Opinion ID: 2753620
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: it must be “likely,” as opposed to merely

Text: “speculative,” that the injury will be “redressed by a favorable decision.” Id. (quoting Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560-61, 112 S. Ct. at 2136 (citation omitted)).
Where the plaintiff seeks declaratory or injunctive relief, as opposed to damages for injuries already suffered, for example, the injury-in-fact requirement insists that a plaintiff “allege facts from which it appears there is a substantial likelihood that he will suffer injury in the future.” Malowney v. Fed. Collection Deposit Grp., 193 F.3d 1342, 1346 (11th Cir. 1999) (citations omitted). This is because injunctions regulate future conduct only; they do not provide relief for past injuries already incurred and over with. See Church v. City of Huntsville, 30 F.3d 1332, 1337 (11th Cir. 1994). So a plaintiff seeking declaratory or injunctive relief must allege and ultimately prove “a real and immediate—as opposed to a merely hypothetical or conjectural—threat of future injury.” Id. (citation omitted). 12 Case: 13-15483 Date Filed: 11/20/2014 Page: 13 of 28 In considering whether Strickland had satisfied this requirement, the district court concluded that Strickland did not because it found that the risk that Strickland would suffer future injury was too remote. The court reached this conclusion based in large part on Malowney, 193 F.3d 1342, a case where the plaintiffs challenged Florida’s post-judgment garnishment statute. While we can understand how the district court reached this conclusion, in Malowney, we expressly chose not to consider whether facts as they exist in Strickland’s case would satisfy the injury-in-fact requirement. Id., 193 F.3d at 1347 n.6. Now that we are faced with these facts, we conclude that Malowney and its brief discussion of Finberg v. Sullivan, 634 F.2d 50 (3d Cir. 1980), warrant the conclusion that Strickland has alleged sufficient facts in this case to demonstrate a substantial likelihood that he will suffer garnishment proceedings in the future under Georgia’s post-judgment garnishment statute. In Malowney, a bank froze the plaintiffs’ checking-account funds in accordance with a writ of garnishment. 193 F.3d at 1344. At the time of garnishment, the only funds in the account were Social Security Disability benefits and United States Army retirement benefits, both of which are exempt from garnishment under federal law. Id. at 1345. The plaintiffs sued the clerk of a circuit court that issued the writ, seeking only declaratory relief pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and the Declaratory Judgment Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2201. Id. 13 Case: 13-15483 Date Filed: 11/20/2014 Page: 14 of 28 Specifically, they sought a judgment declaring notice provisions of Florida’s postjudgment garnishment statute unconstitutional in part because those provisions failed to afford the plaintiffs adequate due process. Id. When we reviewed the district court’s order granting the motion to dismiss, 4 we concluded that “the amended complaint [did] not contain any allegations which could reasonably support a finding that the Malowneys are likely to be subject to future injury from the application of the statute they challenge.” Id. at 1347. The absence of several facts underpinned this determination. First, we noted that the complaint did not allege that the Malowneys had checking-account funds likely to be subject to garnishment in the future, or even that they were still judgment debtors. Id. For these reasons, we declined to speculate that the Malowneys were, or soon would become, indebted to a different judgment creditor and, as a result, would have a garnishment issued against them under the challenged statute. Id. Second, we emphasized that both the creditor that obtained the garnishment summons against the Malowneys’ bank account and the bank that froze the Malowneys’ account were both on notice of the exempt status of the Malowneys’ funds as a result of the Malowneys’ case. Id. at 1347-48. We doubted that they 4 The district court in Malowney concluded that Florida’s post-judgment garnishment statute satisfies due process and is constitutional because it provides sufficient notice and an adequate opportunity to be heard. Malowney, 193 F.3d at 1346. We did not reach this issue on appeal because we held that the claim should have been dismissed since the plaintiffs lacked standing. Id. 14 Case: 13-15483 Date Filed: 11/20/2014 Page: 15 of 28 would risk liability over wrongful garnishment again in the future. Id. These facts made the likelihood of a recurrence of the attempted garnishment of the Malowneys’ exempt funds weak and deprived the Malowneys of standing to seek declaratory and injunctive relief. Id. at 1348. In reaching this conclusion in Malowney, we were careful to distinguish the Third Circuit’s decision in Finberg, 634 F.2d 50. Malowney, 193 F.3d at 1347 n.6. In Finberg, a widow whose sole source of income was Social Security retirement benefits, sought to have the application of Pennsylvania’s post-judgment garnishment statute declared unconstitutional after the statute was used to initiate garnishment proceedings on Finberg’s bank accounts that held her Social Security benefits. 634 F.2d at 51-52. The Third Circuit determined that Finberg’s claim had not been mooted as a result of Finberg’s recovery of all of the funds that had been attached through the garnishment proceedings because Finberg had demonstrated “a ‘reasonable expectation’ that [she would] be subject to a recurrence of the activity that [she] challenge[d].” Id. at 55 (citation omitted). When we discussed Finberg in Malowney, we explained, Finberg . . . involved different facts, because in that case the plaintiff remained a judgment debtor, and she was an elderly widow on a modest income, from which the court inferred that the judgment was likely to remain unsatisfied for some time. . . . 