this Court
affirmed in part and vacated in part. Burrell v.
Loungo, 750 F. App’x 149, 160 (3d Cir. 2018). The panel
reversed the District Court’s dismissal of Burrell’s
TVPA and Thirteenth Amendment claims because
although Burrell alleged that “he had a ‘choice’—
either work in the LRC or spend an extra six months
in prison—given the dearth of case law in this area, it
is not clear, especially at the screening stage, whether
this ‘choice’ was sufficient to bring the alleged practice
of coercing civil contemnors to work in the LRC out
of the range of involuntary servitude.” Id. at 159–60
(cleaned up). The panel also said in a footnote that
One might argue, of course, that as a civil
contemnor who would be released once he
paid his child support obligations, Burrell
“carr[ied] the keys of [his] prison in [his] own
pockets.” Turner v. Rogers, 564 U.S. 431, 44142, 131 S. Ct. 2507, 180 L.Ed.2d 452 (2011).
We leave it to the District Court to consider
such an argument.
Id. at 160 n.7. Finally, the panel reversed the District
Court’s dismissal of Burrell’s RICO claims because
that ruling was based on dismissal of his Thirteenth
Amendment and TVPA claims—the alleged predicate
violations of law for RICO liability. Id. at 160.
App.7a
On remand, Burrell obtained counsel and filed a
Second Amended Complaint (“SAC”), which added
Huzzard and Stuckey as plaintiffs and significantly
refined its list of defendants, its factual allegations,
and its legal claims. The SAC contends that conditioning plaintiffs’ access to work release—which would
have enabled them to earn the money they needed to
secure their freedom from incarceration—on completing
a period of sub-minimum-wage, dangerous, and
disgusting work at a private business amounted to
involuntary servitude and forced labor, in violation of
the Thirteenth Amendment4 and the TVPA, 18 U.S.C.
§§ 1589, 1595; 5 that defendants’ violations of the
TVPA as an association in fact was a pattern of
racketeering activity under RICO, 18 U.S.C. § 1961(1),
in violation of id. §§ 1962(c), 1964(c); that failure to
pay them the minimum wage for their work at the
Recycling Center violated FLSA’s minimum wage
provision, 29 U.S.C. § 206(a)(1)(c), and the Pennsylvania
Minimum Wage Act, 43 Pa. Stat. and Cons. Stat.
§ 333.104(a.1); that paying plaintiffs’ daily five dollar
wage into their commissary accounts, rather than in
4 Plaintiffs press their Thirteenth Amendment claims via 42
U.S.C. § 1983.
5 § 1595 creates a civil cause of action for victims of, inter alia,
a TVPA violation, “against the perpetrator [ ]or whoever knowingly
benefits, financially or by receiving anything of value from participation in a venture which that person knew or should have
known has engaged in an act in violation of this chapter[.]” Id.
§ 1595(a). On January 5, 2023, Congress enacted the Abolish
Trafficking Reauthorization Act of 2022. This amended the language in § 1595(a) to include a TVPA violation, “against the
perpetrator [ ]or whoever knowingly benefits, or attempts or
conspires to benefit, financially . . . .” See Pub. L. No. 117-347,
136 Stat 6199, 6200 (emphasis added).
App.8a
cash or check, violated the Pennsylvania Wage Payment
and Collection Law, id. § 260.2a; and that plaintiffs’
work at the Center unjustly enriched defendants.
After briefing, the District Court granted defendants’ motions to dismiss the SAC. The Court first
held that the Rooker-Feldman doctrine did not preclude
its jurisdiction over the TVPA and Thirteenth Amendment claims, so long as it did not credit plaintiffs’
allegations that they could not pay their purges (payment of which would effect compliance with their
contempt orders and get them out of prison). The
Court then concluded that plaintiffs’ Thirteenth Amendment and TVPA claims failed, because the legal requirement that the state court had to find that plaintiffs were able to pay their purges before sentencing
them to incarceration for civil contempt meant that
plaintiffs could have chosen to pay their purges and
leave prison rather than work at the Recycling Center.
The Court also dismissed plaintiffs’ RICO and unjust
enrichment claims because they were predicated on
plaintiffs’ failed Thirteenth Amendment and TVPA
claims. The Court finally dismissed plaintiffs’ FLSA,
Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act, and Pennsylvania
Wage Payment and Collection Law claims because
plaintiffs failed to allege an employer-employee relationship, an implied contract on wages to be paid, or
a breach thereof.
Though the District Court dismissed some claims
without prejudice, plaintiffs stood on their complaint
and sought final judgment, which the District Court
issued. Plaintiffs then timely appealed.
App.9a
II. Standard of Review
Because this case arises from a motion to dismiss,
we conduct a plenary review of the District Court’s
order granting a motion to dismiss for failure to state
a claim, Gelman v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co.,
583 F.3d 187 (3d Cir. 2009), and “accept as true the
allegations of the complaint,” Mohamad v. Palestinian
Auth., 566 U.S. 449, 452 (2012).
III. Discussion
A. Rooker-Feldman, Issue Preclusion, and
Changed Circumstances
1. Rooker-Feldman Doctrine
“In certain circumstances, where a federal suit
follows a state suit, the Rooker–Feldman doctrine
prohibits the district court from exercising jurisdiction.
The doctrine takes its name from the only two cases
in which the Supreme Court has applied it to defeat
federal subject-matter jurisdiction[.]” Great W. Mining
& Min. Co. v. Fox Rothschild LLP, 615 F.3d 159, 163–
64 (3d Cir. 2010). The doctrine is narrowly confined
to “cases brought by state-court losers complaining of
injuries caused by state-court judgments rendered
before the district court proceedings commenced and
inviting district court review and rejection of those judgments,” and “does not otherwise override or supplant
preclusion doctrine.” Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic
Indus. Corp., 544 U.S. 280, 284 (2005).
“If a federal plaintiff presents some independent
claim, albeit one that denies a legal conclusion that a
state court has reached in a case to which he was a
party, then there is jurisdiction and state law deter-
App.10a
mines whether the defendant prevails under principles
of preclusion.” Id. at 293. That distinction has consequences: “Rooker-Feldman, unlike claim and issue
preclusion, implicates a federal court’s subject-matter
jurisdiction, meaning it cannot be forfeited or waived,
and courts must evaluate its applicability sua sponte
if it is a concern.” Vuyanich v. Smithton Borough, 5
F.4th 379, 385 (3d Cir. 2021) (cleaned up).
Plaintiffs assert “that they had no option but to
work at the Center” and Burrell asserts “that he did
not have the ability to pay $2,129.43”—his purge
amount. App. 62. Whether the purge orders preclude
us from entertaining those assertions is a question
subsidiary to plaintiffs’ claims. And the “ability to
pay” determination in the state court was merely a
step towards the state court orders’ ultimate purpose
of ordering plaintiffs incarcerated to coerce their payment of overdue child support. As plaintiffs’ claims
may deny conclusions reached by the state court, but
do not require review and rejection of the orders in
which those conclusions were reached, Rooker-Feldman
does not thwart federal jurisdiction. See Exxon Mobil
Corp., 544 U.S. at 293.
2. Issue Preclusion
The purge orders implicate issue preclusion,
which is not a jurisdictional matter but instead an
affirmative defense. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 8(c). Plaintiffs
correctly point out that issue preclusion “has not yet
been raised in this case.” Pls.’ Reply Br. at 4–5 n.1.
But they “do not challenge the state-court ability-topay finding,” id., the only state court determination
relevant to plaintiffs’ claims. Instead, plaintiffs contend
that they “allege injuries caused by events occurring
App.11a
after the state-court orders—their ever‐worsening
financial circumstances and Defendants’ exploitation
of them,” and that their “financial insecurity increased
once detained.” Pls.’ Br. at 16–17. The state court
purge orders’ ability-to-pay findings were limited by
law to plaintiffs’ respective present abilities to pay at
the time the orders were entered. See Hyle v. Hyle,
868 A.2d 601, 605 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2005) (“[T]he trial
court must set the conditions for a purge in such a
way as the contemnor has the present ability to
comply with the order.”) (emphasis in original). They
did not, and could not, make any predictions about
plaintiffs’ ability to pay in the future.
Thus, while plaintiffs have waived, and are
precluded from raising, any challenge to the state
court findings that they were able to pay at the time
the courts imposed their incarceration and purge
orders, they are not precluded from contending that
they were, at the time of their injuries, when faced
with the “community service” scheme at issue here,
unable to pay.
3. Changed Circumstances
The District Court, in dismissing plaintiffs’
Thirteenth Amendment and TVPA claims, correctly
pointed out that the SAC does not allege that plaintiffs’
circumstances changed between when they were each
adjudged able to pay a purge amount and when they
began working at the Recycling Center under what
they purport was coercion. Plaintiffs, however, respond,
also correctly, that they were not required to allege
as much in their complaint, as such facts are required
only to overcome the affirmative defense of issue
preclusion, and “‘[u]nder Federal Rule of Civil Proce-
App.12a
dure 8, a complaint need not anticipate or overcome
affirmative defenses’ to state a claim for relief and
defeat a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss.” Pls.’ Br. at
21 (quoting Schmidt v. Skolas, 770 F.3d 241, 248 (3d
Cir. 2014).
Although they do not allege changed circumstances
in their complaint, the facts they do allege support
no less than the inference that when faced with the
choice of working at the Recycling Center, serving
their contempt sentence, or paying their purge amount,
plaintiffs were unable to pay. Plaintiffs allege that
they worked at the Center because it was the only
way they could qualify for work release, without
which they could not pay their child support debt
and regain their freedom. For just five dollars per
day—approximately sixty-two-and-a-half cents per
hour—they separated trash and recyclables on conveyor
belts, frequently breaking out in skin rashes, suffering
wounds from sharp pieces of glass, and vomiting
from the stench of their abhorrent working conditions,
which includes working in 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
App. 132–33 ¶¶ 166–75. The Center provides them
with unsanitary toilets that have been out of order
and uncleaned for months to relieve themselves and
takes away their food as punishment for working too
slowly. Id. “[E]vidence of . . . extremely poor working
conditions is relevant to corroborate disputed evidence
regarding the use . . . of physical or legal coercion . . . or
the causal effect of such conduct.” United States v.
Kozminski, 487 U.S. 931, 952 (1988). “[N]o individual
who could pay his way to freedom would choose to
work in the dangerous conditions of the Recycling
Center for just five dollars per day.” CAC & ACLU
Amicus Br. at 6. Rather, the most plausible inference
App.13a
for why plaintiffs chose to work at the Recycling
Center was to access the work release program that
would pay them enough to enable them to pay their
purge and secure their freedom. Plaintiffs have thus
stated plausible facts from which it can be reasonably
inferred that they were, at the time of their injuries,
unable to pay their purge.
The District Court also erred by requiring plaintiffs
to allege why they did not request modification of
their support orders in state court. The statute at issue,
23 Pa. C.S. § 4352(a.2), expressly excludes “incarceration
for nonpayment of support” from “constitut[ing] a
material and substantial change in circumstance that
may warrant modification or termination of an order
of support where the obligor lacks verifiable income
or assets sufficient to enforce and collect amounts
due.” As plaintiffs were legally unable to have their
support orders modified or terminated for changed
circumstances stemming from incarceration for nonpayment of support, they need not plead otherwise.
The District Court thus erred by dismissing plaintiffs’ Thirteenth Amendment and TVPA claims based
on their failure to allege changed circumstances and
why they did not seek modification of their support
orders. That does not, however, end the inquiry—
plaintiffs still must state claims upon which relief can
be granted.
B. Thirteenth Amendment
Section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States states: “Neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have
App.14a
been duly convicted, shall exist within the United
States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
In Kozminski, the Supreme Court held that the
phrase “involuntary servitude,” as used in 18 U.S.C.
§ 1584 and the Thirteenth Amendment, is “limited to
cases involving the compulsion of services by the use
or threatened use of physical or legal coercion.” 487
U.S. at 948. The Court rejected the Government’s
broader proposed understanding of the phrase, which
encompassed “the compulsion of services by any
means that, from the victim’s point of view, either
leaves the victim with no tolerable alternative but to
serve the defendant or deprives the victim of the
power of choice,” because that reading “would delegate
to prosecutors and juries the inherently legislative
task of determining what type of coercive activities
are so morally reprehensible that they should be
punished as crimes.” Id. at 949.
“Modern day examples of involuntary servitude
[under the Thirteenth Amendment] have been limited
to labor camps, isolated religious sects, or forced
confinement.” Steirer v. Bethlehem Area Sch. Dist.,
987 F.2d 989, 999 (3d Cir. 1993). Thus, in Zavala v.
Wal Mart Stores Inc., where plaintiff illegal immigrants
“allege[d] that they were coerced into working by
threats to report their immigration status to
authorities,” we held that “[a]bsent some special circumstances, threats of deportation are insufficient to
constitute involuntary servitude.”6 691 F.3d 527,
6 Although Zavala involved a claim under 18 U.S.C. § 1584, the
phrase “involuntary servitude” has the same meaning in § 1584
and the Thirteenth Amendment. See Kozminski, 487 U.S. at
944–45.
App.15a
531, 541 (3d Cir. 2012). From Zavala we derive the
principle that using an otherwise legal process for a
purpose for which it was not created or intended to
be used is not, on its own, sufficient to constitute the
threat of legal sanction necessary to find a Thirteenth
Amendment violation. Here, restricting access to the
work release program and threatening plaintiffs with
serving the entirety of their otherwise legal contempt
sentences is akin to the threats of deportation in
Zavala. Because plaintiffs do not sufficiently allege
involuntary servitude, they fail to state a Thirteenth
Amendment § 1983 claim on which relief can be
granted, and we will affirm the District Court’s
dismissal of those claims.
C. TVPA
As to their TVPA claims, Plaintiffs allege three
theories:
204. During all relevant times, Defendants
attempted to and did obtain the labor of
Plaintiffs and the Rule 23 Class through
threats of continued physical restraint, specifically, by telling Debtors that if they did
not work at the Center they would remain
ineligible for work release, in violation of 15
U.S.C. § 1589(a)(1).
205. During all relevant times, Defendants
attempted to and did obtain the labor of
Plaintiffs and the Rule 23 Class through
abuse of law and/or legal process, in violation
of 15 U.S.C. § 1589(a)(3).
206. During all relevant times, Defendants
attempted to and did obtain the labor of
App.16a
Plaintiffs and the Rule 23 Class by causing
Debtors to believe that, if they did not provide labor at the Center, they would suffer
continued physical restraint without the
ability to participate in work release, in violation of 15 U.S.C. § 1589(a)(4).
App. 137.
Congress heeded the Court’s call in Kozminski
for legislative action, see 487 U.S. at 951–52, when it
passed the TVPA, which defines forced labor broader
than Kozminski’s definition of involuntary servitude
as used in the Thirteenth Amendment by criminalizing
knowingly provid[ing] or obtain[ing] the labor
or services of a person by any one of, or by
any combination of, the following means—
(1) by means of force, threats of force, physical
restraint, or threats of physical restraint to
that person or another person;
(2) by means of serious harm or threats of serious
harm to that person or another person;
(3) by means of the abuse or threatened abuse
of law or legal process; or
(4) by means of any scheme, plan, or pattern
intended to cause the person to believe that,
if that person did not perform such labor or
services, that person or another person would
suffer serious harm or physical restraint[.]
18 U.S.C § 1589(a). Specifically, subsections (2) and
(4) draw more broadly than Kozminski’s limitation to
“physical or legal coercion.” See also 22 U.S.C.
§ 7101(b)(13) (noting, in support of the TVPA’s passage,
App.17a
Kozminski’s narrow definition of involuntary servitude
and stating that “[i]nvoluntary servitude statutes are
intended to reach cases in which persons are held in
a condition of servitude through nonviolent coercion.”);
H.R. Rep. No. 106-939, at 101 (2000) (“Section 1589 will
provide federal prosecutors with the tools to combat
severe forms of worker exploitation that do not rise
to the level of involuntary servitude as defined in
Kozminski.”).
Congress also broadly defined “abuse or threatened
abuse of law or legal process” as
the use or threatened use of a law or legal
process, whether administrative, civil, or
criminal, in any manner or for any purpose
for which the law was not designed, in order
to exert pressure on another person to cause
that person to take some action or refrain
from taking some action.
18 U.S.C. § 1589(c)(1).
And Congress chose not to include the phrase
“involuntary servitude” in the TVPA. Rather, the
TVPA clearly encompasses a broad range of conduct
which is not limited, as the dissent suggests, to
‘appalling criminal conduct and shocking depravity.’”
See Dissent Op. at n.6. That range of conduct
encompasses circumstances in which the person whose
labor is being exploited is faced with any number of
choices as an alternative to working, including actual
or threatened physical restraint, serious harm, and
abuse of law or legal process. See 18 U.S.C. § 1589(a).
And the TVPA bars getting or giving labor “by any
one of, or by any combination of, the [prohibited]
means,” indicating that a victim can face more than
App.18a
a binary choice and remain protected by the statute.
Id. The TVPA’s more-expansive definitions of coercion
reflect the “increasingly subtle” ways by which labor
may be forced, United States v. Dann, 652 F.3d 1160,
1169 (9th Cir. 2011), including both physical and
“nonphysical forms of coercion,” Muchira v. Al-Rawaf,
850 F.3d 605, 617 (4th Cir. 2017).
Defendants’ conditioning of plaintiffs’ access to
the work release program (which plaintiffs allege
they needed to free themselves) on a period of nearly
free, grueling labor at the Recycling Center, is an
abuse of law or legal process under the TVPA. That
is so because it is a use of the work release program
in a manner for which it was not designed, in order
to pressure plaintiffs to work at the Center. Id. at
1589(c)(1).
