Opinion ID: 785213
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: This Court's Appellate Jurisdiction

Text: 11 At the threshold, we must examine whether we have appellate jurisdiction over one, both, or neither of the questions that the defendants present. See Gov't of V.I. v. Marsham, 293 F.3d 114, 116 (3d Cir.2002) (quoting Collinsgru v. Palmyra Bd. of Educ., 161 F.3d 225, 229 (3d Cir.1998) (we have an independent obligation to examine our jurisdiction to hear this appeal.)). Three of the four defendants invoke this Court's jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. Although some of our cases are imprecise about the statutory source of our jurisdiction over the Appellate Division, we take this opportunity to clarify that, as a technical matter, it is 48 U.S.C. § 1613a(c), and not 28 U.S.C. § 1291, that confers jurisdiction on this Court over appeals from the Appellate Division. However, the distinction is only technical—our cases have uniformly held that 48 U.S.C. § 1613a(c) has the same requirements for appealability as 28 U.S.C. § 1291. See, e.g., Rivera, 333 F.3d at 147; Ortiz v. Dodge, 126 F.3d 545, 547 (3d Cir.1997). 12 Turning to the substance of our appellate jurisdiction, we consider whether we have jurisdiction over some or all of this case as a final decision of the Appellate Division within the meaning of 48 U.S.C. § 1613a(c). We conclude that we do not in the usual sense. We then consider whether we have appellate jurisdiction over some or all of this case under the collateral order doctrine. We conclude that we do have jurisdiction under the collateral order doctrine to review the Appellate Division's determination of its own jurisdiction.
13 We are the second appellate court to address this case. Nonetheless—to reiterate the point made above about the parallel construction of 48 U.S.C. § 1613a(c) and 28 U.S.C. § 1291—with regard to the question of finality, we have treated appeals from the Appellate Division ... no differently than appeals taken from any other federal district court. Ortiz, 126 F.3d at 548 (citing as examples Gov't of V.I. v. Blake, 118 F.3d 972 (3d Cir.1997); In re A.M., 34 F.3d 153 (3d Cir.1994)). 14 The key question is whether the vacate-and-remand order of the Appellate Division was a final decision under 48 U.S.C. § 1613a(c). It was not a final decision in the most common sense of the term—for two reasons. First, it was a remand order, and we have explained in a similar context that remand orders are not final under § 1613a(c). In re Alison, 837 F.2d 619 (3d Cir.1988), considered our appellate jurisdiction over an order of the Appellate Division reversing the Territorial Court's grant of a Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss. Since the Appellate Division had reversed, it remanded the case to the Territorial Court for further proceedings. We concluded that such a remand was not a final decision under § 1613a(c). Remand orders are not generally appealable because they are not final decisions within the meaning of 28 U.S.C. § 1291 and 48 U.S.C. § 1613a(c). We recently reiterated that [a] final decision `ends the litigation on the merits and leaves nothing ... to do but execute the judgment.' Rivera, 333 F.3d at 150 (alteration in original) (quoting Catlin v. United States, 324 U.S. 229, 233, 65 S.Ct. 631, 89 L.Ed. 911 (1945)). The remand in Alison left more to do than mere execution of the judgment, and thus the remand order was not appealable. 15 A second, independent reason leads us to conclude that the Appellate Division's order was not a final decision: The first appeal (i.e., the appeal to the Appellate Division) was interlocutory, but, as we explain in Part III below, was nonetheless proper. The subsequent appeal to this Court asks us, in effect, to (re)consider an interlocutory order of a trial court. But, in view of the finality policy of 28 U.S.C. § 1291 and 48 U.S.C. § 1613a(c), this is something which we do not generally engage in (absent specific statutory authorization). 5 Such statutory authorization comes from Congress. See U.S. Const. Art III. § 1 (The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in ... such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.). If we were to blithely take jurisdiction over appeals of decisions that the Appellate Division rendered on interlocutory appeal, we would in practice be allowing our jurisdiction to expand based on the Virgin Islands Legislature's exercise of its authority, under 48 U.S.C. § 1613a(a), to determine the appellate jurisdiction of the Appellate Division. Of course, the scheme in § 1613a means that, for a Territorial Court case to appear on our docket on appeal, it is necessary that the Virgin Islands Legislature confer intermediate appellate jurisdiction on the Appellate Division; but it does not follow that such a jurisdictional statute is sufficient to confer jurisdiction, in turn, on this Court. Hence we decline to conclude that in enacting § 1613a Congress intended to cede to the Virgin Islands Legislature such control over this Court's jurisdiction. 16 Thus we hold that the Appellate Division's decision is not a final decision in the most common sense under 48 U.S.C. § 1613a(c), and therefore this Court does not have appellate jurisdiction in the normal sense. We next consider whether this Court has jurisdiction under the collateral order doctrine.
