Opinion ID: 2994706
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Woods’ affidavit argument

Text: Woods also argues that the district court should not have considered the arrest report and the misdemeanor complaint because they did not qualify as admissible affidavits under 28 U.S.C. sec. 1746 and Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(e). Rule 56(e) authorizes parties to submit affidavits supporting or opposing a motion for summary judgment, but it specifically mandates that such affidavits shall be made on personal knowledge, shall set forth such facts as would be admissible in evidence, and shall show affirmatively that the affiant is competent to testify to the matters stated therein. Moreover, 28 U.S.C. sec. 1746 provides, in relevant part, that [w]herever, under any law of the United States or under any rule . . . made pursuant to law, any matter is required or permitted to be supported . . . by . . . affidavit, such matter may, with like force and effect, be supported . . . by the unsworn declaration, certificate, verification, or statement, in writing of such person which is subscribed by him, as true under penalty of perjury . . . (emphasis added). Woods contends that the misdemeanor complaint and the arrest report were not affidavits as contemplated by 28 U.S.C. sec. 1746 because, while they were purportedly sworn by Flores and officer Makowski (respectively), neither document contained the penalty of perjury language as required by that section. Moreover, Woods maintains that even if officer Makowski’s signed declaration on the arrest report were sufficient to transform that document into an affidavit, the report would still be inadmissible under Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(e) because it contained statements made by Flores regarding matters not within Makowski’s personal knowledge. Woods’ arguments are unpersuasive. First, while Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(e) allows a party to submit affidavits in support of its summary judgment motion, it does not require that all supporting material be submitted in affidavit form. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(b) (permitting a party to move for summary judgment with or without supporting affidavits); Celotex, 477 U.S. at 323 (1986). Sworn testimony is not the only basis on which summary judgment may be granted; rather, ’the court may consider any material that would be admissible or usable at trial,’ Aguilera v. Cook County Police & Corrs. Merit Bd., 760 F.2d 844, 849 (7th Cir. 1985) (citation omitted), including properly authenticated and admissible documents or exhibits. See Martz v. Union Labor Life Ins. Co., 757 F.2d 135, 138 (7th Cir. 1985). Therefore, the district court was entitled to consider the arrest report and the misdemeanor complaint even if they were not admissible as affidavits, under 28 U.S.C. sec. 1746 or Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(e), so long as those documents were properly authenticated and were otherwise admissible. The district court found the documents admissible as a business record under Fed. R. Evid. 803(6). To be admissible as a business record, a document must have sufficient indicia of trustworthiness to be considered reliable. See Saks Int’l, Inc. v. M/V Export Champion, 817 F.2d 1011, 1013 (2d Cir. 1987). Normally, to demonstrate such trustworthiness and reliability at the summary judgment stage, the party seeking to offer the business record must attach an affidavit sworn to by a person who would be qualified to introduce the record as evidence at trial, for example, a custodian or anyone qualified to speak from personal knowledge that the documents were admissible business records. See Federal Deposit Ins. Corp. v. Patel, 46 F.3d 482, 484 (5th Cir. 1995); see also Martz, 757 F.2d at 138 (When a party seeks to offer evidence through other exhibits, they must be identified by affidavit or otherwise made admissible in evidence.). However, under the rather peculiar circumstances of this case, we feel that the district court did not abuse its discretion in admitting the arrest report and the misdemeanor complaint as business records without requiring the defendants to authenticate them by affidavit. Woods attached a Chicago Police Case Report to his response to the defendants’ motion for summary judgment, and he relied on the case report for its accuracy both in his original response before the district court and in his appellate brief presented to this Court. The case report recapitulated Flores’ account of the altercation as presented in the arrest report and the misdemeanor complaint in each of its essential details. By submitting and relying upon the case report, Woods conceded the accuracy of the documents that the defendants sought to introduce. This situation is strikingly similar to the situation that the First Circuit confronted in Cerqueira v. Cerqueira, 828 