Plaintiffs argue that
Pennsylvania law authorizes state correctional
facilities to implement and operate work‐
release programs, which enable inmates to
temporarily leave their correctional facility to
work in the community. But these programs
must serve several statutory purposes (and
only those purposes): to promote “accountability of offenders to their community,” to
provide “opportunities for offenders to
enhance their ability to become contributing
members of the community,” and to “protect
society.” 42 Pa. Stat. and Cons. Stat.
§ 9803(1)-(4). Here, the County operated its
work-release program in a manner directly
at odds with these purposes, manipulating
the qualification standards for work-release
eligibility solely to gain a pecuniary benefit.
App.19a
Pls.’ Br. at 31. No defendant challenges this argument.
And the placement of Section 9813, “Work release or
other court order and purposes,” in Title 42, Chapter
98, “County Intermediate Punishment”—which also
includes Section 9803, “Purpose,” the Section relied
on by plaintiffs—indicates that Section 9803’s stated
purposes govern county jail work release programs
like that which plaintiffs sought to participate in here.
Section 9803 states in full:
County intermediate punishment programs
shall be developed, implemented and operated
for the following purposes:
(1) To protect society and promote efficiency and
economy in the delivery of corrections services.
(2) To promote accountability of offenders to
their local community.
(3) To fill gaps in local correctional systems and
address local needs through expansion of
punishment and services available to the
court.
(4) To provide opportunities for offenders who
demonstrate special needs to receive services
which enhance their ability to become
contributing members of the community.
42 Pa. Stat. and Cons. Stat. § 9803.
Again, no defendant contends that conditioning
access to work release on a period of dangerous,
nearly unpaid labor serves any of those purposes.
Rather, the nearly free labor for most of the grunt
work at a joint public/private profit-seeking operation
seems to be the point. The Professional Service
App.20a
Operating Agreement between the Corporation and
the Municipal Authority states that the “Authority
shall use its best efforts to . . . provide [the Corporation]
with the same number of Prisoners from the
Lackawanna County Prison that have historically
worked at the Center as part of their work release
program as security requirements dictate.” App. 150.
Plaintiffs allege that “the only individuals typically
performing this work are those from the Prison. The
Center does not employ hourly-paid workers to
regularly perform this work.” App. 133 ¶ 176. And
under the Operating Agreement, “the Authority shall
retain the lesser of[ ] all revenues or the first $60,000.00
of gross revenue.” App. 148. So long as the Center
brings in more than $60,000, the Corporation and
the Authority share the profits earned by exploiting
plaintiffs’ and their purported class members’ nearly
free labor—labor which plaintiffs purport to have
provided so as to be eligible to later access the work
release program, earn real wages, pay their purges,
and free themselves from civil incarceration.
That is a clear example of “the use . . . of a law
or legal process . . . in a[ ] manner or for any purpose
for which the law was not designed, in order to exert
pressure on another person to cause that person to
take some action,” which the TVPA defines as an
abuse of law or legal process. 18 U.S.C. § 1589(c)(1);
see id. § 1589(a)(3) (proscribing the obtaining or providing of labor or services by means of the abuse of
law or legal process); see also United States v.
Calimlim, 538 F.3d 706, 713 (7th Cir. 2008) (“[T]he
immigration laws do not aim to help employers retain
secret employees by threats of deportation, and so
their ‘warnings’ about the consequences were directed
App.21a
to an end different from those envisioned by the law
and were thus an abuse of the legal process. See
Restatement (Second) of Torts § 682. The warnings
therefore fit within the scope of § 1589(3).”). Of course,
plaintiffs do not have an independent due process or
state-created liberty interest in access to a work
release program in which they have not yet been
placed. See Powell v. Weiss, 757 F.3d 338, 342– 46
(3d Cir. 2014). But they have a statutory right to be
free from having their labor knowingly coerced via,
inter alia, the abuse of law or legal process.
The TVPA also proscribes providing or obtaining
labor “by any one of, or by any combination of,” the
proscribed means. 18 U.S.C. § 1589(a). That includes
(1) serious harm, such as “withholding basic necessities
like food” if they did not work efficiently enough at
the Recycling Center, see Barrientos v. CoreCivic,
Inc., 951 F.3d 1269, 1273 (11th Cir. 2020); (2) physical
restraint, like plaintiffs allege they faced (albeit pursuant to a legal order) if they were unable to access
the work release program to pay their purge; and (3)
abuse of law or legal process, like conditioning access
to a work release program on the furnishing of a
period of nearly free labor. Plaintiffs have thus sufficiently pleaded that their labor was provided and
obtained by a combination of means prohibited by
the TVPA, 18 U.S.C. § 1589.
Several defendants also contest whether they,
specifically, can be held liable. The Authority first
argues that
Child Support Debtors offend the intent and
purpose of the TVPA by essentially
analogizing their situations to the serious
cases of physical and sexual exploitation of
App.22a
trafficked woman and children intended to
be protected by the act. Child Support
Debtors were lawfully sentenced to a term of
imprisonment where eligibility for traditional
work release was lawfully conditioned upon
community service. Court ordered Community
service is not human trafficking, and the
TVPA was never intended to criminalize or
impose liability upon governmental, municipal, and private entities and individuals
who either offer inmates the opportunity to
complete community service or provide a
means to actually complete community service.
Auth Br. at 21–22.
But despite its legislative history, the TVPA is
not limited to “serious cases of physical and sexual
exploitation of trafficked woman and children.” Id.
Rather, it applies to “[w]hoever” falls within the
reach of its plain text. 18 U.S.C. § 1589; see Gonzalez
v. CoreCivic, Inc., 986 F.3d 536, 539 (5th Cir. 2021)
(cleaned up) (holding that § 1589(a) applies to a federally regulated work program in a privately operated
federal immigration detention facility because “legislative history cannot muddy the meaning of clear statutory language”); Barrientos, 951 F.3d at 1276–77
(same). Just because the County and its Municipal
Authority purport to operate community service and
work release programs in compliance with Pennsylvania law does not mean that they are precluded
from liability for those programs’ TVPA violations.
The Authority and the Corporation’s contentions
that their alleged conduct was not proscribed by the
TVPA similarly fail. The TVPA subjects to liability
not only “[w]hoever knowingly provides or obtains
App.23a
the labor or services of a person by any one of, or by
any combination of, the” proscribed means, but also
“[w]hoever knowingly benefits, financially or by
receiving anything of value, from participation in a
venture which has engaged in the providing or
obtaining of labor or services by any of the [proscribed]
means . . . , knowing or in reckless disregard of the
fact that the venture has engaged in the providing or
obtaining of labor or services by any of such means.”
18 U.S.C. § 1589(a), (b). Plaintiffs argue that at
minimum, they have plausibly alleged a beneficiary/
venture claim as to the Authority, the Corporation,
and the DeNaples brothers.
The alleged venture starts with the County’s
policy requiring child support debtor contemnors to
work half of their sentences at the Corporation if
they want to qualify for work release—which plaintiffs
contend they depend on to earn money to free themselves from physical restraint in the form of civil contempt incarceration. That is an abuse of law or legal
process as defined by the TVPA.
The County provides the debtors’ labor to the
Corporation via the Operating Agreement between
the County’s Municipal Authority and the Corporation,
which states that the “Authority shall use its best
efforts to . . . provide [the Center] with the same number
of Prisoners from the Lackawanna County Prison
that have historically worked at the Center as part of
their work release program as security requirements
dictate.” App. 150. Plaintiffs sufficiently allege that
the Authority and the Corporation, as parties to the
contract, knowingly benefited from its provisions,
including the providing of debtors’ labor to the Corporation. See App. 134 ¶¶ 183–84 (allegations about
App.24a
reduced operating costs benefitting venture defendants).
Plaintiffs also state sufficient facts supporting
the reasonable inference that the Authority and the
Corporation knew or should have known that the
venture used prohibited means to obtain or provide
labor. Plaintiffs allege extremely poor working conditions and direct on-site supervision by County and
Corporation employees. See Kozminski, 487 U.S. at
952 (stating that “extremely poor working conditions
are relevant to . . . the use or threatened use of physical
or legal coercion, the defendant’s intention in using
such means, or the casual effect of such conduct.”).7
It is quite plausible to infer from those facts that it
was apparent to those employees overseeing plaintiffs’
work that “no individual who could pay his way to
freedom would choose to work in the dangerous conditions of the Recycling Center for just five dollars per
day.” CAC & ACLU Amicus Br. at 6. Thus, plaintiffs
have stated facts supporting the plausible inference
that the Corporation should have known that those
prisoners working at the Center, including plaintiffs,
were made to do so by prohibited means.
7 The dissent’s description of Plaintiffs’ working conditions as
“colorful descriptions of ‘sorting through trash’” and “dirty,
difficult, and demanding” work fails to accurately reflect what
Plaintiffs’ allege has occurred. One can celebrate and recognize
the importance of blue-collar jobs and also point out working
conditions that most workers would find repugnant and would
serve as the basis for a TVPA claim—i.e., getting paid less than
six dollars per day, having your meals taken away if you do not
work hard enough, lacking protective equipment or failing to
have basic sanitary items like a functioning toilet.
App.25a
And though the County Municipal Authority did
not directly oversee plaintiffs’ labor at the Center,
the facts alleged suggest the inference that it knew
about the venture’s use of prohibited labor. The
Authority is the party that contracted to provide prison
labor to the Corporation. As the provider of the
prisoners, it is reasonable to infer that the Authority
knew that “a significant number of the prisoners
supplied by the Authority to LRCI for work at the
Center have been placed in the Prison following civil
contempt proceedings for failure to pay child support.” App. 130 ¶ 145. And additionally it can be
inferred—from several of the Authority’s obligations
in the Operating Agreement, including to “(1) cooperate
with Operator in effectuating the transition by providing a transition team to meet with Operator to
plan the transition; (2) provide any and all necessary
books and records, customer lists, vendor lists, sale
invoices, purchase invoices, payroll records, etc.[; and]
(3) provide Operator with the same number of
Prisoners from the Lackawanna County Prison that
have historically worked at the Center as part of
their work release program”—that before the Corporation agreed to operate the Center, the Authority
itself operated the Center primarily with prison
labor. App. 150. There is no reason to think that the
disgusting and dangerous nature of the work at the
Center was any different before the Corporation took
control. Plaintiffs have alleged sufficient factual matter
to support the reasonable inference that the Authority
knew that plaintiffs’ (and other contemnors’) work at
the Center was obtained and provided by means
prohibited by the TVPA—that is, threat of physical
restraint and abuse of law or legal process. Thus,
App.26a
plaintiffs have stated a TVPA claim as to the County,
the Authority, and the Corporation.
The claims as to the DeNaples brothers are
more tenuous. Plaintiffs state plausible facts alleging
that the DeNaples brothers benefitted from and participated in the venture and generally allege that
“Defendants were aware of Debtors’ work at the
Center,” App. 134 ¶ 181, but they do not state any
facts supporting that general conclusion, nor from
which the conclusion could be reasonably inferred.
See Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 686–87 (2009)
(“Rule 8 does not empower respondent to plead the
bare elements of his cause of action, affix the label
‘general allegation,’ and expect his complaint to survive
a motion to dismiss.”).8
Accordingly, plaintiffs’ TVPA claims against the
County, the Authority, and the Corporation should
not have been dismissed, but dismissal of their TVPA
claims against the DeNaples brothers was appropriate.
D. RICO
The RICO Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1962(c), states that
It shall be unlawful for any person employed
by or associated with any enterprise engaged
in, or the activities of which affect, interstate
8 As stated in footnote five, Congress amended the TVPA on
January 5, 2023. See Pub. L. No. 117-347, 136 Stat 6199, 6200.
The 2023 TVPA amendment adds civil liability for anyone who
“attempts or conspires to benefit” from a TVPA violation. Even
if this applies retroactively, it neither alters the requirement
that the defendant “knew or should have known” that the venture
violated the TVPA nor our conclusion that pleadings as to the
DeNaples brothers fail for this reason.
App.27a
or foreign commerce, to conduct or participate,
directly or indirectly, in the conduct of such
enterprise’s affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity or collection of unlawful debt.
Section 1961(1) defines “racketeering activity” to
include “any act which is indictable under any of the
following provisions of title 18, United States Code:
. . . sections 1581-1592 (relating to peonage, slavery,
and trafficking in persons).” And § 1964(c) provides a
civil remedy for “[a]ny person injured in his business
or property by reason of a violation of section 1962.”
The SAC alleges that all defendants violated
RICO by way of their alleged TVPA violations. The
District Court dismissed the RICO claims against
the Corporation because it found plaintiffs failed to
plausibly allege a predicate TVPA violation. And the
Court dismissed the RICO claims against the DeNaples
brothers because the facts alleged in the SAC “are
not sufficient to establish that Louis and Dominick
DeNaples personally—separate and apart from their
roles as corporate officers—’conducted or participated
in the conduct of the enterprise’s affairs, not just
their own affairs.’” App. 66–67 (quoting Cedric Kushner
Promotions, Ltd. v. King, 533 U.S. 158, 162 (2001)).
We agree that plaintiffs’ RICO claims against
the DeNaples brothers fail, but for a different reason—
because plaintiffs’ predicate TVPA claims against
them fail. However, plaintiffs’ RICO claims against
the Corporation survive. The Corporation contends
that plaintiffs have failed to allege that the Corporation
engaged in the alleged TVPA violations. But, for the
same reason that plaintiffs have sufficiently alleged
predicate TVPA venture liability as to the Corporation,
they have sufficiently alleged predicate RICO liability
App.28a
as to the Corporation. The allusion to an argument
that TVPA venture liability is not a predicate RICO
offense has no basis in law. And the Corporation contracting for, and allegedly overseeing, plaintiffs’ labor,
in order to operate the Recycling Center for its and
the County/Authority’s profit, indicates that the
Corporation “participated in the ‘operation or
management’” of the RICO enterprise—here, the same
as the TVPA venture described above—“through a
pattern of racketeering activity.” See In re Ins.
Brokerage Antitrust Litig., 618 F.3d 300, 372 (3d Cir.
2010).
E. FLSA & Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act
Plaintiffs contend that the Recycling Center, the
County, and the Authority violated the FLSA’s minimum wage protections, 29 U.S.C. § 206(a)(1)(C), and
the Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act, 43 Pa. Stat.
and Cons. Stat. § 333.104(a.1),9 by paying plaintiffs
sixty-three cents an hour to work at the Recycling
Center.
The District Court disagreed, relying on the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals’ rule
that a prerequisite to finding that an inmate
has “employee” status under the FLSA is
that the prisoner has freely contracted with a
non-prison employer to sell his labor. Under
this analysis, where an inmate participates
in a non-obligatory work release program
in which he is paid by an outside employer,
9 This analysis also applies to plaintiffs’ Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act claims. See Commonwealth v. Stuber, 822 A.2d
870, 873 (Pa. Commw. Ct. 2003).
App.29a
he may be able to state a claim under the
FLSA for compensation at the minimum
wage. However, where the inmate’s labor is
compelled and/or where any compensation
he receives is set and paid by his custodian,
the prisoner is barred from asserting a claim
under the FLSA, since he is definitively
not an “employee.” At the pleading stage,
this means that a federal prisoner seeking
to state a claim under the FLSA must allege
that his work was performed without legal
compulsion and that his compensation was
set and paid by a source other than the
Bureau of Prisons itself. Absent such allegations, prison labor is presumptively not
“employment” and thus does not fall within
the ambit of the FLSA.
Henthorn v. Dep’t of Navy, 29 F.3d 682, 686–87 (D.C.
Cir. 1994). The Court held that plaintiffs’ FLSA
claims failed this test (1) because plaintiffs alleged
that their labor was compelled, and thus it could not
be voluntary—despite the Court previously discrediting
plaintiffs’ allegations of compulsion in order to dismiss
their TVPA and Thirteenth Amendment claims10—
10 In order to conclude that plaintiffs had not sufficiently
alleged that their work was voluntary, the District Court
handwaved its earlier discrediting of plaintiffs’ claims of
compulsion and concluded that they had voluntarily chosen to
work. But if the Court found implausible plaintiffs’ allegations
that their work was involuntary, then it had decided their work
was voluntary, and could not dismiss their FLSA claims for failure to sufficiently allege voluntariness.
As the Recycling Center acknowledges, parties “can plead facts
in the alternative, and under Fed. R. Civ. P. 8, a party may
state as many separate claims or defenses as it has, regardless
App.30a
and (2) because plaintiffs alleged that the Authority
and the County, the latter of which was their jailer,
set their pay. We will reverse, because plaintiffs have
alleged sufficient plausible facts to state a claim that
they are employees and that the County, its Municipal
Authority, and the Corporation are their joint
employers.
1. Joint Employment
The FLSA’s minimum wage provisions apply to
those that fall under the statutory definition of
“employees” and “employers.” 29 U.S.C. § 206. The
FLSA defines “employee” as “any individual employed
by an employer,” “employ” as “to suffer or permit to
work,” and “employer” as any “person,” which
encompasses an “individual, partnership, association,
corporation, business trust, legal representative, or
any organized group of persons” acting “directly or
indirectly in the interest of an employer in relation to
an employee and includes a public agency.” 29 U.S.C.
§ 203(a), (d), (e)(1), (g).
of consistency.” Corp. Br. at 28 n.13. And it is true that plaintiffs cannot assert contradictory factual allegations that are not
legitimately in doubt. See id. But whether plaintiffs’ work was
involuntary is not a fact; it is a mixed question of law and fact
which is so in doubt that the District Court already denied it.
The Court cannot then turn around and say plaintiffs did not
allege the very thing the Court concluded had to be true—that
plaintiffs’ work was voluntary.
