Madero Pouncil v. James Tilton

A state prisoner asserts that denials by prison officials of his request for a conjugal visit with his wife violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution by interfering with his practice of a tenet of his Islamic faith requiring him to marry, consummate his marriage, and father children. The immediate question, however, is not the merits of his claims, but when the limitations period began to run on them. Was it in 2008, when the prisoner’s request for a conjugal visit with his second wife was denied pursuant to a prison regulation that had been in force, essentially unchanged, since 1996, or in 2002, when the prisoner’s request for a conjugal visit with his first wife was denied pursuant to that regulation? The answer turns not only on the precise nature of the prisoner’s claims, but on which of two apparently conflicting lines of authority is controlling on the accrual date of the prisoner’s claims. Indeed, this appears to be the kind of case, forecast by the United States Supreme Court, “where it will be difficult to determine when the [limitations] time period should begin to run.”…