Opinion ID: 161817
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: destruction of videotape

Text: Sours next claims that the district court erred by refusing to grant, as a discovery sanction, his pretrial motion for a default judgment. His motion arose from the destruction of a videotape. A security camera installed in the jail recorded the November 27 altercation between Sours and the deputy sheriffs. The video was destroyed when prison officials taped new material over old. This reuse of the video occurred even though the November 27 incident set off a series of administrative proceedings, which included an investigation, a hearing, and an appeal by Sours from the punishment imposed on him as a result of the incident. In fact, as part of the administrative review, a jail official watched the video. Seeing it may well have affected his ultimate decision; he reduced Sours’s punishment from two weeks of punitive segregation to one week. It is likely, moreover, that the videotape was destroyed after the defendants were served with the complaint. According to their brief, the videotapes in the jail’s security cameras are “reused after approximately one year.” Answer Br. at -6- p. 7. Sours served his complaint on the defendants eleven months after the incident. At the hearing held on Sours’s motion for a default judgment, the defendants denied they destroyed the videotape in an effort to withhold evidence. They claimed instead that it was inadvertently taped-over. Finding no bad faith on the part of the defendants, the district court rejected Sours’s request for a default judgment. The court, however, did state its willingness to reconsider its decision in the event Sours presented evidence that the tape was culpably destroyed. The court gave Sours an additional three weeks of discovery in which to conduct the necessary discovery. Sours, who was represented by counsel, did not engage in any additional discovery. We review the district court’s decision whether or not to impose sanctions, as well as its choice of sanctions, for abuse of discretion. Knowlton v. Teltrust Phones, Inc. , 189 F.3d 1177, 1182 (10th Cir. 1999). Under an abuse of discretion standard, this court will not disturb the underlying decision unless we have a definite and firm conviction that the district court made a clear error of judgment or exceeded the bounds of permissible choice in the circumstances. See Richardson v. Mo. Pac. R.R. , 186 F.3d 1273, 1276 (10th Cir. 1999) (quotation omitted). -7- A discovery sanction must be measured; a court should impose the least onerous sanction that will remedy the prejudice and, when applicable, punish the past wrongdoing and deter future wrongdoing. Schmid v. Milwaukee Elec. Tool Corp. , 13 F.3d 76, 79 (3d Cir. 1994). A drastic remedy like a default judgment or a dismissal “is usually appropriate only where a lesser sanction would not serve the interest of justice.” Meade v. Grubbs , 841 F.2d 1512, 1520 (10th Cir. 1988) (quotation omitted). Sours did not offer to the district court a meaningful alternative to the draconian sanction he sought. Granted, he did suggest that “[i]n the event the Court determines [a default] judgment too harsh a sanction,” it consider a “fitting alternative.” His suggestion was an order establishing “that the beating was inflicted on Mr. Sours maliciously and sadistically for the purpose of causing harm, and not in a good faith effort to maintain or restore discipline.” Aplee. App. at 23. This, of course, would have been the practical equivalent of a directed verdict. It would have achieved the same result as a default judgment, since it is precisely the standard of liability for an Eighth-Amendment excessiveforce claim that the Supreme Court has formulated. See, e.g., Hudson v. McMillian , 503 U.S. 1, 7 (1992). Sours also suggested another, equally severe sanction: that the district court shift the burden of proof to the defendants. -8- Neither of these two suggestions presented the district court with an earnest alternative to a default judgment. On appeal, Sours similarly fails to propose any lesser sanction. He asks us to remand the case for “a determination of the proper sanction,” yet he appears no more willing or able to suggest what that remedy might be. Aplt. Reply Br. at 4. To be sure, the court is troubled by the destruction of a valuable piece of evidence, especially given the prominent role that the videotape played in Sours’s administrative appeal. The district court, however, found no bad faith by the defendants. And Sours, represented by counsel, does not challenge that finding on appeal. To the contrary, he emphasizes that he “did not and does not now base his appeal on an allegation of bad faith against the Defendants.” Aplt. Reply Br. at 2. 2 In view of the district court’s ruling, as well as Sours’s disavowal of any effort to show bad faith, we are stripped of the ability to impose one possible lesser sanction: a remand with direction that the district court infer that production of the videotape would have been unfavorable to the defendants. Such an adverse inference “must be predicated on the bad faith of the party destroying the [evidence].” Aramburu v. Boeing Co. , 112 F.3d 1398, 1407 (10th Cir. 1997). 2 Sours filed his opening brief pro se. Later, counsel sought leave from this court to file a reply brief and supplemental appendix out of time, attaching copies of those respective documents to his motion. We hereby GRANT those requests. -9- Unable to consider what is perhaps the most appropriate sanction, we are thus left with a decision by the district court against imposing the most severe sanction possible against the defendants. We review that decision for an abuse of discretion, keeping in mind that drastic sanctions like default judgments are warranted only in extraordinary cases. Under these circumstances, we cannot say that the district court committed a clear error of judgment or exceeded the bounds of permissible choice. See Richardson , 186 F.3d at 1276. Finally, we are unable to review the contention, raised for the first time in Sours’s reply brief, that the district court abused its discretion by basing its decision to deny sanctions on a misapprehension of the law. See Codner v. United States, 17 F.3d 1331, 1332 n.2 (10th Cir. 1994) (noting that this court need not address arguments raised for the first time in a reply brief) . According to Sours, the district court erred in stating that it could not impose any sanction unless he showed bad faith by the defendants. But Sours did not provide this court with a copy of the relevant transcript in which that statement, allegedly made by the district court, appears. Thus even if we were inclined to address an argument raised initially in a reply brief, we are unable to review this one. An appellate court cannot review what is claimed to be an erroneous oral ruling by a trial court unless the appellant first establishes that the ruling, and the reasoning attributed to it, in fact occurred. See McGinnis v. Gustafson, 978 F.2d 1199, -10- 1200-01 (10th Cir. 1992) (court would not review ruling when appellant did not include transcript of the district court’s oral ruling; the failure “raises an effective barrier to informed, substantive appellate review”). The judgment of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma is AFFIRMED. Entered for the Court Michael R. Murphy