Of course, plaintiffs cannot prevail on the merits on both their
TVPA claims, which require some degree of involuntary work, and
their FLSA claims, which require that they worked voluntarily.
But that does not bar plaintiffs from presenting both theories to
a factfinder who can conclude whether the facts prove that
plaintiffs’ work was voluntary or involuntary.
App.31a
The FLSA defines employer and employee broadly
“and with ‘striking breadth.’” In re Enter. Rent-A-Car
Wage & Hour Emp. Pracs. Litig., 683 F.3d 462, 467
(3d Cir. 2012) (quoting Rutherford Food Corp. v.
McComb, 331 U.S. 722, 730 (1947); Donovan v.
DialAmerica Mktg., Inc., 757 F.2d 1376, 1382 (3d Cir.
1985) (“Congress and the courts have both recognized
that, of all the acts of social legislation, the Fair
Labor Standards Act has the broadest definition of
‘employee.’”). That is because the FLSA “is part of the
large body of humanitarian and remedial legislation
enacted during the Great Depression, and has been
liberally interpreted.” Brock v. Richardson, 812 F.2d
121, 123 (3d Cir. 1987). “The Supreme Court has
even gone so far as to acknowledge that the FLSA’s
definition of an employer is ‘the broadest definition
that has ever been included in any one act.’” In re
Enter. Litig., 683 F.3d at 467–68 (quoting United
States v. Rosenwasser, 323 U.S. 360, 363 n.3 (1945)).
Moreover, circuit courts have consistently held that
prisoners as a class are not exempted from FLSA
coverage. Henthorn, 29 F.3d at 685 (citing Vanskike
v. Peters, 974 F.2d 806, 808 (7th Cir. 1992)). Congress
has laid out “an extensive list of workers who are
exempted from FLSA coverage” that does not include
prisoners, so it would be an “encroachment upon
legislative prerogative for a court to hold that a class
of unlisted workers is excluded from the Act.” Carter
v. Dutchess Cmty. Coll., 735 F.2d 8, 13 (2d Cir. 1984).
FLSA coverage is a highly factual inquiry that requires
consideration of “the circumstances of the whole
activity . . . rather than any one particular factor.”
DialAmerica Mktg., 757 F.2d at 1382 (citing Rutherford
Food Corp., 331 U.S. at 730). Accordingly, the FLSA
employer/ employee determinations must be made in
App.32a
light of the “economic reality” of the parties’ relationship. Goldberg v. Whitaker House Co-op., Inc., 366
U.S. 28, 33 (1961).
In In re Enterprise Litigation, this Court set out
the test for whether a defendant is a joint employer.
“[D]oes the alleged employer have: (1) authority to
hire and fire employees; (2) authority to promulgate
work rules and assignments, and set conditions of
employment, including compensation, benefits, and
hours; (3) day-to-day supervision, including employee
discipline; and (4) control of employee records, including
payroll, insurance, taxes, and the like.” 683 F.3d at
469. The Court “emphasize[d], however, that these
factors do not constitute an exhaustive list of all
potentially relevant facts, and should not be blindly
applied.” Id. (emphasis in original) (cleaned up). We
continued that “courts should not be confined to
narrow legalistic definitions and must instead consider
all the relevant evidence, including evidence that
does not fall neatly within one of the above factors.”
Id. (cleaned up). And we noted that
this is consistent with the FLSA regulations
regarding joint employment, which state
that a joint employment relationship will
generally be considered to exist where the
employers are not completely disassociated
with respect to the employment of a particular
employee and may be deemed to share
control of the employee, directly or indirectly,
by reason of the fact that one employer
controls, is controlled by, or is under common
control with another employer.
Id. at 468 (cleaned up).
App.33a
In Tourscher v. McCullough, we held that both
pre-trial and convicted inmates are “not entitled to
minimum wages under the FLSA” for “intra-prison
work.” 184 F.3d 236, 243– 44 (3d Cir. 1999). To reach
that conclusion as to convicted inmates, we agreed
with the ten other circuits that had addressed the
question and quoted analysis from the Second Circuit
Court of Appeals: “The relationship is not one of employment; prisoners are taken out of the national
economy; prison work is often designed to train and
rehabilitate; prisoners’ living standards are determined
by what the prison provides; and most such labor
does not compete with private employers.” Danneskjold
v. Hausrath, 82 F.3d 37, 42 (2d Cir. 1996). And we
extended that rationale to pre-trial detainees by
relying on analysis from the Eleventh Circuit Court
of Appeals that
The purpose of the FLSA is to protect the
standard of living and general well-being of
the American worker. Because the correctional facility meets [plaintiff’s] needs,
his standard of living is protected. In sum
. . . [plaintiff]’s situation does not bear any
indicia of traditional free-market employment contemplated under the FLSA.
Villarreal v. Woodham, 113 F.3d 202, 207 (11th Cir.
1997) (cleaned up).
Plaintiffs’ work, however, was not the sort of
“intra-prison work” for which inmates are categorically
“not entitled to minimum wages under the FLSA.”
Tourscher, 184 F.3d at 243–44. The Recycling Center
is located at an off-site facility to which plaintiffs and
their purported class members were transported by
County jail guards. The facility is owned by the
App.34a
County Municipal Authority and operated, for the
most part, by the Corporation, pursuant to an
Operating Agreement between the Authority and the
Corporation. Plaintiffs’ off-site work, not done for the
benefit of the jail but rather for the benefit of the
public-private partnership between the Municipal
Authority and the Recycling Center, is markedly
different than inmates doing work within a facility
“producing goods and services used by the prison”
(like plaintiff in Tourscher’s work in the prison
cafeteria).
The Tourscher, Danneskjold, and Villarreal opinions are limited to intra-prison labor, and each acknowledge and distinguish the Fifth Circuit Court of
Appeals’ opinion in Watson v. Graves, which held
that the FLSA applied to convicted inmates allowed
to work for a private construction company outside of
the jail. 909 F.2d 1549, 1553–56 (5th Cir. 1990).
Watson applied the traditional four-factor economic
reality test originated by the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals in Bonnette v. California Health and Welfare
Agency, which is slightly less detailed than our
Enterprise test: “whether the alleged employer (1)
had the power to hire and fire the employees, (2)
supervised and controlled employee work schedules
or conditions of employment, (3) determined the rate
and method of payment, and (4) maintained employment records.” 704 F.2d 1465, 1470.
By contrast, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in
Henthorn declined to apply the Bonnette test to
incarcerated people at all and rejected the relevance
of whether they work inside or outside of the prison
or for public or private employers, instead asking
whether (1) an inmate’s labor is compelled or voluntary
App.35a
and (2) their wages are set and paid by their custodian
or an outside employer. 29 F.3d at 685–87. The plaintiff in Henthorn was a convicted federal prisoner,
incarcerated at a federal prison on a naval base, and
assigned to work on the grounds of the base outside
of the prison. Id. at 683. The D.C. Circuit did not
apply the traditional Bonnette economic reality test
because “the prisoner is legally compelled to part
with his labor as part of a penological work assignment”
and “is truly an involuntary servant to whom no
compensation is actually owed.” Id. at 686 (citing
Vanskike, 974 F.2d at 809 (“Thirteenth Amendment’s
specific exclusion of prisoner labor supports the idea
that a prisoner performing required work for the
prison is actually engaged in involuntary servitude,
not employment.”) and Wilks v. District of Columbia,
721 F. Supp. 1383, 1384 (D.D.C. 1989) (convicted
“inmate labor belongs to the penal institution and
inmates do not lose their primary status as inmates
just because they perform work”)).
As a preliminary matter, none of those cases
involve non-convicted inmates like plaintiffs here.
And the Henthorn test’s muddled application to this
case proves it too narrow and rigid to serve the
FLSA’s purposes.
As to the first factor, plaintiffs allege that their
work was coerced, but as defendants argue, plaintiffs
chose to work at the Recycling Center rather than
merely complete their contempt sentences. Plaintiffs’
work, as alleged, sits on a razor-thin line between
involuntary and voluntary, and whether it falls to
either side should be decided on the facts. And no one
can say that not convicted plaintiffs’ work belongs to
the County or that the Thirteenth Amendment excludes
App.36a
their labor from the prohibition on involuntary
servitude.
The second factor—does the custodian or a private
party set and provide pay?—is similarly unclear.
Plaintiffs allege that the County and its Municipal
Authority set inmate pay. While the County alone
setting plaintiffs’ pay may seem to weigh in favor of
finding that they were not employees (because the
County was plaintiffs’ custodian), that is complicated
in a case like this, where the County and its Municipal Authority financially benefitted from plaintiffs’
labor. Further, plaintiffs are silent as to who actually
paid them, and the County Municipal Authority
seems to contend in its briefing that the Recycling
Center paid them. See Auth. Br. at 17 (“The Authority
did not set or pay any employee wages to either
inmates completing community service at the recycling
center or standard employees directly hired to work
at the recycling center. All wages and compensation
were managed and paid by the Center, out of its own
contractual consideration.”). And even if the County
set and provided plaintiffs’ pay, it did so in furtherance of its business relationship with the Recycling
Center Corporation, with whom it operated the Center
as a joint public-private venture (through the auspices
of the Municipal Authority), to whom it contracted
out plaintiffs’ work as off-site sub-minimum wage
labor, and who plaintiffs allege jointly controlled
plaintiffs’ work along with County jail guards. There
is a real difference in the economic relationships at
play when a custodial jurisdiction receives an economic
benefit for its not convicted wards’ work.
App.37a
Application of the Enterprise test proves far
more useful. Plaintiffs allege the following facts relevant
to the Enterprise factors:
133. Pursuant to the Operating Agreement,
County personnel select Debtors to work at
the Center.
134. Upon information and belief, County
personnel and LRCI personnel have authority
to terminate Debtors from their assignments
at the Center.
135. Defendants LRCI and the Authority
jointly determine work rules and assignments.
136. Defendants LRCI, the County, and the
Authority jointly determine the days and
hours during which Debtors will work at
the Center.
137. County personnel–specifically, prison
guards–transport Debtors to the Center consistent with agreed-upon work schedules.
138. The prison guards remain on site at the
Center to supervise Debtors and ensure
security.
139. The prison guards and Center employees
jointly supervise Debtors’ work at the Center,
including but not limited to ensuring that
prisoners working on the line worked quickly.
140. If prisoners on the line did not move
quickly enough or failed to remove all the
glass from the conveyor belt, the prison
guards or Center staff punished them by,
App.38a
for example, omitting portions of their
prison-provided lunch.
141. Staff at the Center direct Debtors’ work,
including but not limited to assigning them
to workstations, instructing them how to
perform their tasks, and authorizing them
to take breaks.
142. The Authority and the County set
Debtors’ pay at $5 per day.
143. Under the terms of the Operating Agreement, LRCI has the authority to set the rates
of compensation of any employees of the
Center.
App. 129–30 ¶¶ 133–43. These all indicate plaintiffs’
joint employment by the County, its Municipal
Authority, and the Corporation.
Also relevant to the economic reality of plaintiffs’
relationships with the County, the Municipal Authority,
and the Corporation, is the fact that the County and
Authority contracted out plaintiffs’ work to the Corporation for a joint economic benefit. Plaintiffs and
their cohort did the facility’s integral and necessary
grunt work of hand-sorting garbage in lieu of the
Corporation employing hourly-paid workers. That
work “benefited Defendants by reducing the need for
paid employees and artificially reducing their labor
costs through access to a steady supply of submarket rate labor for which Defendants did not provide unemployment and health insurance, worker’s
compensation, minimum wages, and/or overtime
premiums.” App. 138 ¶ 217. That is true as to the
County, which had custody of plaintiffs and provided
their labor, and its Municipal Authority, which owned
App.39a
the facility out of which the Recycling Center ran and
shared the profits that resulted from its operation. It
is also true for the Corporation, which contracted
with the County’s Municipal Authority to run the
Recycling Center. Pursuant to the Operating
Agreement between the Recycling Center and the
Authority, the “Authority shall use its best efforts
to . . . provide [the Center] with the same number of
Prisoners from the Lackawanna County Prison that
have historically worked at the Center as part of
their work release program as security requirements
dictate.” App. 150. As such, the Recycling Center
relied on plaintiffs and other inmates to do work that
other recycling facilities had to hire people to do.
The economic reality of plaintiffs’ relationship
with the County, its Municipal Waste Management
Authority, and the Corporation is only truly understood
by looking at all of those facts, which resemble an
employee-joint employer relationship far more than
the typical forced prison work program.
The purposes underlying the FLSA bolster
our conclusion. “The central aim of the Act
was to achieve, in those industries within
its scope, certain minimum labor standards.”
Mitchell v. Robert DeMario Jewelry, Inc.,
361 U.S. 288, 292, 80 S. Ct. 332, 335, 4
L.Ed.2d 323 (1960). Congress sought to correct labor conditions that are “detrimental to
the minimum standard of living necessary
for health, efficiency, and general well-being
of workers.” 29 U.S.C. § 202(a). In addition,
the FLSA was intended to prevent unfair
competition in commerce from the use of
underpaid labor. 29 U.S.C. § 202(a)(3).
App.40a
Vanskike, 974 F.2d at 810.
While plaintiffs’ basic needs were provided for
by Lackawanna County, plaintiffs allege that they
were only incarcerated because they were unable to
pay their purges. They needed money for a reason
that the typical incarcerated person does not: to
satisfy their contempt orders and secure their freedom
from incarceration. Thus, while courts may conclude
that typical prisoners do not need a minimum wage
because they are fed and housed by the state, plaintiffs
here had a concrete, important financial objective
that they contend was the reason they worked at the
Center. And as to competition in commerce, the Corporation here surely competed with other local and
regional recycling facilities who had to hire employees; the Corporation, on the other hand, got an
unfair advantage in the form of nearly free labor
funneled from its business partner, the County—who
stood to profit from the Corporation’s success. Plaintiffs’
work at the Center mirrors the work in Watson,
where the defendant had access to a “pool of workers”
whom he paid “token wages” far below the minimum
wage, and “incurred no expenses for overtime, unemployment insurance, social security,” etc. and did not
need to worry about competition. Watson, 909 F.2d at
1555. The situations in Watson and here are “the very
problems that FLSA was drafted to prevent—grossly
unfair competition among employers and employees
alike.” Id.
We are not persuaded that the passage of the
Ashurst-Sumners Act of 1935, see 18 U.S.C. §§ 1761–
62, is reason to preclude from FLSA protection
prisoners who partake in labor outside prison walls
and who perform labor that does not benefit the
App.41a
prison. While the Ashurst-Sumners Act “regulates
the interstate transportation of prison-made goods to
avoid competition between low-cost prison labor and
free labor,” Danneskjold, 82 F.3d at 42, “prison labor
might implicate unfair-competition concerns when
prisoners are paid below minimum wage to work for
‘a company that was not providing services to the
prison and that competed with companies required to
pay wages set by the FLSA.’” Gamble v. Minnesota
State-Operated Servs., 32 F.4th 666, 671 (8th Cir.
2022) (quoting Danneskjold, 82 F.3d at 44). That is
arguably the situation at hand. As stated above, the
Corporation competed with other recycling facilities
that had to hire employees and did not get the
benefit of nearly free labor. Plaintiffs’ work was done
off-site and for the benefit of a public-private
partnership, unlike in Harker where the prisoners
worked at a workshop located in the prison and
produced goods that reached the open market in
limited ways. See Harker v. State Indus., 990 F.2d
131, 136 (4th Cir. 1993). Plaintiffs’ work was also not
that of an inmate performing work assignments,
such as janitor or kitchen worker, directly for the
benefit of the prison. See Vanskike, 974 F.2d at 812.
Here, the benefits of Plaintiffs’ labor do not redound
to the prison. The existence of the Ashurst-Sumners
Act does not cause us to ignore the stark differences
between work done for the prison’s benefit and outside
work done at least partially to benefit a private corporation.
Plaintiffs thus sufficiently allege that, while
working at the Center, they were the employees of the
County, the Authority, and the Corporation, acting
as joint employers.
App.42a
2. Statute of Limitations
The Corporation also argues that Burrell and
Huzzard’s claims are barred by the FLSA’s statute of
limitations, as their violations occurred in 2014 and
2013, respectively, and they did not raise their FLSA
claims when plaintiffs filed their Second Amended
Complaint in 2019.
Plaintiffs contend that the statute of limitations
should be equitably tolled because defendants failed
to conspicuously post required notices to alert them
to their rights as employees and “actively misled
Plaintiffs and members of the FLSA Collective regarding the nature of their relationship with Defendants by
suggesting to them that they were not employees
with rights but rather prisoners whom Defendants
could force to perform work as punishment and as a
condition of their liberty,” and “[t]hese actions prevented
Plaintiffs and those similarly situated from understanding that they had a right to federal minimum wage
during the time they worked at the Center.” App. 127
¶¶ 118–119.
While we have not decided whether an employer’s
failure to post required FLSA notices, by itself, tolls
the statute of limitations, at least one other Court of
Appeals has. See Cruz v. Maypa, 773 F.3d 138, 146–
47 (4th Cir. 2014). In Cruz, the Fourth Circuit Court
of Appeals extended its prior precedent—holding
“that the 180–day filing requirement of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (“ADEA”) was tolled
by reason of the plaintiff’s employer’s failure to post
statutory notice of workers’ rights under the Act”—to
the FLSA context, because “the notice requirements
in the ADEA and the FLSA,” and their purposes,
“are almost identical,” and, unlike the ADEA, the
App.43a
FLSA lacks an administrative filing requirement. Id.
