Opinion ID: 615207
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: District Court's Sua Sponte Dismissal of Colón's Equal Protection Claim

Text: Colón's remaining argument on appeal is that the district court improperly dismissed her equal protection claim sua sponte because the Municipality never moved for its dismissal in its motion for summary judgment. We begin with Colón's alleged claim. The only reference to an equal protection claim that we can find in the record is in the jurisdiction section to Colón's amended complaint, in which she asserts: Also, the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution is proclaimed. Colón does not include the claim as a separate cause of action in the complaint; she does not incorporate it into her other causes of action; she makes no factual or legal argument in support of this claim in her amended complaint or other subsequent pleading (or even on this appeal); and she makes no reference to it in her opposition to summary judgment motion. See Ruiz Rivera v. Pfizer Pharm., LLC, 521 F.3d 76, 87-88 (1st Cir.2008) (finding no error where district court did not review a fleeting and inadequate claim that plaintiff only raised in her complaint's introductory paragraph, which she did not raise as a separate cause of action, and to which she pled no supporting facts). In short, Colón makes a one-sentence, legally and factually unsupported, emaciated assertion of an equal protection claim to secure the district court's federal jurisdiction over her case. We have warned parties before that trial judges are not mind readers, and that [i]f claims are merely insinuated rather than actually articulated, courts are not required to make determinations on them. McCoy v. Mass. Inst. of Tech., 950 F.2d 13, 22 (1st Cir.1991); see also Harriman v. Hancock Cnty., 627 F.3d 22, 28 (1st Cir.2010) (It is not enough merely to mention a possible argument in the most skeletal way, leaving the court to do counsel's work, create the ossature for the argument, and put flesh on its bones. (quoting United States v. Zannino, 895 F.2d 1, 17 (1st Cir.1990))); Paterson-Leitch Co. v. Mass. Mun. Wholesale Elec. Co., 840 F.2d 985, 990 (1st Cir.1988) (a party has a duty to spell out its arguments squarely and distinctly . . . [instead of being] allowed to defeat the system by seeding the record with mysterious references to unpled claims). Moreover, even if Colón's one sentence claim, bereft of any legal citation or factual analysis, could be deemed to have required notice of its potential exposure to the winds of dismissal for failure to state a justiciable claimfurther notice, of course, aside from Colón having already sought to amend her complaint and having fully responded to the Municipality's summary judgment motion (which sought to effectively remove all of her listed causes of action from the court's consideration, leaving as her only potential claim on which to prop herself before the federal court's jurisdiction her alleged equal protection claim)not . . . every sua sponte dismissal entered without prior notice to the plaintiff automatically must be reversed. González-González v. United States, 257 F.3d 31, 37 (1st Cir.2001). If it is crystal clear that the plaintiff cannot prevail and that amending the complaint would be futile, then a sua sponte dismissal may stand. Id. Here, the record shows that Colón already was afforded the opportunity to amend her complaint, into which she planted the seed of an equal protection claim. But she buried and abandoned the seed in the complaint's jurisdiction section, failing to support it with factual or legal arguments, or to even address it againwhether in that pleading or in any other pleading, motion, or brief. Thus, we cannot see how a subsequent opportunity to amend would be anything but futile. Colón cannot reap what she has not sown. Further, any remand here is unnecessary because Colón's claim clearly fail[s] to survive the proper Rule 8(a)(2) notice pleading standard. Cepero-Rivera v. Fagundo, 414 F.3d 124, 129 (1st Cir.2005). Rule 8(a)(2) requires that a pleading stating a claim for relief must contain a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief, Fed. R.Civ.P. 8(a)(2); however, there must be sufficient detail in the complaint to give a defendant fair notice of the claim and the grounds upon which it rests. Ocasio-Hernández v. Fortuño-Burset, 640 F.3d 1, 8 (1st Cir.2011). That is, the plain statement must possess enough heft to show that the pleader is entitled to relief, id., and it requires more than an unadorned, the-defendant-unlawfully-harmed-me accusation. Sanchez v. Pereira-Castillo, 590 F.3d 31, 48 (1st Cir.2009) (quoting Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 129 S.Ct. 1937, 1949, 173 L.Ed.2d 868 (2009)) (internal quotation marks omitted). Colón's claim here lacks any legal or factual authority or supportive detail. She cannot bury a blatantly inadequately pled claim in her complaint on the hope that it might spring to life like a forgotten Hydra-head upon the court's disposal of all of her other alleged claims. We therefore find no error in the district court's determination not to consider Colón's entirely unarticulated equal protection claim. See Ruiz Rivera, 521 F.3d at 87-88.