15 Case: 13-15483 Date Filed: 11/20/2014 Page: 16 of 28 193 F.3d at 1347 n.6. Although we noted that the Third Circuit had considered Finberg under a mootness analysis, as opposed to a standing analysis, see id., the fact that the Finberg Court found, under the facts that Finberg alleged, a “reasonable expectation” that Finberg would be subjected again to garnishment proceedings on her exempt funds certainly suggests that the Third Circuit would have found these same facts to have been sufficient to establish standing by demonstrating a “substantial likelihood” that Finberg would suffer injury in the form of garnishment proceedings on her exempt funds in the future. Taking Strickland’s allegations as true and liberally construing the complaint in his favor (as we must when we review a motion to dismiss), we note that none of the disqualifying facts that existed in Malowney are present in Strickland’s case, yet all of the facts, plus more, that allowed Finberg to escape mootness exist in Strickland’s case. Unlike the Malowneys but similar to Finberg, Strickland alleged in his complaint that he and his joint-accountholder wife were both judgment debtors and that his wife had “judgments against her, as well as other debts that are likely to be reduced to judgment.” Because of this situation, as Strickland points out in his brief, he is “essentially a sitting duck.” Also unlike the Malowneys but again similar to Finberg’s situation as construed by the court, Strickland averred that he and his wife subsist on a very modest income consisting only of Strickland’s disability benefits, so they were very unlikely to satisfy their 16 Case: 13-15483 Date Filed: 11/20/2014 Page: 17 of 28 outstanding debts “for some time.” In addition, and once again in contrast to the Malowneys, Strickland asserted that, at a bank other than Chase, he had a second account containing only his Social Security disability income. All of these facts point strongly to one conclusion: it is substantially likely that it is simply a matter of time before another judgment creditor seeks to garnish the monies that the Stricklands have in at least one of their bank accounts. And, unlike in Malowney, we cannot count on the creditor and the bank to have learned their lessons that the Stricklands’ funds are exempt. This is so because the Stricklands have judgments against them from creditors other than Discover, the creditor involved in this case. And they have a second bank account containing exempt funds at a bank other than Chase, the bank involved in this case. These circumstances create a “real and immediate” likelihood of future injury and satisfy the injury-in-fact requirement for seeking declaratory and injunctive relief.
We also find that Strickland has met the second standing requirement: that the injury suffered is fairly traceable to the defendant. This “causal connection” must “link the injury to the complained-of conduct” of the defendant and is not satisfied if the injury results instead from “the independent action of some third party not before the court.” Ga. Latino Alliance for Human Rights v. Governor of Ga., 691 F.3d 1250, 1257 (11th Cir. 2012) (quoting Bennett v. Spear, 520 U.S. 17 Case: 13-15483 Date Filed: 11/20/2014 Page: 18 of 28 154, 167, 117 S. Ct. 1154, 1163 (1997) (quotation marks omitted)). In making this inquiry, we note that “even harms that flow indirectly from the action in question can be said to be ‘fairly traceable’ to that action for standing purposes.” Focus on the Family, 344 F.3d at 1273 (citation omitted). Here, Defendant Alexander is the court clerk with the responsibility to process garnishments by docketing the garnishment affidavit, issuing the summons of garnishment, depositing the garnished property into the court registry, and holding the property. At the time that Strickland filed his complaint, Defendant Alexander had docketed the garnishment and issued the summons of garnishment. He was awaiting receipt of the garnished property from Chase and planned to hold the property until the garnishment action was resolved. Similarly, the next time that Strickland’s property is the subject of a garnishment action, Alexander will be required to follow these exact same procedures. So Strickland’s inability to access his exempt funds will be “fairly traceable” to Alexander’s actions, not to “the independent action of some third party not before the court.” Nor, as Alexander suggests, does the fact that “his duties are ministerial in nature” somehow render Strickland’s injury not fairly traceable to Alexander. Alexander provides no authority for the proposition that conduct must be “unlawful” for a resulting constitutional deprivation to be “fairly traceable” to that conduct, and he similarly identifies no support for the notion that an injury cannot 18 Case: 13-15483 Date Filed: 11/20/2014 Page: 19 of 28 be deemed “fairly traceable” to ministerial conduct. We decline to reach such a conclusion. In Finberg, the Third Circuit considered whether the prothonotary and sheriff who issued the writ of execution and served it on the garnishee were proper defendants in the action. In conducting this analysis, the Third Circuit noted that it had to determine whether the prothonotary and sheriff “[met] the prerequisites to adjudication in a federal court.” 634 F.2d at 53. In other words, the court evaluated whether a causal connection between Finberg’s injury and the prothonotary and sheriff’s actions existed under standing doctrine. The Third Circuit concluded that the prothonotary and sheriff’s actions constituted the “immediate causes of the attachment and freezing of [the plaintiff’s] bank accounts.” Id. at 54. As the court further explained, “If the rules that they were executing are unconstitutional, their actions caused an injury to [the plaintiff’s] legal rights.” Id. In reaching this conclusion, the Third Circuit expressly rejected the proposition that the requisite causation did not exist because the prothonotary and the sheriff executed only ministerial duties in issuing and serving the garnishment. Id. The court reasoned that “the inquiry is not into the nature of an official’s duties but into the effect of the official’s performance of his duties on the plaintiff’s rights.” Id. 19 Case: 13-15483 Date Filed: 11/20/2014 Page: 20 of 28 This case is exactly the same: Alexander’s docketing of the garnishment affidavit and issuance of the summons of garnishment were the immediate cause of the attachment and freezing of Strickland’s account, and the requirement that he execute these ministerial duties in the future when presented with the appropriate documents means that Alexander will again be a cause of any garnishment that befalls Strickland. As a result, Strickland’s injury is fairly traceable to Alexander’s conduct.
Finally, turning to the third prong of the standing inquiry, it is likely that Strickland’s injury would be redressed by a favorable decision. A federal court could declare the Georgia garnishment process unconstitutional or enjoin any future similar actions that lacked adequate due process protections. Because Strickland has demonstrated injury in fact, causation, and redressability with respect to the declaratory and injunctive relief he seeks, Strickland enjoys Article III standing.