A federal judge in Connecticut on Monday told three former inmates they had no standing to challenge the state's attorney general over a controversial law that allows the state to sue prisoners for the costs of their incarceration.

In an order dismissing a putative class action complaint, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey A. Meyer for the District of Connecticut said the plaintiffs failed to show that the injuries they would suffer under the law are traceable to Attorney General William Tong, the respondent in their suit.

Citing the 1908 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Ex parte Young, which largely bars federal court lawsuits against a state and its agencies, the judge said the plaintiffs failed to show that Tong, either in his personal or official capacity, was responsible for enforcing the law.

Rather, it is the Connecticut Department of Administrative Services, an executive branch agency that performs various collection services for the state, that files claims to recover incarceration costs. But the plaintiffs did not show that the attorney general had anything to do with the agency's collection efforts, the judge said.

"The Attorney General is not properly subject to suit under Ex parte Young merely because of his general duty to represent state agencies or employees in lawsuits, including lawsuits like this one that call into question the constitutional validity of a state law," Judge Meyer wrote.

Under the Connecticut statute, which went into effect in 1997, the state can pursue inmates for prison costs up to two years after their release.

But former inmates who either inherit property or win settlements or damages in civil lawsuits can be liable for 20 years after they walk out of prison. In both those scenarios, the state's claim counts as a lien against an inheritance or money award in the amount of the costs of incarceration or 50% of the assets the former prisoner earned.

Plaintiffs Teresa Beatty, Michael Llorens and Karl Weissinger, all of whom were told they owed thousands of dollars for their time in custody, brought a suit in March 2022 seeking certification of a class of about 30,000 people.

Arguing that the "pay to stay" law violates the "excessive fines" clause of the Eighth Amendment, the plaintiffs asked the court to declare their debt null and to bar the state of Connecticut from ever enforcing the law again.

"Connecticut charges $249 per day, or $90,885 per year, for incarceration. The resultant prison debt — imposed on people who are almost uniformly destitute, and two-thirds of whom are people of color — is crippling," the plaintiffs said in the complaint.

Many states have pay to stay laws that allow them to sue prisoners for some or all of the costs of their imprisonment. Such laws are controversial. Supporters argue that people who break the law should pay for the taxpayer money states spend in keeping them in jail or prison. Critics say the laws burden incarcerated people with debt that falls largely on people of color, making their reentry into society even harder.

When the suit was filed, Beatty, who spent nearly two years in prison on drug charges, said she was expecting to inherit $230,000 from the sale of her deceased mother's home. The state told her she owed nearly $84,000 in incarceration costs.

Weissinger, who settled with a motorist over injuries he suffered in a car crash, was told that he had to give half the settlement's money to cover $118,000 in prison costs he sustained while serving nearly two years in prison.

Llorens, who served a three-year sentence for burglary, said he had a pending civil suit against his arresting officers, but that any settlement or damage award in case of a win could be used to pay nearly $273,000 in prison debt. Unlike with the other plaintiffs, the state has not yet pursued Llorens for his incarceration debt. 

"Even after a person serves their designated sentence, the prison debt laws punitively and arbitrarily impose an additional sentence, just in a different form," the complaint says. "Piling debts of this magnitude on people sentenced to imprisonment dangles lifelong poverty over the heads of the currently and formerly incarcerated."

In the order, Judge Meyer noted that the law does not require the state to file a lawsuit against every prisoner.

According to court documents submitted as evidence, the state's attorney general began 65 court actions under the pay to stay law between 2015 and 2020, an average of 13 per year. About 25,000 people cycled out of the state's prisons between 2017 and 2022, according to the suit.

"According to the plaintiffs' own numbers, the probability that the Attorney General will file a court action against any particular prisoner is near vanishingly small," Judge Meyer said in the order.

The judge concluded that Beatty and Weissinger lacked standing because they failed to show the attorney general has authority to enforce the pay to stay law beyond the post-release two-year window allowed in the statute. They filed their suit 20 and seven years after the end of their sentences, respectively.

Judge Meyer said Llorens lacked standing because he failed to show that the attorney general has filed or threatened to sue him. The judge said Llorens' claim that the pay to stay law could be enforced against him "is at best a speculative injury."

He offered a comparison: A person goes to a hospital emergency room, but the hospital does not send a bill. The hospital has some type of "claim" against the patient for services rendered.

Under the plaintiffs' "sweeping" theory of standing and ripeness, Judge Meyer said, the patient need not wait for the hospital to bill him; he can just sue the hospital now for fear that it could send a bill in the future.

"Alas, it is a fact of life that we routinely engage in conduct that can be said to generate a 'claim' by someone else against us," the judge said. "Does that mean we may sue that someone else even if the someone else does not bother to assert or enforce the claim against us?"

Because the dismissal is non-prejudicial, the plaintiffs can file an amended complaint.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comments. A spokeswoman for the Connecticut attorney general declined to comment.

The plaintiffs are represented by Dan Barrett and Elana Spungen Bildner of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut; and David A. Slossberg, Erica Oates Nolan and Kyle A. Bechet of Hurwitz Sagarin Slossberg & Knuff LLC.

The Attorney General of Connecticut is represented by Benjamin A. Abrams, Krislyn Mina Launer and Robert J. Deichert.

The case is Beatty et al. v. Lamont et al., case number 3:22-cv-00380, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.

--Editing by Peter Rozovsky.