17 This Court's recent definitive treatment of the collateral order doctrine is In re Ford Motor Co., 110 F.3d 954 (3d Cir.1997). There we explained: 18 [T]he collateral order doctrine, first enunciated by the Supreme Court in Cohen v. Beneficial Indus. Loan Corp., 337 U.S. 541, 69 S.Ct. 1221, 93 L.Ed. 1528 (1949), provides a narrow exception to the general rule permitting appellate review only of final orders. An appeal of a nonfinal order will lie if (1) the order from which the appellant appeals conclusively determines the disputed question; (2) the order resolves an important issue that is completely separate from the merits of the dispute; and (3) the order is effectively unreviewable on appeal from a final judgment. See Rhone-Poulenc Rorer Inc. v. Home Indem. Co., 32 F.3d 851, 860 (3d Cir.1994). 19 Id. at 958. As the Cohen Court explained, 28 U.S.C. § 1291 has been given a practical rather than a technical construction. 337 U.S. at 546, 69 S.Ct. 1221. To this end, as a doctrinal matter, orders that meet the three prongs described above are deemed to be final decisions within the meaning of the statute. 20 Ford Motor Co. paid special attention to the question of what makes an issue important under the second prong. We described the task as one of compar[ing] the apple of the desire to avoid piecemeal litigation to the orange of, for example, federalism. Ford Motor Co., 110 F.3d at 960. In cases where the Supreme Court has blessed interlocutory appeals, we observed, it was because the imperative of preventing impairment of some institutionally significant status or relationship made the danger of denying justice by reason of delay in appellate adjudication outweigh[ ] the inefficiencies flowing from interlocutory appeal. Id. 21 We will apply the doctrine separately to both of the questions that the defendants urge us to consider: (1) the merits of the Appellate Division's decision, and (2) the Appellate Division's determination of its own jurisdiction. 22
23 As to the first prong of the collateral order doctrine, the Appellate Division's order did not conclusively resolve much of anything. To be sure, it established some guideposts for too much and too little redaction, but at bottom, it remanded the issue to the Territorial Court to settle on the exact redaction to use. 24 On the second prong, the redaction question is clearly separable from the merits, and this favors appealability. The question about the redactions goes to how much identifying information can be contained in a nontestifying codefendant's statement and still preserve the other defendants' Confrontation Clause rights. This is an exercise in applied constitutional law, as it were, and it does not implicate the merits of whether some or all of the defendants did or did not participate in the robbery-murder of the victim. As for the importance of the question, there are mixed signals. On the one hand, the Confrontation Clause articulates a fundamental constitutional right, and one might assume that such rights cry out most strongly for vindication on interlocutory appeal. Cf., e.g., P.R. Aqueduct & Sewer Auth. v. Metcalf & Eddy, Inc., 506 U.S. 139, 145, 113 S.Ct. 684, 121 L.Ed.2d 605 (1993) (holding that determination of sovereign immunity was a proper subject for interlocutory appeal because it involves a claim to a fundamental constitutional protection). On the other hand, Confrontation Clause rights are vindicated through evidentiary rulings, and a prime target of the policy against interlocutory appeals is the avoidance of piecemeal review of the many evidentiary rulings in a typical case. Thus we find this factor inconclusive. 25 The third prong strongly disfavors appealability. Practice alone—in Bruton and Gray themselves—suggests that interlocutory appeal is unwarranted because the constitutional defect in Bruton's and Gray's trials were, in fact, remedied by vacating their convictions and remanding for a new trial. 6 26 In sum, the prongs range from inconclusive to strongly disfavoring appealability. As the collateral order doctrine is a narrow exception and the Supreme Court has described the conditions for collateral order appeal as stringent, Digital Equip. Corp. v. Desktop Direct, Inc., 511 U.S. 863, 868, 114 S.Ct. 1992, 128 L.Ed.2d 842 (1994), failure to meet one prong makes the doctrine inapplicable no matter how compelling the other prongs may be (and here, not even one prong is in favor of appealability). Thus we conclude that this Court does not have appellate jurisdiction to hear an appeal of the merits of the Appellate Division's order. 27