(citing Vance v. Whirlpool Corp., 716 F.2d 1010 (4th
Cir. 1983)). We have held the same in the ADEA
context, and a panel of our Court applied that holding
in the Title VII context. See Bonham v. Dresser
Indus., Inc., 569 F.2d 187, 193 (3d Cir. 1977); Hammer
v. Cardio Med. Prods., Inc., 131 F. App’x 829, 831–32
(3d Cir. 2005). And we need not categorically conclude
that failure to post notices is itself sufficient to
equitably toll the limitations period. Plaintiffs here
allege more: that defendants actively misled them by
failing to post notices and telling them that they
were not employees with rights but rather prisoners
who could be forced to work for below the minimum
wage. App. 126–27 ¶¶ 117–118. These allegations
amount to “active misleading” such that equitable
tolling applies. See Hedges v. United States, 404 F.3d
744, 751 (3d Cir. 2005).11
Accordingly, plaintiffs’ FLSA claims against the
County, the Authority, and the Corporation are not
barred by the statute of limitations.
11 Additionally, Burrell’s FLSA claim relates back to the filing of
his First Amended Complaint. His FLSA claim in the Second
Amended Complaint “arose out of the conduct, transaction, or
occurrence set out—or attempted to be set out—in the original
pleading.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 15(c)(1)(B). Burrell’s pro se First
Amended Complaint alleges that he was paid far below the
minimum wage to work full days at the Center, and that he was
told he could be treated as such because he was a prisoner.
With regard to his FLSA claim in the SAC, that satisfies Fed.
R. Civ. P. 15(c)(1)(B).
App.44a
F. Pennsylvania Wage
Collection Law
Payment
and
The Pennsylvania Wage Payment and Collection
Law requires employers to pay employees their
promised wages “in lawful money of the United
States or check.” 43 Pa. Stat. § 260.3(a). That requirement is not waivable. Id. § 260.7. The law “does
not create a right to compensation. Rather, it provides a statutory remedy when the employer breaches
a contractual obligation to pay earned wages. The
contract between the parties governs in determining
whether specific wages are earned.” Weldon v. Kraft,
Inc., 896 F.2d 793, 801 (3d Cir. 1990).
The District Court first held that the law did not
apply to plaintiffs based on its earlier conclusion that
there was not an employer-employee relationship in
the FLSA context. But it also held that even if there
was, plaintiff failed to allege an implied contract or a
breach thereof. The Court noted that while Burrell
alleged he was told by prison staff that he would
receive $5.00 a day for working at the Center, Huzzard
and Stuckey did not allege that they were told as
much, “only that they in fact received $5.00 a day
and those payments were deposited in their commissary
accounts.” App. 82. It then extrapolated from those
facts the conclusion that “[t]he Second Amended
Complaint contains no allegation that a person acting
with the authority to speak for any Defendant established that Plaintiffs would be paid $5.00 for their
services. Thus, the Court cannot infer from the
Second Amended Complaint that the parties ‘agreed
on the obligation to be incurred.’” App. 83 (quoting
Oxner v. Clivedon Nursing & Rehab. Ctr. PA, L.P.,
132 F. Supp. 3d 645, 649 (E.D. Pa. 2015)) (cleaned up).
App.45a
But the District Court’s conclusion ignores its
own acknowledgment that Burrell alleged that County
prison staff—who presumably have the authority to
speak for the County—told him that he would be
paid $5.00 a day for his work at the Center. That
directly contradicts the inference that plaintiffs fail
to allege that anyone “acting with the authority to
speak for any Defendant established that Plaintiffs
would be paid $5.00 for their services.” App. 83. That
is exactly what Burrell has alleged.
And it is no far stretch to identify an implied
agreement. Plaintiffs allege that “[t]he Authority and
the County set Debtors’ pay at $5 per day.” App. 130
¶ 142. Further, as the Authority points out in its
brief, 37 Pa. Code § 95.235(3) states that “[w]ritten
local policy must require that inmates who participate
in a work program (other than personal housekeeping
and housing area cleaning) receive compensation.
Written local policy must specify the type and amount
of compensation.” As plaintiffs allege that the County
determined what plaintiffs would be paid for their
services, and by law the County must specify that
amount in a written policy, plaintiffs allege sufficient
facts from which it can be reasonably implied that
the County’s written policy informed plaintiffs that
they would be paid $5.00 a day for their work at the
Center, which they then gave in exchange for that
money.
The problems with plaintiffs’ claims, however,
are more fundamental. The crux of their claims is
that “[p]ayment into the commissary accounts is not
equivalent to payment by lawful money of the United
States or check. Commissary accounts, among other
things, earn no interest, are tightly controlled by the
App.46a
Prison, and are subject to various mandatory deductions
by the Prison.” App. 131–32 ¶ 160. But cash and
checks, on their own, earn no interest either. Cash
and checks are also presumably contraband within
the prison, which justifies depositing plaintiffs’ pay
into their commissary accounts, just as cash and
checks would be deposited. And plaintiffs do not
allege specific deductions that they contend made
payment into their commissary accounts different
than “lawful money.” Plaintiffs thus fail to state
Pennsylvania Wage Payment and Collection Law
claims.
G. Unjust Enrichment
The District Court dismissed plaintiffs’ unjust
enrichment claim because it was pleaded as a
companion to plaintiffs’ forced labor and involuntary
servitude claims, and where the unjust enrichment
claim rests on the same improper conduct as the
underlying tort claim, the unjust enrichment claim
will rise or fall with the underlying claim. As plaintiffs’
TVPA claims survive against the County, the Authority,
and the Corporation, so do their unjust enrichment
claims.
Further, plaintiffs contend that they “plausibly
alleged the three elements of an unjust enrichment
claim, independent from their TVPA and Thirteenth
Amendment claims.” Pls.’ Br. at 53. Those three
elements are (1) conferring a benefit on defendant;
(2) defendant’s knowledge of the benefit; and (3) circumstances are such that defendant’s retention of
that benefit would be unjust. See Allegheny Gen.
Hosp. v. Philip Morris, 228 F.3d 429, 447 (3d Cir.
2000). They allege that they conferred the benefits of
App.47a
their labor by working at the Center and the resulting
lower operating costs on all defendants. They allege
all defendants knowingly obtained those benefits.
And they allege that defendants’ retention of those
benefits was not only unjust because it was the result
of plaintiffs’ unlawfully forced labor, but because
Defendants got those benefits “from an unfair competitive advantage by paying subminimum wages into
commissary accounts they tightly control.” Pls.’ Br.
at 54. That species of unjust enrichment is more akin
to a contract claim than a tort claim, and rises and
falls with their FLSA claims rather than their TVPA
claims.
As plaintiffs plausibly allege that the County, its
Municipal Authority, and the Corporation unjustly
retained the yield of their labor, whether by way of a
TVPA violation or a FLSA violation, plaintiffs’ unjust
enrichment claims on both theories survive against
those defendants.
IV. Conclusion
For the foregoing reasons, we will affirm dismissal
of plaintiffs’ Thirteenth Amendment and Pennsylvania
Wage Payment and Collection Law claims in full,
and of their TVPA and RICO claims against the
DeNaples brothers. We will reverse dismissal of their
TVPA, FLSA, Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act, and
unjust enrichment claims against the County, the
Authority, and the Corporation, and of their RICO
claims against the Corporation and remand.
App.48a
MATEY, CIRCUIT JUDGE, CONCURRING IN
PART AND DISSENTING IN PART
Choices usually come with consequences. We can
honor our obligations, pursue opportunity, make good
on our debts. Or we can walk the other way and
decline to play by the rules. Ordinarily, law fences
these two paths, rewarding industry and honesty,
penalizing irresponsibility. The majority’s decision
moves that line. While I agree Plaintiffs fail to state
claims under the original meaning of the Thirteenth
Amendment1 and the Pennsylvania Wage Payment
1 After an abhorrent chapter in our Nation’s history, the
Thirteenth Amendment confirmed the natural rights of all
persons through “a practical application of that self-evident
truth, ‘that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these
are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’” Jacobus tenBroek,
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:
Consummation to Abolition and Key to the Fourteenth Amendment, 39 Calif. L. Rev. 171, 178 (1951) (quoting Cong. Globe,
38th Cong., 2d Sess. 142 (1865) (statement of Rep. Godlove S.
Orth)). The Amendment reiterated the natural law that supports our Constitution, making slavery irreconcilable “with the
fundamental principles upon which our government rests.” Joel
Tiffany, A Treatise on the Unconstitutionality of American
Slavery (1849), reprinted in 1 The Reconstruction Amendments:
The Essential Documents 237, 237–38 (Kurt T. Lash ed., 2021)
(“All men are possessed of the same natural rights, secured by
the same natural guarantys—held by the same tenure—their
title is derived from the same source. . . . Deny these truths,
and you destroy the foundation upon which society is based.
Violate them, and you are at war with yourself, with Man and
God.”). The Amendment, rooted in “our ancient faith [that] the
just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the
governed,” recognized that slavery’s existence was “a total violation of this principle . . . [of] self government.” Abraham Lincoln,
Speech at Peoria, Illinois (Oct. 16, 1854), reprinted in 2 The
App.49a
and Collection Law, the majority rescues Plaintiffs
from their own choices by allowing a host of statutory
and common law claims. Respectfully, the District
Court’s decision dismissing the entire action got it
right. Despite having the means, Plaintiffs did not
pay child support. Despite Pennsylvania law giving
them recourse to modify that order, they filed no
petitions. Despite having the option not to, Plaintiffs
asked to work during their confinement for contempt.
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln 247, 265–66 (Roy Basler
ed., 1953). “By the law of nature all men are born free and
equal, and man has no jus dominii in man. . . . [F]or freedom is
the natural right of every man, and slavery is abridgment by
positive law.” Slavery and the Incoming Administration, in 2
Brownson’s Quarterly Review 65, 109 (1857). See also Dred
Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 624 (1857) (Curtis, J.,
dissenting) (“Slavery, being contrary to natural right, is created
only by municipal law.”). The Thirteenth Amendment codified
the truth that slavery could be treated as constitutional “only
by disregarding the plain and common-sense reading of the
Constitution itself.” Frederick Douglass, The Constitution of the
United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (1860),
reprinted in 1 The Reconstruction Amendments: The Essential
Documents 303, 308. See also Peter C. Myers, Seed-Time and
Harvest-Time: Natural Law and Rational Hopefulness in
Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times, 99 J. Afr. Am. Hist. 56 (2014),
reprinted in A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass 285,
287 (Neil Roberts ed., 2018) (“Douglass frequently invoked the
law of nature both because he was convinced of its profound
truth and also by virtue of its utility in various practical applications.”).
None of Plaintiffs’ claims approach a violation of the natural
principles guarded in the Reconstruction Amendments, nor
could the nature of their work approach the atrocities the
Thirteenth Amendment protects against. Calling what amounts
to a wage and hour dispute a violation of these laws would be a
most remarkable departure from the Amendment’s original
meaning and disrespectful to that historic achievement.
App.50a
None of these choices is disputed, none of the facts
challenged. Still, claims of forced servitude, human
trafficking, and unfair labor can now proceed. But
regrets do not demand remedies in federal court, and
the fact Plaintiffs’ choices produced unappealing
consequences does not require new definitions of
torture and labor. So I dissent in part from the
majority’s decision.
I.
This action began (and really ended) when
Plaintiffs failed to pay child support. No party argues
that the court orders directing Plaintiffs to provide
for their children were unlawful. None dispute that
Plaintiffs failed to make those payments to their
families. And there is no disagreement what happened
next: After long periods without paying, each was
cited for civil contempt. Hearings followed and a
judge found, beyond a reasonable doubt,2 that each
Plaintiff had the present ability to pay the amounts
owed to their children.3 Pay that amount, the court
ordered, or serve a fixed term in prison for contempt.
That order and those findings have never been challenged. Not at the contempt hearing. Not on appeal.
2 See Hyle v. Hyle, 868 A.2d 601, 604–05 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2005)
(“To be found in civil contempt, a party must have violated a
court order” and “the court, in imposing coercive imprisonment
for civil contempt, should set conditions for purging the contempt and effecting release from imprisonment with which it is
convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, from the totality of the evidence before it, the contemnor has the present ability to comply.”
(citations and quotations omitted)).
3 Child support payments follow guidelines based on the means
of the parent and the needs of the child. 23 Pa. C.S. § 4322(a).
App.51a
Not in a petition to modify the payments, a petition
that “may be filed at any time and shall be granted if
the requesting party demonstrates a substantial change
in circumstances.” 23 Pa. C.S. § 4352(a) (my emphasis).
In short, Plaintiffs skipped their support payments
and wound up in contempt of court. Decisions have
consequences.
So how did this turn into a federal question?
Neither Plaintiffs nor the majority are clear. “The
law in [Pennsylvania] is . . . that the trial court must
set the conditions for a purge in such a way as the
contemnor has the present ability to comply with the
order.” Hyle, 868 A.2d at 605. Meaning Plaintiffs
could have paid their debt and purged their contempt.
Or, if their circumstances shifted after the hearing,
they could have asked for relief under 23 Pa. C.S.
§ 4352(a). Why did Plaintiffs ignore these options?
The Complaint—their second—offers no answers.
Instead, there is a single statement that one Plaintiff,
“Mr. Burrell[,] did not have $2,129.34—in fact, he
had nothing close to that.” App. 115, ¶ 28. And one
other line, nearly identically worded for each Plaintiff,
noting that, “lacking any other option, [Plaintiff] was
compelled to work at the Center.” See App. 117, ¶ 36;
App. 120, ¶ 67; App. 122, ¶ 88. Allegations that fall
below the pleading standards we regularly enforce in
matters prepared by far less sophisticated counsel.
See, e.g., Fantone v. Latini, 780 F.3d 184, 193 (3d Cir.
2015) (noting that even with pro se complaints, “we
nonetheless review the pleading to ensure that it has
‘sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to state a
claim to relief that is plausible on [its] face’” (quoting
Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009))). That, as
the District Court concisely concluded, means “the
App.52a
undisturbed Court of Common Pleas orders conclusively
established that Plaintiffs were able to pay the purge
at the time of their incarceration, [and that] Plaintiffs’
conclusory assertions regarding ‘lacking any option’
but to work at the Center and Plaintiff Burrell’s
statement that he ‘did not have $2,129.43’ are not
entitled to a presumption of truth.” App. 62 (citations
omitted).
We do not face men wrongfully imprisoned. Or,
as the United States awkwardly attempted to analogize,
women abducted and forced into sex slavery. See
Oral Arg. at 34:03– 34:16 (Counsel for the United
States) (“You can imagine victims of sex trafficking
who aren’t—they aren’t—chained in the room. They’re
not locked in the basement. They could potentially
leave.”). Plaintiffs were found in willful contempt of
an order to financially support their children. With
ample process, each received an opportunity to cure
his contempt by paying what he owed. And beyond a
reasonable doubt, Plaintiffs had the ability to pay4
and avoid prison altogether.5 If all of that is wrong,
4 “[M]odification may be applied to an earlier period if the
petitioner was precluded from filing a petition for modification
by reason of a significant physical or mental disability, misrepresentation of another party or other compelling reason and if
the petitioner, when no longer precluded, promptly filed a petition.”
23 Pa. C.S. § 4352(e). True, the process expressly excludes
“incarceration for nonpayment of support.” 23 Pa. C.S. § 4352(a.2).
But the purge amount is set before surrender and calculated on
the present ability to pay. Meaning that right now, Plaintiffs
can challenge the purge amount that led to their contempt.
5 As with the District Court, we need not “determine that the
state court judgment was erroneously entered in order to grant
the requested relief.” In re Knapper, 407 F.3d 573, 581 (3d Cir.
2005) (citation omitted). “[I]f the circumstances in existence at
App.53a
Commonwealth courts were, and still are, available
to reconsider.
Properly framed, Plaintiffs’ claims should be dismissed. Instead, the majority makes room for claims
of human trafficking and unfair labor, reading new
meanings into old laws to draw conclusions reached
by no other federal circuit. That, I believe, is erroneous.
II.
Begin with the Trafficking Victims Protection
Act (“TVPA”). The TVPA prohibits “knowingly
provid[ing] or obtain[ing] the labor or services of a
person” through a host of unlawful means or
“knowingly benefit[ting]” from joining a venture involving forced labor. 18 U.S.C. § 1589(a), (b). Claims under
the TVPA usually “involve circumstances such as
squalid or otherwise intolerable living conditions,”
“threats of legal process such as arrest or deportation,”
and “exploitation of the victim’s lack of education
and familiarity with the English language, all of
which are ‘used to prevent [vulnerable] victims from
leaving and to keep them bound to their captors.’”
Muchira v. Al-Rawaf, 850 F.3d 605, 618–19 (4th Cir.
2017) (quoting United States v. Callahan, 801 F.3d
606, 619 (6th Cir. 2015)) (alteration in original).6
the time the state court entered the contempt orders changed
thereafter,” “Plaintiffs could have availed themselves of the
provisions of 23 Pa. C.S. § 4352” to modify the orders. App. 52.
6 Not surprisingly, reported TVPA decisions turn on appalling
criminal conduct and shocking depravity. See, e.g., Bistline v.
Parker, 918 F.3d 849 (10th Cir. 2019) (members of a congregation
shielded a man who engaged in child rape, forced labor, and
extortion); Ricchio v. McLean, 853 F.3d 553, 555 (1st Cir. 2017)
(Souter, J.) (prostitution scheme where “McLean physically and
App.54a
Plaintiffs allege three theories, but the majority
relies on only one: that Plaintiffs’ labor was procured
through the “abuse or threatened abuse of law or
legal process.” 18 U.S.C. § 1589(a)(3), (b). To sustain
a claim under the TVPA’s “abuse of law” clause,
Plaintiffs must plausibly allege the “use of a law or
legal process . . . in any manner or for any purpose
for which the law was not designed, in order to exert
pressure on another person to cause that person to
take some action or refrain from taking some action.”