F.2d 863 (1st Cir. 1987). In that case, the plaintiff sued the legal titleholder to a fishing boat, seeking recovery for injuries he sustained while he was working on the boat. The defendant moved for summary judgment on the grounds that he was not the owner of the boat and was therefore not liable for the plaintiff’s injuries. The defendant tried to show that he was not the owner of the boat by, inter alia, attaching an exhibit to his legal memorandum supporting his motion for summary judgment. The exhibit was purportedly an unsigned draft of an agreement between the parties prepared by the plaintiff’s lawyer for use in an earlier case between them, and it showed that the plaintiff had bought the boat and that the defendant held title for the plaintiff because the plaintiff was not a U.S. citizen. In his appellate brief, the plaintiff conceded that he had drafted the document as a proposed resolution of the earlier case. While the court noted that technically speaking, [the defendant] should have introduced his exhibits into the record through affidavits, not as exhibits to a memorandum of law . . ., it held that given the plaintiff’s concession, it was appropriate for the district court to have considered the exhibit in ruling on the motion for summary judgment. Id. at 865. The court reasoned that there was no point in remanding this case to permit [the defendant] to file an affidavit stating the very thing that [the plaintiff] has conceded, namely, that the document is what it purports to be. Id. We find this reasoning persuasive and applicable to the facts of this case. By submitting the case report and relying on it, Woods has conceded that Flores made out a complaint against him to the Chicago Police, and that in that complaint Flores alleged that Woods had threatened to kill him while wielding a lead pipe. Since these are exactly the facts that the defendants sought to prove through the arrest report and the misdemeanor complaint, we conclude that Woods cannot reasonably question the reliability of those documents. Requiring authenticating affidavits in this case would be an empty formality, and the district court did not abuse its discretion when it considered the documents without such affidavits. Moreover, even were we to hold that the district court erred in considering the arrest report and misdemeanor complaint absent a certifying affidavit or some other traditional method of authentication, such an error would be harmless in this case. Rule 56(c) provides that summary judgment shall be granted if, among other documents, [the] admissions on file . . . show that there is no genuine issue as to any material fact and that the moving party is entitled to a judgment as a matter of law. An admission includes anything which is in practical fact an admission Cerqueira, 828 F.2d at 865 (citation omitted), including statements made in a brief presented to the district court, see United States v. One Heckler-Koch Rifle, 629 F.2d 1250, 1253 (7th Cir. 1980). Woods submitted the case report to the district court, and he relied on its account of the complaint that Flores gave to the police in his response to the defendants’ summary judgment motion. As a practical matter, this amounted to an admission of the facts presented in the case report, and the district court was entitled to consider the facts admitted in ruling on the defendants’ summary judgment motion. By continuing to rely on the case report and subsequently failing to offer any evidence to rebut its account of Flores’ complaint, Woods left the district court free to grant summary judgment upon consideration of the facts admitted by Woods alone and without even considering the arrest report or the misdemeanor complaint. Thus, even if the latter documents were inadmissible and therefore not available for the district court’s consideration, the court could still properly have granted summary judgment for the defendants. See In re Sunset Bay Assocs. v. Eureka Fed. Sav. & Loan Ass’n, 944 F.2d 1503, 1513-14 (9th Cir. 1991) (holding that, once a party had admitted that the opposing party’s unauthenticated exhibit contains truthful information, the court may consider the material in that exhibit because an admission is, or course, admissible in evidence). In his reply brief, Woods tries to avoid having some of the damaging information in the case report admitted against him (in particular, the case report’s statement that the R/O’s interviewed the victim) by asserting that the case report itself is unverified and lacks the basic foundation predicates of date, time, place, and persons present. However, while unauthenticated documents generally cannot be considered on a motion for summary judgment, a party who submits such a document without reservation cannot subsequently complain because the district court considered the contents of the document. See Walker v. Wayne County, Iowa, 850 F.2d 433, 435 (8th Cir. 1988).