28 Turning to the question of the reviewability of the Appellate Division's determination of its own jurisdiction, it is clear that we may at least review this limited question. This Court's indistinguishable precedent in Government of the Virgin Islands v. Blake, 118 F.3d 972 (3d Cir.1997), compels this conclusion. In that case, the Government had taken an interlocutory appeal from the Territorial Court to the Appellate Division under 4 V.I.Code § 39(d), a provision which allows an interlocutory appeal during trial under some circumstances. (In Blake, the Territorial Court had suppressed—during motions decided after the jury had been selected and sworn—a variety of testimony and other evidence the Government sought to present.) The Appellate Division in Blake decided that it did not have jurisdiction to hear the Government's appeal. On appeal we held that although we had no jurisdiction to reach the merits, we did have jurisdiction under the collateral order doctrine to review the Appellate Division's jurisdiction over the appeal. Blake, 118 F.3d at 975-76. We of course adhere to Blake in this case, see Third Circuit IOP 9.1, but we do add a few words of analysis since the discussion in Blake was quite summary. 29 The first prong of the collateral order doctrine is clearly satisfied here because the Appellate Division did finally determine its own jurisdiction over this sort of interlocutory appeal. The third prong is also clearly satisfied because such a determination cannot be effectively reviewed on appeal from a final judgment because, by hypothesis, the Appellate Division's jurisdiction to hear interlocutory (i.e., not final ) appeals would not be implicated in that posture. 30 The second prong is more complex, but it too favors our jurisdiction. Part of it is clear: The issue of the Appellate Division's jurisdiction is separate from the merits. Whether the question is important enough requires some discussion. On the one hand, issues involving the scope of federal jurisdiction are good candidates for the collateral order doctrine. See, e.g., Quackenbush v. Allstate Ins. Co., 517 U.S. 706, 116 S.Ct. 1712, 135 L.Ed.2d 1 (1996) (holding that an abstention-based remand to state court was immediately appealable under collateral order doctrine). On the other hand, a vague reference to the scope of federal jurisdiction may denominate the category too broadly, for the cases involving the collateral order doctrine and the scope of federal jurisdiction are by and large abstention cases, see id. at 712-15, 116 S.Ct. 1712 (canvassing cases), which put the litigants `effectively out of court,' id. at 713, 116 S.Ct. 1712 (quoting Moses H. Cone Mem'l Hosp. v. Mercury Contr. Corp., 460 U.S. 1, 11 n. 11, 103 S.Ct. 927, 74 L.Ed.2d 765 (1983) (quoting Idlewild Bon Voyage Liquor Corp. v. Epstein, 370 U.S. 713, 715 n. 2, 82 S.Ct. 1294, 8 L.Ed.2d 794 (1962))), and some courts have explicitly held that non-immunity based motions to dismiss for want of subject matter jurisdiction are not ordinarily entitled to interlocutory review. Merritt v. Shuttle, Inc., 187 F.3d 263, 268 (2d Cir.1999) (citing Catlin, 324 U.S. at 236, 65 S.Ct. 631). 31 The dispositive differences in this case are twofold. First, we are considering the ability to appeal an interlocutory determination of appellate jurisdiction, not original jurisdiction, making cases like Merritt distinguishable. Second, the order at issue here is not so much effectively unreviewable as it is procedurally unreviewable if we do not take jurisdiction now. Effective unreviewability arises because a party's putative rights will be irreparably harmed. For example, a party may have to forego an injunction guarding against irreparable harm because the security bond that is the price of the injunction may have been made too costly by the lower court; or a party wrongly determined to lack qualified immunity may be subjected to a trial. In such situations, although the aggrieved party cannot be made whole after the fact, the legal question will, as a matter of procedure, still be preserved for the appellate court's review at a later time. In contrast, only in the most convoluted and improbable of hypotheticals will the jurisdictional issue presented here ever make its way to this Court on appeal from a final decision. 