18 U.S.C. § 1589(c)(1). Plaintiffs point to the direct
acts of the County, and the indirect beneficiaries of
those acts: the Authority, Corporation, and DeNaples.
Meaning Plaintiffs must adequately allege first, that
their work at the recycling facility was obtained
through an abuse of law and legal process, and
second, that Defendants knew, or recklessly disregarded, the fact that their labor was obtained through
sexually abused Ricchio, repeatedly raping her, starving and
drugging her, and leaving her visibly haggard and bruised”);
United States v. Callahan, 801 F.3d 606, 620 (6th Cir. 2015) (a
developmentally disabled young woman and her minor daughter
deprived of food, locked in a basement for hours on end, forced
to beat each other on camera while “Defendants threatened to
show the video to the police and Children’s Services if [the
young woman] talked to any strangers, went to her mom’s
house, or otherwise ‘messed up’”); United States v. Jungers, 702
F.3d 1066 (8th Cir. 2013) (purchasers of commercial sex acts
with children); United States v. Dann, 652 F.3d 1160 (9th Cir.
2011) (immigrant housekeeper who, among other things, was
forbidden from leaving the apartment without permission, denied
her passport, threatened with financial harm, and threatened
that her children would suffer harm if she were to leave the employment); United States v. Todd, 627 F.3d 329 (9th Cir. 2010)
(prostitution ring of young girls who were beaten, threatened,
and, in at least one instance, forced to undergo an abortion).
Sorting recyclables is nothing of the sort.
App.55a
unlawful means. The Complaint lacks any allegation,
no matter how generously construed, that plausibly
satisfies these requirements
First, there is no plausible allegation Plaintiffs
worked at the recycling facility because of an abuse
of law. Plaintiffs start generally, stating Defendants
(all of them) “force Debtors to work at the Center
before they can ‘qualify’ for work release. This means
that for potentially hundreds of Debtors, forced labor
has been the price of freedom from incarceration.”7
App. 113, ¶ 3. That “prevent[s] Debtors from earning
wages through work release that would benefit Debtors
and their children, who would receive those wages
through child support payments.” App. 113, ¶ 4.
Meaning Plaintiffs are held as captives, unable to
pay their way to freedom by earning enough to pay
their debts. Appalling, and a likely violation of the
Thirteenth Amendment, if true.
Thankfully, it is not. Because, again, Plaintiffs
have not been incarcerated as debtors and are not
ordered to work to pay their creditors. They are civil
contemnors found capable of paying child support
amounts lawfully ordered. Lost in the discussion, but
plain in the law and facts: Plaintiffs did not have to
participate in the Commonwealth’s discretionary work
release program.8 That is because the work program
7 The Complaint refers to Plaintiffs collectively as “Debtors” in
a clumsy attempt, one supposes, to imply a violation of Bearden
v. Georgia, 461 U.S. 660 (1983).
8 See 42 Pa. C.S. § 9812 (“Nothing in this chapter shall be
construed as creating an enforceable right in any person to participate in an intermediate punishment program in lieu of
incarceration.”). See also Maldonado v. Karnes, No. 3:CV-14-1330,
2014 WL 5035470, at *5 (M.D. Pa. Oct. 8, 2014) (“An inmate
App.56a
is not designed to provide Plaintiffs with an opportunity
to earn money to purge their contempt. Rather, the
work program “fills gaps in local correctional systems
and addresses local needs through expansion of
punishment and services available to the court.” 42
Pa. C. S. § 9803. Calling Plaintiffs “Debtors” in a
“prison” does not make it so.9
Second, Plaintiffs do not, and cannot, allege
Defendants knowingly benefitted from an abuse of
law, 18 U.S.C. § 1589(b), or a “venture” that they
“knew or should have known [was] engaged in an act
in violation of” the TVPA, 18 U.S.C. § 1595(a).10 See
does not have a protected liberty or property interest in prison
employment. The right to earn wages while incarcerated is a
privilege, not a constitutionally guaranteed right.” (citing James
v. Quinlan, 866 F.2d 627, 629–30 (3d Cir. 1989); Bryan v. Werner,
516 F.2d 233, 240 (3d Cir. 1975) (“We do not believe that an
inmate’s expectation of keeping a particular prison job amounts
either to a ‘property’ or ‘liberty’ interest entitled to protection
under the due process clause.”)).
9 Left mostly unsaid is what role the Commonwealth courts are
alleged to play in this scheme. Plaintiffs dance up to the line
stating, “[s]ince at least 2006, a significant number of the prisoners
supplied . . . for work at the Center have been placed in the
Prison following civil contempt proceedings for failure to pay
child support.” App. 130, ¶ 145. And that “[u]pon information
and belief, individuals deemed able to pay their [child] support
obligations are routinely held in civil contempt.” App. 130,
¶ 148. That suggests Defendants enjoy a steady supply of labor
courtesy of an at least tacitly complicit judiciary. Such shocking
suggestions demand far more specificity if they are to support a
civil cause of action.
10 On January 5, 2023, Congress enacted the Abolish Trafficking
Reauthorization Act of 2022, which amended § 1595(a) to
extend liability to “whoever knowingly benefits or attempts or
conspires to benefit” from a TVPA violation. Pub. L. No. 117347, 136 Stat. 6199, 6200. Even assuming the amendment
App.57a
Muchira, 850 F.3d at 622–23. Plaintiffs, and the
majority, offer a single speculation: “No individual
who could pay his way to freedom would choose to
work in the dangerous conditions of the Recycling
Center for just five dollars per day.” Maj. Op. at 12,
23. But that conclusion contains three problems. For
one, it is not alleged. For another, it could not be
alleged because, at the risk of repetition, there is no
allegation that the Commonwealth court erred in
setting the purge amount. And finally, if there were
error, it could be corrected in the Commonwealth
courts at any time. This is my key point of disagreement
with the majority. Speculation about Plaintiffs’ choices
cannot substitute for the allegations in the second
amended complaint. Perhaps it is puzzling why they
chose jail over supporting their children. But it is
equally puzzling that Plaintiffs would ignore the
ample opportunities to remedy an incorrect contempt
finding, particularly with the able assistance of the
half-dozen attorneys and students from firms, schools,
and clinics backed by public interest groups and the
United States Department of Justice. Yet that is
where we stand.
Nor can the invocation of the “dangerous and
disgusting conditions,” Maj. Op. at 5, and colorful
descriptions of “sorting through trash,” Maj. Op. at 5,
12, carry the ominous implications Plaintiffs seek.
All can agree that working at a recycling factory is
dirty, difficult, and demanding. Respectfully, to both
the majority and the millions of workers who serve
neighborhoods in the Commonwealth and across the
applies retroactively, the new language does not cure Plaintiffs’
pleading deficiencies which fail to show a knowing abuse of the
law as required by the TVPA.
App.58a
nation, that is the nature of physical labor. Not all
sit at a keyboard. Many would not even if given the
choice. The suggestion that because work is rigorous
it must also be repugnant finds no support in law,
logic, or human experience.11 And it cannot shoulder
the weight the majority assigns, that knowledge of
recycling facility conditions allows an inference of
knowledge of an abuse of the law. Because there is
no allegation that Defendants were aware Plaintiffs
supposedly could not pay their purge amounts and
could not redress that legal error through the means
provided by the Commonwealth, and thus could be
preyed upon by Defendants’ exploitative venture.
The knowledge requirement of the TVPA demands
much more than an awareness of “grueling” work,
Maj. Op. at 17, a contrast illustrated by other cases.
11 By describing the work Plaintiffs do as repulsive, counsel
perpetuates the stigmatization of “dirty work,” the “tasks and
occupations that are likely to be perceived as disgusting or
degrading.” See Blake E. Ashforth & Glen E. Kreiner, “How
Can You Do It?”: Dirty Work and the Challenge of Constructing
a Positive Identity, 24 Acad. Mgmt. Rev. 413, 413 (1999).
Occupations like recycling are essential to society but haunted
by “[p]hysical taint,” either by association “with garbage, death,
[or] effluent,” or involving “particularly noxious or dangerous
conditions.” Id. at 415. So the tasks are hidden, the workers
“cast as taboo.” Id. at 416. Yet, “abundant qualitative research
from a wide variety of occupations indicates that people performing dirty work tend to retain relatively high occupational
esteem and pride.” Id. at 413. Rather than bemoaning the conditions of dirty work with patronizing concerns, we might note
the importance of such labor and its consistency with the goals
of the Commonwealth’s inmate work program “[t]o provide
opportunities for offenders . . . [to] enhance their ability to
become contributing members of the community.” 42 Pa. C.S.
§ 9803.
App.59a
Take Ricchio v. McLean, where a woman was
abducted, driven to another state, and taken to a
motel where she was “physically and sexually abused”
for days, with her tormentor “raping her, starving
and drugging her, and leaving her visibly haggard
and bruised,” all part of “grooming her for service as
a prostitute subject to his control.” 853 F.3d at 555.
The motel owners’ knowledge was evident from the
“high-fives” with the abductor in the parking lot, and
visits to the room where they “nonchalantly ignored
Ricchio’s plea for help in escaping” and witnessed
Ricchio kicked and forced back to the rented room
“when she had tried to escape.” Id. All creating a
“plausible understanding” that the motel owners
knew their lodge was being used for rape and assault.
Id.
Or Bistline v. Parker, where attorneys “acknowledged
. . . serious legal questions” about “graphic evidence
of the ceremonial rape of little girls.” 918 F.3d at 875
(cleaned up). Still, defendants discussed their client’s
“illegal goals” and aided a “scheme to ‘cloak’ forced
labor and ritual rape of young girls ‘with the superficial
trappings of legal acceptance.’” Id. (citations omitted).
Bistline and Ricchio illustrate the kind of extraordinary and unusual circumstances necessary to
infer knowledge for TVPA claims. Motel managers
cannot feign ignorance of sex trafficking when they
see a woman locked in a room, battered and pleading
to escape. Lawyers may not shrug off evidence of
child abuse and rape and return to drafting trusts.
The knowledge suggested in this case shatters that
standard and turns the TVPA’s goal of “effectuat[ing]
the constitutional prohibitions against slavery and
involuntary servitude” into an employment action.
App.60a
Muchira, 850 F.3d at 625. That is wrong, and as the
District Court correctly concluded, Plaintiffs’ TVPA
claims should be dismissed.12
III.
Arguing in the alternative, Plaintiffs allege that
if they are not slaves or involuntary servants, they
must be employees under the Fair Labor Standards
Act (“FLSA”) and the Pennsylvania Minimum Wage
Act.13 Intricate questions about whether Defendants
are employers, or joint employers, under the FLSA
abound. But they need not be answered because
Plaintiffs are contemnors, not employees, under the
best reading of the FLSA.
Analyzing the FLSA requires that we “proceed[ ]
methodically” through the statute’s text. Badgerow v.
Walters, 142 S. Ct. 1310, 1317 (2022). The goal, as
always, is to give effect to the legislature’s charge,
Brown v. Barry, 3 U.S. (3 Dall.) 365, 367 (1797), as
expressed in the text’s “ordinary meaning . . . at the
time Congress enacted the statute,” Perrin v. United
States, 444 U.S. 37, 42 (1979). This is a “fundamental
canon of statutory construction.” Wis. Cent. Ltd. v.
United States, 138 S. Ct. 2067, 2074 (2018) (quoting
Perrin, 444 U.S. at 42). See also Minor v. Mechanics’
Bank of Alexandria, 26 U.S. (1 Pet.) 46, 64 (1828).
12 Seeing no TVPA claim stated, I also see no predicate act supporting a RICO claim. 18 U.S.C. § 1962(c); In re Ins. Brokerage
Antitrust Litig., 618 F.3d 300, 372 & n.69 (3d Cir. 2010).
13 Like the majority, I review Plaintiffs’ claims under the FLSA,
29 U.S.C. § 206, and the Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act, 43
Pa. C.S. § 333.101 et seq., under the same standards. See FordGreene v. NHS, Inc., 106 F. Supp. 3d 590, 612–13 (E.D. Pa. 2015).
App.61a
We interpret the language using all “the standard
tools of interpretation,” Kisor v. Wilkie, 139 S. Ct.
2400, 2414 (2019), reading the words “in their context
and with a view to their place in the overall statutory
scheme,” Parker Drilling Mgmt. Servs., Ltd. v. Newton,
139 S. Ct. 1881, 1888 (2019) (citation omitted). See
also United States v. Fisher, 6 U.S. (2 Cranch) 358,
386 (1805) (“It is undoubtedly a well established
principle in the exposition of statutes, that every
part is to be considered, and the intention of the
legislature to be extracted from the whole.”). And
where these efforts lead to multiple ordinary meanings,
we adopt “the best reading” of the statutory text.
Yellen v. Confederated Tribes of Chehalis Rsrv., 141
S. Ct. 2434, 2442 (2021).
A.
The FLSA states an “employee” is “any individual
employed by an employer,” 29 U.S.C. § 203(e)(1), an
explanation that directs us to technical rather than
ordinary meaning. See Lopez v. Att’y Gen., 49 F.4th
231, 234 n.4 (3d Cir. 2022). While ordinary and competent English speakers likely have a reasonable
understanding of the word, the FLSA creates a legal
distinction to extend particular rights and benefits to
a limited class. See Moskal v. United States, 498 U.S.
103, 121 (1990) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (“[W]hen a
statute employs a term with a specialized legal
meaning relevant to the matter at hand, that meaning
governs.”). The definition of “employee” is part of the
specialized guidelines for employers to comply with
requirements for wages and hours, a way to know
who deserves what. Cf. Kasten v. Saint-Gobain
Performance Plastics Corp., 563 U.S. 1, 18 (2011)
(Scalia, J., dissenting) (looking to the context of the
App.62a
phrase “filed any complaint” within the FLSA and
determining that “at the time the FLSA was passed
(and still today) the word [complaint] when used in a
legal context has borne a specialized meaning”). So
the term “must be read by judges with the minds of
the specialists.” Felix Frankfurter, Some Reflections
on the Reading of Statutes, 47 Colum. L. Rev. 527,
536 (1947).14
Legal sources at the FLSA’s enactment defined
“employee” as “[o]ne who works for an employer,”
generally including “a person working for salary or
wages,” but “rarely to the higher officers of a corporation
or government or to domestic servants.” Black’s Law
Dictionary 657 (3d ed. 1933). Those general concepts
yield to specific applications, “and whether one is an
employee or not will depend upon particular facts
and circumstances.” Id.; see, e.g., Walling v. Jacksonville
Paper Co., 317 U.S. 564, 571–72 (1943) (“The
applicability of the Act is dependent on the character
of the employees’ work.”). So our focus is not on
“isolated factors but rather upon the circumstances
of the whole activity.” Rutherford Food Corp. v.
McComb, 331 U.S. 722, 730 (1947).
The “circumstances of the whole activity” here,
the genesis of Plaintiffs’ work, is their custody.
Without the contempt finding, they would not be
committed to the Lackawanna County Prison. And
Plaintiffs agree they are in custody and that their
14 Even though there is not much difference between the legal
and ordinary meaning. See Webster’s New International Dictionary
of the English Language 718 (1930) (defining employee as
“[o]ne employed by another; a clerk or workman in the service
of an employer, usually disting. from official or officer, or one
employed in a position of some authority”).
App.63a
work is tied to their incarceration. App. 115–16,
¶¶ 24–29 (Burrell); App. 119–20, ¶¶ 60–63, 67
(Huzzard); App. 121–22, ¶¶ 83–88 (Stuckey). Custody
is another legal term, meaning “the detainer of a
man’s person by virtue of lawful process or authority,”
an “actual imprisonment.” Black’s Law Dictionary
493–94 (3d ed. 1933).15 See also Kelley v. Oregon, 273
U.S. 589, 591 (1927) (describing the plaintiff as being
“constantly in the custody of the warden of the
penitentiary inside and outside of the courtroom,
during the trial” and finding “[i]t is a new meaning
attached to the requirement of due process of law
that one who is serving in the penitentiary for a felony
and while there commits a capital offense must, in
order to secure a fair trial, be entirely freed from
custody”); Sibray v. United States, 185 F. 401, 403–
04 (3d Cir. 1911) (“The custody complained of must
be actual and not constructive” and contrasting
someone “in . . . custody or control” with one “out on
bail.”); Smith v. Commonwealth, 59 Pa. 320, 324
(1869) (“Custody is the detainer of a person under
lawful authority.”).
These “common linguistic intuitions” are “at least
strained by the classification of prisoners as ‘employees.’” Vanskike v. Peters, 974 F.2d 806, 807 (7th Cir.
1992). First, the prison does not act as Plaintiffs’
employer. It is, rather, the caretaker of Plaintiffs “by
virtue of lawful process or authority.” See Black’s
15 A meaning that also mirrors ordinary understanding. See
Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language 554 (1930) (custody means “penal safe-keeping; control of
a thing or person with such actual or constructive possession as
fulfills the purpose of the law or duty requiring it; specif., as to
persons, imprisonment”).
App.64a
Law Dictionary 493–94 (3d ed. 1933). As such, Plaintiffs are detainees in the prison’s custody, not employees. Second, Plaintiffs are not persons working for
salary or wages; they are able to voluntarily participate in the recycling center to help “accept, process
and market recyclable commodities.” App. 149
(Operating Agreement between Center and Authority).
That fits squarely into Pennsylvania law to “fill gaps
in local correctional systems and address local needs
through expansion of punishment and services
available to the court.” 42 Pa. C.S. § 9803. Nowhere
among these statutory purposes is earning income.
