Louisiana’s longstanding one-year statute of limitations on many kinds of civil litigation, including civil rights cases against law enforcement officers, has been relaxed this year due to actions taken by the state Legislature.
A new law, House Bill 315, authored by Rep. Michael Johnson (R-East Pineville), took effect July 1. It repealed a prior one-year statute of limitations and provided for a two-year period to file lawsuits that argue a defendant negligently caused loss or damage to a plaintiff or a plaintiff’s property.
Louisiana Lawsuit Abuse Watch (LLAW), which advocates for civil legal reforms, was not directly involved in the effort to pass HB 315 this year, according to LLAW’s executive director, Lana Venable.
“While LLAW did not have a specific position on this bill (which ultimately became Act 423), increasing the amount of time to file a lawsuit is in alignment with many other states,” Venable said in an email to the Louisiana Record. “Our hope is that Louisiana’s civil justice system will see real improvement by adopting more policies that are working in other states. We will continue to support meaningful legal reform and look forward to its passage and resulting positive impact for all Louisianans.”
Though the statute of limitations – also referred to as a liberative prescription – has been extended in tort filings dealing with personal injuries or wrongful deaths, civil rights groups are challenging the one-year prescriptive period’s application in prior years, arguing that the one-year time limit is a violation of U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
The nonprofit public-interest law firm Institute for Justice (IJ) over the past month has filed two petitions with the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the state’s previous one-year statute of limitations as insufficient to uphold federal interests described in Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code. In the case of Brown v. Pouncy, IJ argues that the Supreme Court in recent decades has placed more restrictions on plaintiffs in civil rights cases, making the filing of successful cases more time-consuming.
“Plaintiffs in jurisdictions with one-year statutes of limitations for Section 1983 claims face an untenable choice: invest the requisite time in developing their claims and risk the limitations period expiring or file their claims quickly and risk being dismissed for some other deficiency,” IJ said in its motion to the high court filed last month.
The IJ filed a similar motion to the high court this month in another Louisiana case, Monroe v. Conner. Both cases involve police officers physically abusing a suspect accused of nonviolent offenses, according to IJ. And in both cases, appeals courts upheld rulings concluding that the state’s previous one-year filing limitation was too short to fulfill the intent of the Civil Rights Act.
“Louisiana has essentially made it impossible for victims of government abuse to bring constitutional claims against their abusers, by making the window for bringing these claims so narrow,” IJ Attorney Katrin Marquez said in a prepared statement. “It often takes months just to develop a case and establish the basic facts, and this has only been made worse by the creation of procedural barriers, such as qualified immunity, which requires even more work prior to filing a lawsuit.”
Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James Ho indicated during oral arguments in the Brown v. Pouncy case that the plaintiff should seek a review of his case at the U.S. Supreme Court.
“You would think the last thing Congress would want is 50 different limitations rules,” Ho said.