Opinion ID: 112150
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The City

Text: 12 The city's first contention is that the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment is applicable to contempt sanctions and that the particular sanctions imposed here were constitutionally excessive. The city accurately observes in this regard that the Court has indicated that the applicability of this Clause to punitive damages in civil cases is a question of some moment and difficulty. Bankers Life & Casualty Co. v. Crenshaw, 486 U.S. 71, 79, 108 S.Ct. 1645, 1651, 100 L.Ed.2d 62 (1988). But, even if the Clause applies to punitive damages, the city offers no compelling reason why we should extend its reach to civil contempt sanctions. Indeed, it appears settled that the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause does not apply to civil contempt sanctions. See Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651, 668, 97 S.Ct. 1401, 1410, 51 L.Ed.2d 711 (1977). This is not surprising since the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, like the Excessive Fines Clause, applies to punishments for past conduct, while civil contempt sanctions are designed to secure future compliance with judicial decrees. See ibid.; Uphaus v. Wyman, 360 U.S. 72, 81, 79 S.Ct. 1040, 1046, 3 L.Ed.2d 1090 (1959). In any event, even assuming that the size of monetary contempt sanctions is limited by the Excessive Fines Clause or even the Due Process Clause, I do not think that the fines against the city, as modified by the Court of Appeals, are unreasonable. The city of Yonkers has an annual budget of $337 million. At one point, it offered to forfeit $30 million in federal funds to avoid compliance with the consent decree. Under these circumstances, a fine schedule which imposes $1 million a day only after noncompliance for 15 consecutive days can hardly be deemed unreasonable. 13 The city's second contention is that the contempt adjudication itself was improper because the District Court should have adopted less restrictive alternatives such as direct enactment of the legislation or appointment of an Affordable Housing Commission, and because the city had a valid impossibility defense. Neither contention has merit. First, the District Court had no need to resort to its equitable authority, codified in Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 70, to deem the legislation enacted, as the city had committed itself to adopting that legislation in a court-approved consent order. Surely it is both less disruptive and more effective to order compliance with that order than to usurp completely the council's legislative authority and enact the legislation directly. Second, having previously objected to the creation of an Affordable Housing Commission, the city cannot now claim that the District Court should have created such an entity. The city also contends the District Court erred by rejecting its impossibility defense. It claims that it does not have the ability to compel the councilmembers to enact the legislation or to remove recalcitrant members. The city's attempt to divorce itself from the actions of its councilmembers is disingenuous. As the city repeatedly points out in its application, Yonkers is relatively unique in that most of the governmental power in the city is centralized in the legislative branch. For this reason, the city is the council. Indeed, because the council sets municipal policy, see Pembaur v. Cincinnati, 475 U.S. 469, 481, 106 S.Ct. 1292, 1299, 89 L.Ed.2d 452 (1986), it is reasonable to attribute to the city the acts of its elected policymakers.