Rather, the programs are designed with a
rehabilitative mindset to benefit both prisoners and
the community—not a typical design for the average
hourly job. All leaving prisoners outside the best
legal reading of the FLSA.
B.
Context confirms that reading, as all laws are
“part of an entire corpus juris,” and we must interpret
“laws dealing with the same subject” “harmoniously.”
Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law:
The Interpretation of Legal Texts 252 (2012). See
also Carlsbad Tech., Inc. v. HIF Bio, Inc., 556 U.S.
635, 638 (2009) (noting that the Court “has consistently
held” two statutes “must be read in pari materia”);
Lafferty v. St. Riel, 495 F.3d 72, 81–82 (3d Cir. 2007)
(interpreting two statutes using “the common canon
of statutory construction that similar statutes are to
be construed similarly”). And we “presume that Congress is knowledgeable about existing law pertinent to
the legislation it enacts.” Goodyear Atomic Corp. v.
Miller, 486 U.S. 174, 185 (1988). Just three years
before the FLSA’s passage in 1938, Congress enacted
App.65a
the Ashurst-Sumners Act of 1935, which targeted
unfair competition derived from prison labor by making
it illegal to knowingly transport goods made by
prisoners. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 1761–62. See also
Danneskjold v. Hausrath, 82 F.3d 37, 42 (2d Cir.
1996) (“[T]he Ashurst-Summers [sic] Act . . . regulates
the interstate transportation of prison-made goods to
avoid competition between low-cost prison labor and
free labor. . . . ” (citation omitted)). That, as other courts
have held, is strong reason to conclude prisoners are
not employees protected by the FLSA. See, e.g.,
Danneskjold, 82 F.3d at 42 (“[T]he continued existence
of the Ashurst-Summers [sic] Act . . . reveals a congressional assumption that prison labor will not be
paid at FLSA minimum wage levels.”); Harker v.
State Use Indus., 990 F.2d 131, 134 (4th Cir. 1993)
(“We must read [the FLSA and Ashurst-Sumners
Act] in pari materia. . . . [T]he FLSA [] does not apply
here because Congress has dealt more specifically
with [the problem of prison goods entering the open
market and threatening fair competition] through
the Ashurst-Sumners Act.”); Vanskike, 974 F.2d at
812 (“[T]he Ashurst-Sumners Act supports the conclusion that Congress did not intend to extend the
FLSA’s definition of ‘employee’ to prisoners working
in prison.”).
That is a sensible reading. Unlike the AshurstSumners Act, the FLSA “was enacted to improve the
living conditions and general well-being of free-world
American workers and their bargaining strength visa-vis employers.” Reimonenq v. Foti, 72 F.3d 472, 476
(5th Cir. 1996). If a prison puts its inmates “to work,
it is to offset some of the cost of keeping them, or to
keep them out of mischief, or to ease their transition
App.66a
to the world outside, or to equip them with skills and
habits that will make them less likely to return to
crime outside.” Bennett v. Frank, 395 F.3d 409, 410
(7th Cir. 2005). Such goals are incompatible “with
federal regulation of their wages and hours. The
reason the FLSA contains no express exception for
prisoners is probably that the idea was too outlandish
to occur to anyone when the legislation was under
consideration by Congress.” Id.16
Finally, the majority distinguishes between intraprison work and work done by prisoners outside of
the prison not for the benefit of the prison. See Maj.
Op. at 30–32; Tourscher v. McCullough, 184 F.3d 236,
243 (3d Cir. 1999) (“[P]risoners who perform intraprison work are not entitled to minimum wages
under the FLSA.”).17 But there is nothing rooted in
16 Prison work serves a different purpose than the traditional
goal of earning a living. “At its root, the work release program
exists for the benefit of the prisoner himself. The purpose of the
program is to prepare inmates upon release from prison to function
as responsible, self-sufficient members of society.” Reimonenq,
72 F.3d at 476. “Work has been an important feature of prison
systems in the United States since the colonial period.”
Anthony Pierson, Keith Price & Susan Coleman, Prison Labor,
4 Pol. Bureaucracy & Just. 12, 13 (2014). And “[t]hose offenders
who are employed have fewer disciplinary infractions in prison,
obtain better jobs when released, and recidivate less than do
unemployed prisoners.” Id. at 12. Concepts consistent with the
natural principle that “[t]he want of a useful and honest
occupation is the foundation of an infinite number of mischiefs.”
Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, The Principles of Natural and Politic
Law 435 (Knud Haakonssen ed. 2006) (1752).
17 The majority concludes Plaintiffs’ work “mirrors” the facts in
Watson where a Sheriff operated an unauthorized work release
program and assigned prisoners to work for his daughter and
son-in-law. See Maj. Op. at 37; Watson v. Graves, 909 F. 2d
App.67a
the text of the FLSA or the original understanding of
the term “employee” that suggests work involving a
third party or taking place outside the prison grounds
converts a prisoner’s status into one of an employee
in a formal employment relationship. Prisoners are
not employees under the FLSA because their work
relationships “arise out of their status as inmates,
not employees.” Franks v. Okla. State Indus., 7 F.3d
971, 972 (10th Cir. 1993) (cleaned up) (quoting
Williams v. Meese, 926 F.2d 994, 997 (10th Cir.
1991)). “The state’s absolute power over appellants is
a power that is not a characteristic of—and indeed is
inconsistent with—the bargained-for exchange of labor
which occurs in a true employer-employee relationship.” Gilbreath v. Cutter Biological, Inc., 931 F.2d
1320, 1325 (9th Cir. 1991). This reasoning reaches
all prisoners inside and outside the prison walls.
Plaintiffs were not employees while working at the
Center. No work can untether Plaintiffs from their
status as individuals in custody for contempt. Thus,
the motions to dismiss the FLSA claims were properly
granted.18
1549, 1551 & n.2 (5th Cir. 1990). Watson applied the “economic
reality test” championed by the Ninth Circuit in Bonnette v.
California Health and Welfare Agency, 704 F.2d 1465, 1470 (9th
Cir. 1983) and characterized the prisoners as employees under
the FLSA because they worked outside of the prison. But the
economic reality test does not consider the text of the FLSA and
the technical meaning of the word “employee.” And the statutory history of the FLSA, including the Ashurst-Sumners Act,
casts a shadow on the notion that the FLSA is Congress’
intended tool for combatting unfair competition.
18 “Where [an] unjust enrichment claim rests on the same
improper conduct as the underlying tort claim, the unjust
enrichment claim will rise or fall with the underlying claim.”
App.68a
IV.
Plaintiffs, really their counsel, have strong opinions. About holding delinquent dads in contempt
when they stop following court orders and stop supporting their children. About sanitary work, and
whether it serves a salutary purpose. How to manage
a recycling plant. How much to pay prisoners. All
topics fit for consideration by the Commonwealth’s
elected officials. Rather than pursue that option, or
provide direct assistance to Plaintiffs to reduce what
is repeatedly claimed to be an unjust court order, all
take the plunge into protracted litigation. Offering, it
seems, no help to Plaintiffs or future contemnors
allegedly laboring endlessly in perpetual confinement.
Moreover, such a ruling diverges from the traditional
and classically ordered principles acknowledging the
great duty parents hold to care for their children19
Whitaker v. Herr Foods, Inc., 198 F. Supp. 3d 476, 493 (E.D. Pa.
2016). As Plaintiffs have no valid TVPA or FLSA claim, they
have no unjust enrichment claim, as the District Court properly
concluded.
19 See 2 William Blackstone, Commentaries *435 (1765) (“The
duty of parents to provide for the maintenance of their children
is a principle of natural law; an obligation . . . laid on them not
only by nature herself, but by their own proper act, in bringing
them into the world. . . . By begetting them therefore they have
entered into a voluntary obligation, to endeavour, as far as in
them lies, that the life which they have bestowed shall be supported and preserved. And thus the children will have a perfect
right of receiving maintenance from their parents.”); Burlamaqui,
Principles of Natural and Politic Law 61 (“Providence for this
reason has inspired parents with that instinct or natural
tenderness, which prompts them so eagerly to delight in the
most troublesome cares, for the preservation and good of those
whom they have brought into the world.”); Samuel Pufendorf,
The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature 179
App.69a
and the “great importance to use every endeavour to
banish idleness, that fruitful source of disorders.”
Burlamaqui, Principles of Natural and Politic Law
435.20
Respectfully, we should follow the sound reasoning
of the District Court and dismiss these novel claims,
leaving all free to work, to petition the government
for change, or to decline to do anything. Such is the
usual way of our Republic and, accordingly, I dissent
in part.
(Knud Haakonssen ed., Jean Barbeyrac trans. 2003) (1673)
(“Because the Law of Nature it self, when Man was made a
Social Creature, injoin’d to Parents the Care of their Children.”).
20 See also John Locke, Second Treatise of Government §§ 32,
42 (1689) (“God, when he gave the world in common to all
mankind, commanded man also to labour, and the penury of his
condition required it of him. . . . [W]hen any one hath computed,
he will then see how much labour makes the far greatest part of
the value of things we enjoy in this world. . . . ”).
App.70a
MEMORANDUM OPINION OF THE
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE
MIDDLE DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA
(AUGUST 6, 2021)
THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE MIDDLE DISTRICT OF
PENNSYLVANIA
________________________
WILLIAM L. BURRELL, JR., JOSHUA HUZZARD,
and DAMPSEY STUCKEY, individually and as
representatives of the classes,
Plaintiffs,
v.
LACKAWANNA RECYCLING CENTER, INC.,
LACKAWANNA COUNTY SOLID WASTE
MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY, LACKAWANNA
COUNTY, LOUIS DENAPLES, DOMINICK
DENAPLES, and THOMAS STAFF,
Defendants.
________________________
Civil Action No. 3:14-CV-1891
(Magistrate Judge Saporito)
Before: Hon. Robert D. MARIANI,
United States District Judge.
App.71a
MEMORANDUM OPINION
I.
Introduction
Here the Court considers the Report and Recommendation (“R&R”) issued by Magistrate Judge Joseph
F. Saporito addressing the four pending motions to
dismiss (Docs. 99, 101, 102, 103) with which all Defendants seek dismissal of Plaintiffs’ Second Amended
Complaint (Doc. 77). This case arises in relation to
Plaintiffs’ incarceration pursuant to Lackawanna Court
of Common Pleas civil contempt orders. Magistrate
Judge Saporito recommends granting the motions in
part and denying them in part. (Doc. 120 at 27-28.)
For the reasons discussed below, the Court will adopt
the R&R in part and will grant Defendants’ motions
to dismiss.
II. Background
Plaintiffs were child support debtors who were
sentenced to serve a period of incarceration after
they failed to pay overdue child support. (Doc. 77
¶¶ 18-96.) While Plaintiff Stuckey may have had
overlapping criminal sentences (see Doc. 120 at 10
n.6), Plaintiffs Burrell and Huzzard could be released
before the expiration of the imposed sentence upon
payment of a monetary sum established by the
Lackawanna County Court of Common Pleas Order,
a sum known as the “purge” amount. (Doc. 77 ¶¶ 26,
61.) As per Lackawanna County Prison staff directives,
Plaintiffs could not participate in the work release
program until they successfully completed a period of
participation in the Lackawanna County Community
Services Program, which in each case here resulted
in working at the Lackawanna Recycling Center, Inc.
App.72a
for approximately eight hours a day at a pay rate of
$5.00 per day paid into the inmate’s prison commissary
account. (Doc. 77 ¶¶ 32, 36, 42, 43, 66, 67, 70, 71, 87,
88, 91, 92.) Court orders for Plaintiffs Burrell and
Huzzard accommodated and confirmed this arrangement. (Doc. 77 ¶¶ 33-35, 66.)
As set out in the R&R,
Since at least March 31, 2005, the
[Lackawanna County Solid Waste Authority
(“Authority”)] and [Lackawanna Recycling
Center, Inc. (“LRCI”)] have been parties to a
contract (the “Operating Agreement”) regarding the operations of the Lackawanna County
Recycling Center (the “Center”), a recycling
center owned by the Authority. Under the
terms of the Operating Agreement, LRCI
assumed responsibility for operation and
management of the Center, including the
hiring, supervision, training, and payment of
personnel to staff the Center. Besides these
employees of LRCI, however, the Operating
Agreement also provided that the Authority
would continue to “provide the same number
of Prisoners from the Lackawanna County
Prison that have historically worked at the
Center as part of their work release program
as security requirements dictate.”
In accordance with this last provision, county
personnel—specifically prison guards—
transport prisoners to the Center to work
there. Prison guards remain on site at the
Center to supervise prisoners, maintain
security, and discipline prisoners. Some
number of the prisoners supplied by the
App.73a
Authority to work at the Center are child
support debtors sentenced to terms of
incarceration following civil contempt proceedings for failure to pay child support.
(Doc. 120 at 3-4.)
Defendant Louis DeNaples is the president of
LRCI. (Doc. 77 ¶ 11.) Defendant Dominick DeNaples
is the vice president of LRCI. (Id. ¶ 12.) At the relevant
time, Defendant Thomas Staff was an administrator
employed by Defendant County who regulated the
Work Release Program and the Community Service
Program at the Lackawanna County Prison. (Id. ¶ 15.)
Defendant Staff is sued only in his official capacity.
(Id.)
Plaintiffs’ Second Amended Complaint contains
seven counts. In Count I, Plaintiffs seek to hold all
Defendants liable for unlawfully obtaining their labor
in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act
(“TVPA”), 18 U.S.C. § 1589. (Doc. 77 ¶¶ 202-207.) In
Count II, Plaintiffs seek to hold Lackawanna County
(“County”), the Lackawanna County Solid Waste
Management Authority (“Authority”), and Thomas
Staff liable for subjecting them to involuntary servitude
in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, made
actionable by 42 U.S.C. § 1983, by requiring them to
work at the Lackawanna County Recycling Center,
Inc. (“LRCI”) or remain incarcerated and ineligible
for work release. (Id. ¶¶ 208-212.) In Count III, Plaintiffs assert that the Center, the County, and the
Authority violated the Fair Labor Standards Act
(“FLSA”) by failing to pay them the federal minimum
wage. (Id. ¶¶ 213-227.) In Count IV, Plaintiffs assert
that the Center, the County, and the Authority
violated the Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act
App.74a
(“PMWA”) by failing to pay them the state minimum
wage. (Id. ¶¶ 228-232.) In Count V, Plaintiffs assert
that the Center, the County, and the Authority
violated the Pennsylvania Wage Payment and
Collection Law (“PWPCL”) by failing to pay them
their wages “in lawful money of the United States or
check.” (Id. ¶¶ 233-237.) In Count VI, Plaintiffs seek
to hold all Defendants liable for violation of the
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act
(“RICO”), 18 U.S.C. § 1962(c) made actionable by 18
U.S.C. § 1964(c). (Id. ¶¶ 228-243.) In Count VII,
Plaintiffs assert a state law claim for unjust
enrichment. (Id. ¶¶ 244-246.)
The Second Amended Complaint (Doc. 77) was
filed after a panel of the Court of Appeals for the
Third Circuit considered an appeal of this Court’s
December 8, 2016, dismissal of Plaintiff Burrell’s
First Amended Complaint (Docs. 11, 44) and remanded
the matter for further proceedings, Burrel v. Luongo,
750 F. App’x 149 (3d Cir. 2018) (not precedential).
The Circuit panel concluded that this Court had
properly dismissed numerous claims contained in the
First Amended Complaint, id. at 154-57, and identified
several claims that could be pursued after remand
including Thirteenth Amendment and 18 U.S.C. § 1589,
Trafficking Victims Protection Act (“TVPA”), claims,
civil RICO claims, and state law claims, id at 157-60.
The four pending motions are Rule 12(b)(6)
Motion to Dismiss Second Amended Complaint by
Defendants Lackawanna County and Thomas Staff
(Doc. 99); Motion to Dismiss by Lackawanna County
Recycling Center, Inc. (Doc. 101); Motion to Dismiss
by Louis DeNaples and Dominic DeNaples (Doc. 102);
and Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs’ Second Amended
App.75a
Complaint Pursuant to F.R.C.P. 12(b)(6) by Defendant,
Lackawanna County Solid Waste Management
Authority (Doc. 103). The R&R recommends granting
the motions in part and denying them in part: claims
against Defendant Staff should be dismissed as
redundant of the claims against his employer,
Lackawanna County; FLSA, PMWA, and PWPCL
claims (Counts III, IV, and V) should be dismissed
for failure to state a claim; and RICO claims (Count
VI) should be dismissed as to all Defendants except
LRCI. (Doc. 120 at 27-28.) Based on the foregoing,
the R&R recommends that the TVPA claims in Count
I go forward as to all Defendants except Defendant
Staff; Thirteenth Amendment claims in Count II go
forward as to Defendant County and Defendant
Authority; the RICO claim in Count VI go forward as
to LCRI, and the unjust enrichment claims in Count
VII go forward as to all Defendants except Defendant
Staff. (Id. at 28.)
All parties except Defendant Staff have filed
objections to the R&R. (Docs. 121129.) In sum, the
parties raise objections to the R&R’s recommendations
as to each count contained in the Second Amended
Complaint with Plaintiffs objecting to the recommendations that Counts III, IV, and V be dismissed
and Defendants objecting to the recommendations
that Counts I, II, VI, and VII go forward.