7 As a procedural matter, now is this Court's only opportunity to pass on the issue. 32 This reasoning also explains why our holding here would not apply to the issue in Merritt, i.e., why a district court's determination of its subject matter jurisdiction is not generally reviewable under the collateral order doctrine. 8 Questions of original jurisdiction are always automatically before this Court on appellate review. See, e.g., Wujick v. Dale & Dale, Inc., 43 F.3d 790, 792 (3d Cir.1994) (`[E]very federal appellate court has a special obligation to satisfy itself not only of its own jurisdiction, but also that of lower courts in a cause under review.' (alteration in original) (quoting Spring Garden Assoc., L.P. v. Resolution Trust Corp., 26 F.3d 412, 415 (3d Cir.1994) (quoting Employers Ins. of Wausau v. Crown Cork & Seal Co., 905 F.2d 42 (3d Cir.1990)))). In other words, there is no procedural posture where a question of original jurisdiction will escape this Court's review in an appeal from a (non-interlocutory) final decision. In contrast—as this case itself illustrates—there are procedural postures which render permanently unreviewable the judgment of a hierarchically inferior appellate court, 9 and thereby prevent the automatic review of jurisdiction described in Wujick. Because review of a question of appellate jurisdiction is a now-or-never proposition, interlocutory review of a jurisdictional question is warranted here where it is not warranted in the case of a district court's determination of its own original jurisdiction. 33 In brief, coupled with the institutional importance of the question, the absolute unreviewability of the Appellate Division's jurisdiction in this case makes the question an important one. Thus this prong too favors appealability. Because all three prongs are satisfied, the collateral order doctrine affords us a basis for reviewing the Appellate Division's determination regarding its jurisdiction under 4 V.I.Code § 39(a)(1). 34 In reaching this conclusion, we have considered the dissent's contention that our decision effectively grants an appeal as of right to question an appellate court's jurisdiction whenever it makes an interlocutory ruling, and that this result is the very sort of inefficiency that the collateral order doctrine should not countenance. We are underwhelmed by the dissent's in terrorem argument. First, it is a dubious empirical proposition that the holding here will increase the quantity of this sort of appeal. As the citations in the opinion in this case suggest, this Court has seen but a handful of cases like this in the past decade. Second, the fact that we here take the opportunity to give some guidance (both to litigants and to the Appellate Division) should decrease, not increase, the number of appeals taken in good faith. 35 Third, the dissent claims that [t]he majority's decision effectively grants an appeal as of right. But it is the Congress, not this Court, that has granted litigants an appeal as of right from the Appellate Division. Even if we did dismiss this appeal in its entirety for lack of jurisdiction, as the dissent would, little efficiency would be gained as a practical matter: In a subsequent case, a litigant could still file a notice of appeal (as a matter of statutory right), and he could still advance a good faith argument in favor of review under the collateral order doctrine. A motions panel would likely refer the jurisdictional question to the merits panel, and the merits panel would address the question (hopefully in less extended fashion than we have had to here). In other words, the decision here makes it neither easier nor harder for a party who is dissatisfied with the ruling of the Appellate Division to drag out the process by appealing to this Court. 10 36 At bottom, it seems to us that the dissent's problem is the presence of a system of two-tier appellate review as of right. In fact, the dissent states explicitly that [t]his type of review is wisely not found elsewhere in the federal system, and should not exist here. Dissenting Op. post at 328. While we might agree with the dissent if we were drafting 48 U.S.C. § 1613a, that simply is not our task. Congress has provided that we have appellate jurisdiction (until such time as the conditions for certiorari jurisdiction are met, see 48 U.S.C. § 1613), and accordingly, we will turn our attention to the substance of the appeal.