III. Legal Standards
A. Report and Recommendation
A District Court may “designate a magistrate
judge to conduct hearings, including evidentiary
hearings, and to submit to a judge of the court
App.76a
proposed findings of fact and recommendations for
the disposition” of certain matters pending before the
Court. 28 U.S.C. § 636(b)(1)(B). If a party timely and
properly files a written objection to a Magistrate
Judge’s Report and Recommendation, the District
Court “shall make a de novo determination of those
portions of the report or specified proposed findings
or recommendations to which objection is made.” Id.
at § 636(b)(1)(C); see also Fed. R. Civ. P. 72(b)(3);
M.D. Pa. Local Rule 72.3; Brown v. Astrue, 649 F.3d
193, 195 (3d Cir. 2011). “If a party does not object
timely to a magistrate judge’s report and recommendation, the party may lose its right to de novo
review by the district court.” EEOC v. City of Long
Branch, 866 F.3d 93, 99-100 (3d Cir. 2017). The de
novo standard applies only to objections which are
specific. Goney v. Clark, 749 F.2d 5, 6-7 (3d Cir.
1984). However, “because a district court must take
some action for a report and recommendation to
become a final order and because the authority and
the responsibility to make an informed, final determination remains with the judge, even absent objections
to the report and recommendation, a district court
should afford some level of review to dispositive legal
issues raised by the report.” City of Long Branch, 866
F.3d at 100 (internal citations and quotation marks
omitted).
B. Motion to Dismiss Standard
A complaint must be dismissed under Federal
Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) if it does not allege
“enough facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible
on its face.” Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544,
570 (2007). “A claim has facial plausibility when the
plaintiff pleads factual content that allows the court
App.77a
to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant
is liable for the misconduct alleged.” Ashcroft v. Iqbal,
556 U.S. 662, 678, (2009).
“While a complaint attacked by a Rule 12(b)(6)
motion to dismiss does not need detailed factual allegations, a plaintiff’s obligation to provide the grounds
of his entitlement to relief requires more than labels
and conclusions, and a formulaic recitation of the
elements of a cause of action will not do.” Twombly,
550 U.S. at 555 (internal citations, alterations, and
quotations marks omitted). A court “take[s] as true
all the factual allegations in the Complaint and the
reasonable inferences that can be drawn from those
facts, but . . . disregard[s] legal conclusions and
threadbare recitals of the elements of a cause of
action, supported by mere conclusory statements.”
Ethypharm S.A. France v. Abbott Labs., 707 F.3d 223,
231 n.14 (3d Cir. 2013) (internal citation, alteration,
and quotation marks omitted). Thus, “the presumption of truth attaches only to those allegations for
which there is sufficient ‘factual matter’ to render
them ‘plausible on [their] face.’” Schuchardt v.
President of the U.S., 839 F.3d 336, 347 (3d Cir.
2016) (alteration in original) (quoting Iqbal, 556 U.S.
at 679). “Conclusory assertions of fact and legal conclusions are not entitled to the same presumption.”
Id.
“Although the plausibility standard ‘does not
impose a probability requirement,’ it does require a
pleading to show ‘more than a sheer possibility that
a defendant has acted unlawfully.’” Connelly v. Lane
Constr. Corp., 809 F.3d 780, 786 (3d Cir. 2016) (internal
citation omitted) (first quoting Twombly, 550 U.S. at
556; then quoting Iqbal, 556 U.S. at 678). “The
App.78a
plausibility determination is ‘a context-specific task
that requires the reviewing court to draw on its judicial experience and common sense.’” Id. at 786-87
(quoting Iqbal, 556 U.S. 679).
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has identified
the following three-step inquiry as appropriate to
determine the sufficiency of a complaint pursuant to
Twombly and Iqbal:
First, the court must take note of the
elements a plaintiff must plead to state a
claim. Second, the court should identify
allegations that, because they are no more
than conclusions, are not entitled to the
assumption of truth. Finally, where there
are well-pleaded factual allegations, a court
should assume their veracity and then
determine whether they plausibly give rise
to an entitlement for relief.
Burtch v. Milberg Factors, Inc., 662 F.3d 212, 221 (3d
Cir.2011); see also Connelly v. Steel Valey Sch. Dist.,
706 F.3d 209, 212 (3d Cir. 2013); Santiago v.
Warminster Twp., 629 F.3d 121, 130 (3d Cir.2010).
In considering a motion to dismiss, the reviewing
court examines
the “complaint, exhibits attached to the
complaint, [and] matters of public record,”
Mayer v. Belichick, 605 F.3d 223, 230 (3d
Cir. 2010), we can also consider documents
“that a defendant attaches as an exhibit to
a motion to dismiss,” Pension Benefits Guar.
Corp. v. White Consol. Indus., Inc., 998 F.2d
1192, 1196 (3d Cir. 1993), if they are
“undisputedly authentic” and “the [plaintiff’s]
App.79a
claims are based [on them],” Mayer, 605 F.3d
at 230. That holding extends to settlement
material because plaintiffs “need not provide admissible proof at th[e] [motion-todismiss] stage.” In re OSG Sec. Litig., 12 F.
Supp.3 d 619, 622 (S.D.N.Y. 2014); see also
In re MyFord Touch Consumer Litig., 46 F.
Supp.3d 936, 961 n.5 (N.D. Cal. 2014) (same).
Moreover, the Supreme Court has been clear
about the scope of our review, stating we
“must consider the complaint in its entirety,
as well as other sources [we] ordinarily
examine when ruling on . . . motions to
dismiss, in particular, documents incorporated into the complaint by reference, and
matters of which a court may take judicial
notice.” Telabs, Inc. v. Makor Issues & Rights,
Ltd., 551 U.S. 308, 322, 127 S. Ct. 2499, 168
L.Ed.2d 179 (2007) (emphasis added).
Estate of Roman v. City of Newark, 914 F.3d 789,
796–97 (3d Cir.), cert. denied sub nom. Estate of
Roman v. City of Newark, New Jersey, 140 S. Ct. 82,
205 L. Ed. 2d 28 (2019), and cert. denied, 140 S. Ct.
97, 205 L. Ed. 2d 28 (2019).
Even “if a complaint is subject to Rule 12(b)(6)
dismissal, a district court must permit a curative
amendment unless such an amendment would be
inequitable or futile.” Philips v. Cty. of Allegheny, 515
F.3d 224, 245 (3d Cir. 2008).
[E]ven when plaintiff does not seek leave to
amend his complaint after a defendant
moves to dismiss it, unless the district court
finds that amendment would be inequitable
or futile, the court must inform the plaintiff
App.80a
that he or she has leave to amend the complaint within a set period of time.
Id.
IV. Discussion
With their objections, Defendants assert that the
Magistrate Judge wrongly concluded that Plaintiffs’
TVPA and Thirteenth Amendment claims, RICO
claims, and unjust enrichment claims (Counts I, II,
VI, and VII) should go forward. (Docs. 121-126, 129.1)
Plaintiffs object to the Magistrate Judge’s determination that their FLSA, PMWA, and PWPCL claims
should be dismissed. (Docs. 127-128.2)
A. Trafficking Victims Protection Act and
Thirteenth Amendment and Claims
The R&R recommends that Plaintiffs’ Thirteenth
Amendment and TVPA claims go forward based on
the Third Circuit’s decision in Burrel v. Luongo, 750
F. App’x 149 (3d Cir. 2018), and the law of the case
1 Defendants Louis DeNaples, Dominick DeNaples, Lackawanna
Recycling Center, Inc., and Lackawanna County filed objections
to the R&R (Docs. 121, 122, 125) and briefs in support of the
objections (Docs. 123, 124, 126). The Court hereinafter will cite
to the briefs supporting the objections (Doc. 123, 124, 126).
Defendant Lackawanna County Solid Waste Management
Authority joined in the objections filed by other Defendants.
(Doc. 129.) As noted in the text, see supra p. 5, Defendant Staff
does not object to the R&R. Thus, in the context of objections,
the Court’s reference to “Defendants” does not include Defendant Staff.
2 Plaintiffs filed objections to the R&R (Doc. 127) and a brief in
support of the objections (Doc. 128). Hereinafter the Court will
cite to the brief in support of the objections.
App.81a
doctrine. (Doc. 120 at 14-15.) Defendants object to this
recommendation, asserting that the R&R’s determination is not compelled by the Third Circuit’s decision.
(See, e.g., Doc. 123 at 3; Doc. 124 at 3; Doc. 126 at 5, 8.)
1. Relevant Legal Framework
As explained in the Third Circuit panel’s decision,
[t]he Thirteenth Amendment abolishes
“involuntary servitude, except as a
punishment for crime whereof the party
shall have been duly convicted.” And while
the Thirteenth Amendment’s primary purpose
“was to abolish the institution of African
slavery as it had existed in the United
States at the time of the Civil War, . . . the
Amendment was not limited to that purpose;
the phrase ‘involuntary servitude’ was
intended to extend ‘to cover those forms of
compulsory labor akin to African slavery
which in practical operation would tend to
produce like undesirable results.’’’ United
States v. Kozminski, 487 U.S. 931, 942, 108
S. Ct. 2751, 101 L.Ed.2d 788 (1988) (quoting
Butler v. Perry, 240 U.S. 328, 332, 36 S. Ct.
258, 60 L.Ed. 672 (1916)). . . . “[I]nvoluntary
servitude” could encompass peonage, where
a person is forced, through a threat of legal
sanctions, to work off a debt. See, e.g., Bailey
v. Alabama, 219 U.S. 219, 243, 31 S. Ct.
145, 55 L.Ed. 191 (1911); Clyatt v. United
States, 197 U.S. 207, 215-16, 25 S. Ct. 429,
49 L.Ed. 726 (1905).
. . . [T]he Supreme Court has remarked that
“in every case in which [it] has found a con-
App.82a
dition of involuntary servitude, the victim
had no available choice but to work or be
subject to legal sanction.” Kozminski, 487
U.S. at 943, 108 S. Ct. 2751. . . .
Similarly, under 18 U.S.C. § 1589(a), the
Trafficking Victims Protection Act (“TVPA”),
a victim may sue for damages and attorney
fees (see 18 U.S.C. § 1595) if his labor or
services have been obtained “by means of
force, threats of force, physical restraint, or
threats of physical restraint.” Through this
statute, “Congress intended to reach cases
in which persons are held in a condition of
servitude through nonviolent coercion, as
well as through physical or legal coercion.”
Muchira v. Al-Rawaf, 850 F.3d 605, 617
(4th Cir. 2017), as amended (Mar. 3, 2017),
petition for cert. filed (U.S. July 31, 2017)
(No. 17154) (quoting United States v. Dann,
652 F.3d 1160, 1169 (9th Cir. 2011)) (internal
quotation marks omitted).
Burrel, 750 F. App’x at 159-60.
Regarding civil contempt proceedings, The
Supreme Court in Turner described civil contempt as
seeking
only to “coerc[e] the defendant to do” what a
court had previously ordered him to do.
Gompers v. Bucks Stove & Range Co., 221
U.S. 418, 442, 31 S. Ct. 492, 55 L.Ed. 797
(1911). A court may not impose punishment
“in a civil contempt proceeding when it is
clearly established that the alleged contemnor
is unable to comply with the terms of the
App.83a
order.” Hicks v. Feiock, 485 U.S. 624, 638, n.
9, 108 S. Ct. 1423, 99 L.Ed.2d 721 (1988).
And once a civil contemnor complies with
the underlying order, he is purged of the
contempt and is free. Id., at 633, 108 S. Ct.
1423 (he “carr[ies] the keys of [his] prison in
[his] own pockets” (internal quotation marks
omitted)).
564 U.S. at 441–42.
In Hyle v. Hyle, 868 A.2d 601 (Pa. Super. 2005),
the Pennsylvania Superior Court explained that
[t]he purpose of a civil contempt order is to
coerce the contemnor to comply with a court
order. See Gunther v. Bolus, 853 A.2d 1014,
1016 (Pa.Super.2004), appeal denied 578 Pa.
709, 853 A.2d 362 (2004). Punishment for
contempt in support actions is governed by 23
Pa.C.S. § 4345. Section 4345 provides that
(a) General rule.—A person who willfully fails to
comply with any order under this chapter,
except an order subject to section 4344
(relating to contempt for failure of obligor to
appear), may, as prescribed by general rule,
be adjudged in contempt. Contempt shall be
punishable by any one or more of the
following:
(1) Imprisonment for a period not to exceed
six months.
(2) A fine not to exceed $1,000.
(3) Probation for a period not to exceed one
year.
App.84a
(b) Condition for release.—An order committing
a defendant to jail under this section shall
specify the condition the fulfillment of which
will result in the release of the obligor.
23 Pa.C.S. § 4345.
To be found in civil contempt, a party must
have violated a court order. See Garr v. Peters,
773 A.2d 183, 189 (Pa. Super.2001). Accordingly, the complaining party must show, by
a preponderance of the evidence, that a
party violated a court order. See Sinaiko v.
Sinaiko, 445 Pa.Super. 56, 664 A.2d 1005,
1009 (1995). The alleged contemnor may then
present evidence that he has the present
inability to comply and make up the arrears.
See Barrett v. Barrett, 470 Pa. 253, 264, 368
A.2d 616, 621 (Pa.1977); see also, Sinaiko,
664 A.2d at 1009. When the alleged
contemnor presents evidence that he is
presently unable to comply
the court, in imposing coercive imprisonment for civil contempt, should set conditions for purging the contempt and
effecting release from imprisonment with
which it is convinced beyond a reasonable
doubt, from the totality of the evidence
before it, the contemnor has the present
ability to comply.
Barrett, 470 Pa. at 264, 368 A.2d at 621
(emphasis in original); see also, Sinaiko, 664
A.2d at 1010.
Hyle, 868 A.2d at 604–05.
App.85a
In Hyle, the Superior Court determined that the
trial court correctly found that the individual who
failed to pay child support was in contempt of the
support order but the trial court erred in setting a
figure that the contemnor “[did] not have the present
ability to pay.” Id. at 605. Although the trial court
recognized this, it stated in its opinion “that the
purge ‘is well within [the contemnor’s] means to
accomplish by working for a short period of time.’” Id.
(quoting Trial Court Opinion). The Superior Court
noted that the trial court had ordered the contemnor
eligible for work release so that he could obtain employment and pointed out that this arrangement
meant that the “ability to comply with the purge set
by the trial court will only occur sometime in the
future; Appellant must first secure employment and
then earn $2,500.00 to pay the purge amount.” Id.
Hyle then explained why this arrangement violated
Pennsylvania law:
The law in this Commonwealth is, however,
that the trial court must set the conditions
for a purge in such a way as the contemnor
has the present ability to comply with the
order. See, e.g., Barrett, 470 Pa. at 265, 368
A.2d at 622 (reversing contempt order where
alleged contemnor had no present ability to
pay purge amount); Muraco v. Pitulski, 470
Pa. 269, 273, 368 A.2d 624, 626 (1977)
(reversing contempt order where there was
no evidence that alleged contemnor had
present ability to pay purge amount on day
of contempt hearing); Commonwealth ex rel.
Heimbrook v. Heimbrook, 295 Pa.Super.
300, 441 A.2d 1242, 1244 (1982) (vacating
App.86a
contempt order where record did not support
finding that alleged contemnor had “a present
ability to purge himself by making an
immediate payment”); Durant v. Durant, 339
Pa. Super. 488, 489 A.2d 266, 268 (1985)
(vacating order directing payment of purge
amount where there was “nothing to indicate
that appellant has access to [purge]
sum . . . or may readily obtain that amount”);
Travitzky v. Travitzky, 369 Pa. Super. 65,
534 A.2d 1081, 1086 (1987) (vacating order
directing payment of purge amount where
there was insufficient evidence that alleged
contemnor had present ability to pay purge
amount on day of contempt hearing); Wetzel
v. Suchanek, 373 Pa.Super. 458, 541 A.2d
761, 764 (1988) (reversing trial court’s
imposition of 60 day sentence for finding of
civil contempt where the only way appellant
could purge himself of sentence was by
obtaining employment and remanding for
trial court to impose a purge which was
within appellant’s present ability to comply
with); Caloway v. Caloway, 406 Pa. Super.
454, 594 A.2d 708, 710 (1991) (affirming trial
court’s decision to not impose a contempt
order where alleged contemnor’s “present
situation” was such that he could not pay
purge amount).
In this case, the trial court has imposed a
condition for a purge which Appellant does
not have the present ability to meet. “[A]
court may not convert a coercive sentence
into a punitive one by imposing conditions
App.87a
that the contemnor cannot perform and
thereby purge himself of the contempt.”
Barrett, 470 Pa. at 262, 368 A.2d at 621.
Hyle, 868 A.2d at 605–06. Based on the trial court’s
error, the Superior Court vacated the contempt order
directing payment of $2,500.00 and remanded for the
trial court “to determine what conditions will be sufficiently coercive yet enable Appellant to comply with
the order.” Id. at 606. The civil contemnor’s ability to
pay the purge amount was again stressed by the
Superior Court in I.D. v. K.O.J., 237 A.3d 456 (Pa.
Super. 2020) (Table Decision), where the court stated
that “[t]he trial court’s conclusion regarding the
contemnor’s present ability to pay the purge condition must be supported by the record and cannot be
based on speculative factors such as potential earning
capacity or values of assets not in evidence.” Id. at *3.
2. District Court Jurisdiction
Before considering Defendants’ objection to the
Magistrate Judge’s determination regarding the law
of the case, the Court will address the issue of jurisdiction raised by Defendants Louis DeNaples, Dominick
DeNaples, and LCRI. These Defendants contend that
the Rooker-Feldman doctrine deprives the Court of
jurisdiction over the Thirteenth Amendment and
TVPA claims because Plaintiffs seek to collaterally
attack their state court contempt orders which they
cannot do in this proceeding. (Docs. 136 and137 at 3
(citing Gary v. Braddock Cemetery, 517 F.3d 195, 206
(3d Cir. 2008) (“Under [the] Rooker–Feldman [doctrine],
a federal court lacks subject matter jurisdiction
when, in order to grant the relief sought, the federal
court must conclude that the state court’s judgment
App.88a
in a prior proceeding was entered in error, or must
take action that would render the state judgment
ineffectual.”).) They add that Plaintiffs cannot “by
fanciful pleading, contend that they lacked the ‘present
ability’ to comply with the underlying support orders.”
(Id.) Plaintiffs disagree with this assessment. (Doc.
142 at 3.) For the reasons that follow, the Court
concludes that Rooker-Feldman does not deprive the
Court of jurisdiction over the Thirteenth Amendment
and TVPA claims.
In their response to Defendants’ argument, Plaintiffs assert that Rooker-Feldman does not apply here
because their claims “do not seek to undo the state
court judgments.” (Doc. 142 at 3.) They argue as follows:
Plaintiffs have presented “independent
claim[s]” under the TVPA and the Thirteenth
Amendment. See In re Philadelphia Ent. &
Dev. Partners, 879 F.3d at 500 (quoting Exxon
Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Indus. Corp.,
544 U.S. 280, 293 (2005). In fact, Plaintiffs
can recover regardless of whether the state
courts set their purge amounts correctly as
a matter of Pennsylvania child support law,
as the injury alleged by Plaintiffs in this
case was not caused by the state court judgment. In the context of child support contempt
determinations, Pennsylvania courts must
set purge conditions that “will be sufficiently
coercive yet enable [the debtor] to comply
with the order.” Hyle v. Hyle, 868 A.2d 601,
606 (Pa. Super. 2005). In other words, the
purge amounts were designed to be coercive.
The question central to Plaintiffs’ claims
continues to be whether the purge amounts
App.89a
were coercive enough, as a matter of federal
statutory and constitutional law, that their
labor was procured in violation of the TVPA
or the Thirteenth Amendment. RookerFeldman “does not apply merely because
the claim for relief if granted would as a
practical matter undermine a valid state
court order.” In re Philadelphia Ent. & Dev.
Partners, 879 F.3d at 503.
At most, the underlying state court judgments
provide evidence that, while Plaintiffs and
putative class members had some means by
which they could have paid their purge
amounts, the amounts were high enough “to
coerce the contemnor to comply with [the]
court order[s].” Id. at 604. Without proceeding
to discovery, this Court cannot evaluate
whether the funds were accessible to Plaintiffs, other financial burdens faced by Plaintiffs, or other context regarding the coerciveness of the purge amount. Instead, the
Court must rely on Plaintiffs’ SAC, which
unequivocally alleges that Plaintiffs had no
other options but to work under abysmal
conditions for just $5 per day to pay their
child support and regain their freedom. See
SAC at ¶¶ 28, 36, 67, 88. These allegations
suffice to survive Defendants’ motions to
dismiss, and do not divorce this Court of
jurisdiction as LRCI and the DeNaples now
argue for the first time in their reply brief.
(Doc. 142 at 4.)
The United States Supreme Court has explained
that “a federal court generally may not rule on the
App.90a
merits of a case without first determining that it has
jurisdiction.” Sinochem Int’l Co. v. Malay. Int’l Shipping
Corp., 549 U.S. 422, 430–31 (2007); see Federated Dep’t
Stores, Inc. v. Moitie, 452 U.S. 394, 399 n. 3 (1981)
(noting that a dismissal for failure to state a claim
upon which relief can be granted is a judgment on
the merits). Rooker-Feldman prevents federal district
courts from exercising jurisdiction “[i]n certain circumstances, where a federal suit follows a state suit.”
Great W. Mining & Mineral Co. v. Fox Rothschild
LLP, 615 F.3d 159, 163–64 (3d Cir. 2010); Taliaferro
v. Darby Twp. Zoning Bd., 458 F.3d 181, 192 (3d Cir.
2006). Therefore, the Court, as a threshold matter, will
turn to whether Rooker-Feldman presents a jurisdictional bar to consideration of Plaintiffs’ Thirteenth
Amendment and TVPA claims.
The Rooker-Feldman doctrine originated from two
Supreme Court opinions issued over the course of six
decades, Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co., 263 U.S. 413
(1923), and District of Columbia Court of Appeals v.
Feldman, 460 U.S. 462 (1983). Initially, the United
States Supreme Court held that lower federal courts
may not hear claims actually decided by a state
court, as district courts have no appellate jurisdiction. Rooker, 263 U.S. at 416 (1923). The Supreme
Court later extended this holding, explaining that a
federal district court lacks jurisdiction over any claims
that are “inextricably intertwined” with a state court
judgment. Feldman, 460 U.S. at 486. Federal claims
are “inextricably intertwined” with a previous state
court judgment when “the federal court must determine that the state court judgment was erroneously
entered in order to grant the requested relief” or “the
federal court must take an action that would negate
App.91a
the state court’s judgment.” In re Knapper, 407 F.3d
573, 581 (3d Cir. 2005). As summarized in Taliaferro,
“[u]nder the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, a district court
is precluded from entertaining an action, that is, the
federal court lacks subject matter jurisdiction, if the
relief requested effectively would reverse a state
court decision or void its ruling.” Id. at 192.
The Supreme Court has stated that the scope of
the Rooker-Feldman doctrine is “narrow,” confined to
“cases brought by state-court losers complaining of
injuries caused by state-court judgments rendered
before the district court proceedings commenced.”
Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Indus. Corp., 544
U.S. 280, 284 (2005). The doctrine is not implicated
“simply because a party attempts to litigate in federal
court a matter previously litigated in state court”
and therefore “[i]f a federal plaintiff ‘present[s] some
independent claim, albeit one that denies a legal conclusion that a state court has reached in a case to
which he was a party . . . , then there is jurisdiction
and state law determines whether the defendant
prevails under principles of preclusion.’” Id. at 293,
(quoting GASH Assoc. v. Vil. of Rosemont, 995 F.2d
726, 728 (7th Cir. 1993)). The jurisdictional bar
imposed by Rooker–Feldman is not so expansive as to
include federal actions “that simply raise claims previously litigated in state court.” Exxon Mobil, 544
U.S. at 287 n.2; see also, Turner v. Crawford Square
Apartments III, L.P., 449 F.3d 542, 547 (3d Cir. 2006)
(“Turner’s action in the district court did not complain
of injuries caused by the state court judgment. Rather,
Turner’s complaint raised federal claims, grounded
on the FHA [Fair Housing Act], not caused by the
state-court judgment but instead attributable to defend-
App.92a
ants’ alleged FHA violations that preceded the statecourt judgment.)
In the Third Circuit, four requirements must be
met for the Rooker-Feldman doctrine to apply: (1) the
federal plaintiff lost in state court; (2) the plaintiff
“complain[s] of injuries caused by [the] state-court
judgments”; (3) those judgments were rendered before
the federal suit was filed; and (4) the plaintiff is
inviting the district court to review and reject the
state judgments. Great Western, 615 F.3d at 166
(alteration in original) (quoting Exxon Mobil, 544
U.S. at 284). The Circuit Court also stated that “[t]he
second and fourth requirements are the key to
determining whether a federal suit presents an independent-non-barred claim.” Id. “A useful guidepost is
the timing of the injury, that is, whether the injury
complained of in federal court existed prior to the
state-court proceedings and thus could not have been
‘caused by’ those proceedings.” Id. at 167 (citation
omitted).
As the party asserting jurisdiction, a plaintiff
has an affirmative burden to show that his claims
are not precluded by the Rooker-Feldman doctrine.
See Khalil v. NJ Div. of Child Prot. & Permanency,
594 F. App’x 88, 90 (3d Cir. 2015).
Applying the Rooker-Feldman doctrine to the
facts of this case, the first requirement is met because
Plaintiffs lost in state court when the Court of Common
Pleas Family Court division entered enforcement
orders against them and ordered their imprisonment
following civil contempt proceedings. See Lyman v.
Philadelphia Ct. of Common Pleas Domestic Rels.
Div., 751 F. App’x 174, 177 (3d Cir. 2018) (in suit for
claims arising from state court domestic relations
App.93a
proceedings, first Rooker-Feldman requirement met:
“Lyman lost in state court when [the Domestic Relations Division (“DRD”)] entered enforcement orders
against him and ordered his imprisonment following
civil contempt proceedings.)3 The third requirement
is also met because the state court judgments were
rendered before the federal suit was filed. Great
Western, 615 F.3d at 166.
Whether the second and fourth requirements are
met are more difficult questions. The second requirement—that a plaintiff must be complaining of injuries
caused by a state-court judgment—may also be thought
of as an inquiry into the source of the plaintiff’s
injury. Great Western, 615 F.3d at 166 (citing Turner
v. Crawford Square Apartments III, L.P., 449 F.3d
542, 547 (3d Cir.2006) (“Here, the district court erred
by applying the Rooker–Feldman doctrine ‘beyond the
contours of the Rooker and Feldman cases,’ because
3 Lyman also found the remaining three Rooker-Feldman requirements met:
Second, Lyman complains of injuries caused by the
state court judgments, namely, that the October 29,
2014, enforcement order “made no finding regarding
[his] present ability to comply with the support order
or the purge amount,” and that the civil contempt
proceedings took place without provision of counsel
for him. . . . Third, the state court judgments were
finalized before Lyman filed his federal action. And
fourth, we undoubtedly would have to review the
state court’s judgments to determine whether DRD
improperly entered the enforcement orders without
considering certain factors.
It thus follows that the District Court lacked subject
matter jurisdiction to entertain Lyman’s claims.
Lyman, 751 F. App’x at 178.
App.94a
Turner’s action in the district court did not complain
of injuries ‘caused by the state court judgment.’”
(quoting Exxon Mobil, 544 U.S. at 283–84)). “The
critical task is . . . to identify those federal suits that
profess to complain of injury by a third party, but
actually complain of injury ‘produced by a state-court
judgment and not simply ratified, acquiesced in, or
left unpunished by it.’” Id. at 167 (quoting Hoblock v.
Albany County Board of Elections, 422 F.3d 77, 88
(2d Cir. 2005)). Great Western also explained that
[w]hat this requirement targets is whether
the plaintiff’s claims will require appellate
review of state-court decisions by the district
court. Prohibited appellate review “consists
of a review of the proceedings already
conducted by the ‘lower’ tribunal to determine
whether it reached its result in accordance
with law.” Bolden v. City of Topeka, Ks., 441
F.3d 1129, 1143 (10th Cir.2006). It is
important to distinguish such appellate
review from those cases in which “a party
attempts to litigate in federal court a matter
previously litigated in state court,” Exxon
Mobil, 544 U.S. at 293, 125 S. Ct. 1517, or in
which “the federal plaintiff and the adverse
party are simultaneously litigating the same
or a similar dispute in state court,” Noel v.
Hal, 341 F.3d 1148, 1163 (9th Cir.2003)
(cited with approval in Exxon Mobil). If the
matter was previously litigated, there is
jurisdiction as long as the “federal plaintiff
present[s] some independent claim,” even if
that claim denies a legal conclusion reached
by the state court. Exxon Mobil, 544 U.S. at
App.95a
293, 125 S. Ct. 1517 (internal quotation
marks & citation omitted; alteration in original). When “the second court tries a matter
anew and reaches a conclusion contrary to a
judgment by the first court, without concerning itself with the bona fides of the prior
judgment,” the second, or federal, court “is
not conducting appellate review, regardless
of whether compliance with the second judgment would make it impossible to comply
with the first judgment.” Bolden, 441 F.3d
at 1143.
Great Western, 615 F.3d at 169.
As set out above, the parties disagree on whether
Plaintiffs complain of injuries caused by the state
court judgments. Plaintiffs assert that the Thirteenth
Amendment and TVPA were violated because, to
qualify for work release and potentially earlier release
from prison, they lacked any option other than working
at the Center. (Doc. 77 ¶¶ 36, 67, 88.) Plaintiffs say
they do not complain of injuries caused by the state
court judgments (Doc. 142 at 3) but their argument
on the issue is vague and conclusory (see id. at 2-4).
In a sense it may be true that Plaintiffs’ injuries
were caused by what happened after the state court
judgments, i.e., post incarceration allegedly coerced
participation in the Community Service Program
where they worked for $5.00 a day at the Center.
However, for reasons discussed in greater detail in
the “Merits Analysis” section below, the civil contempt
legal framework indicates that what came after Plaintiffs’ incarceration is linked to the state court orders
because Plaintiffs were incarcerated for failing to pay
a purge amount which the state court had deter-
App.96a
mined beyond a reasonable doubt they had the ability
to pay. See supra pp. 11-15; see infra p. 30.
Despite this inescapable link between the state
court orders at issue and the claimed injury allegedly
resulting from the lack of option in Community
Service participation, the Court would not necessarily
need to “determine that the state court judgment was
erroneously entered in order to grant the requested
relief,” In re Knapper, 407 F.3d at 581, if the circumstances in existence at the time the state court
entered the contempt orders changed thereafter such
that Plaintiffs could have availed themselves of the
provisions of 23 Pa. C.S. § 4352 which will be further
discussed in the Merits Analysis section of this
Memorandum Opinion. Given this potential scenario,
the unusual facts and claims in this case, and Great
Western’s caution against an expansive application of
the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, the Court concludes
that the second Rooker-Feldman requirement is not
satisfied here.
Regarding the fourth requirement, it follows
from the conclusion on the second requirement that a
scenario may exist where Plaintiffs would not
necessarily be “inviting the district court to review
and reject the state judgments.” Great Western, 615
F.3d at 166 (citing Exxon Mobil, 544 U.S. at 284).
Therefore, like the second requirement, the fourth
requirement does not weigh in favor of finding a lack
of jurisdiction.
Having determined that two of the four RookerFeldman requirements are not necessarily satisfied
here, the Court has jurisdiction to consider Plaintiffs’
Thirteenth Amendment and TVPA claims. Our analysis
goes forward based on the presumption that Plaintiffs
App.97a
do not attack the state court judgment itself. To the
extent Plaintiffs position is otherwise, i.e., they allege
an inability on the part of Plaintiffs to purge at the
time the state court order of contempt was imposed,
they thereby attack the state court judgment and
such a claim is barred by Rooker-Feldman.
3. Law of the Case Doctrine
As set out above, Defendants object to the Magistrate
Judge’s recommendation that the Thirteenth Amendment and TVPA claims go forward based on the law
of the case doctrine. (See, e.g., Doc. 123 at 3; Doc. 124
at 3; Doc. 126 at 5, 8.) For the reasons discussed
below, the Court concludes that the Third Circuit
panel’s decision does not preclude consideration of
these claims under the motion to dismiss standard.
The doctrine of the law of the case
limits relitigation of an issue once it has
been decided. . . . [T]his doctrine is concerned
with the extent to which the law applied in
decisions at various stages of the same
litigation becomes the governing legal precept
in later stages. 18 James Wm. Moore Et Al.,
Moore’s Federal Practice ¶ 134.20 (3d
ed.1999). The Court has defined the law of
the case as a precept that “‘posits that when
a court decides upon a rule of law, that decision should continue to govern the same
issues in subsequent stages in the same
case.’ This rule of practice promotes the
finality and efficiency of the judicial process
by ‘protecting against the agitation of settled
issues.’” Christianson v. Colt Indus. Operating
Corp., 486 U.S. 800, 816, 108 S. Ct. 2166,
App.98a
100 L.Ed.2d 811 (1988) (citing Arizona v.
California, 460 U.S. 605, 618, 103 S. Ct. 1382,
75 L.Ed.2d 318 (1983), and citing 1B James
Wm. Moore Et Al., Moore’s Federal Practice
¶ 0.404[1], p. 118 (1984)).
In re Cont’l Airlines, Inc., 279 F.3d 226, 232-33 (3d
Cir. 2002).
It is well-established that the law of the case
doctrine “does not restrict a court’s power but rather
governs its exercise of discretion.” In re City of
Philadelphia Litig., 158 F.3d 711, 718 (3d Cir. 1998)
(citing Public Interest Research Group of New Jersey,
Inc. v. Magnesium Elektron, Inc., 123 F.3d 111, 116
(3d Cir. 1997)). Accordingly, the doctrine does not
preclude reconsideration of previously decided issues
in extraordinary circumstances such as where: “(1)
new evidence is available; (2) a supervening new law
has been announced; or (3) the earlier decision was
clearly erroneous and would create manifest injustice.”
Id. at 718 (citation omitted).
In this legal framework, the Court must first
determine if the Thirteenth Amendment and TVPA
claims now before the Court were decided by the
Third Circuit panel in Burrel v. Luongo and became
the law of the case in this litigation.
The Second Amended Complaint (Doc. 77) at
issue here was filed after a panel of the Court of
Appeals for the Third Circuit considered an appeal of
this Court’s December 8, 2016, dismissal of Plaintiff
Burrell’s First Amended Complaint (Docs. 11, 44)
and remanded the matter for further proceedings,
Burrel v. Luongo, 750 F. App’x 149 (3d Cir. 2018) (not
precedential). As explained in the R&R,
App.99a
[i]n screening Burrell’s pro se first amended
complaint, this court found that he had
failed to state a claim upon which relief
could be granted with respect to both his
Thirteenth Amendment indentured servitude
and TVPA forced labor claims because
Burrell had a choice between a full twelve
months of imprisonment or work at the
Center in unpleasant conditions for meager
pay. Burrel [v. Luongo, Civ. A. No. 3:14-CV1891], 2016 WL 7177549, at *11-14 [(July
18, 2016)], adopted by 2016 WL 7175615.
(Docs. 34; Doc. 44.) On appeal, the Third
Circuit noted that, “given th
This text is long and has been trimmed here. Open the source document for the complete record.
This is a copy of a public record, reproduced as it was published. It is not legal advice, and it may not be the version a court would rely on. Check the official source before you cite it.