Opinion ID: 201350
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Factual Findings on Alexander's Particularly Egregious Misconduct

Text: 24 In light of this chronology of events and after assessing the credibility of the witnesses who testified at trial, the court determined that Alexander persisted in particularly egregious misconduct, Powell, 221 F.Supp.2d at 122, and that she engaged in a course of behavior that the court deem[ed] to be `outrageous and worthy of condemnation.'  Id. at 152 (citation omitted). The court then listed several examples of Alexander's egregious acts and omissions, to name just a few, id., each of which Alexander alleges was a clearly erroneous factual determination. We also examine whether the findings, if supportable, amount to outrageous conduct in their cumulative effect. 25 a. Alexander's Failure to Forward Dr. Bird's Original Report of December 21, 1993, to the Medical Review Board 26 The district court found that Alexander failed to send Dr. Bird's first letter, which refers to a medical review board, to that board, in violation of her legal duties. Id. The medical review board, a body of the Massachusetts Criminal Justice Training Council, was authorized to grant exceptions allowing candidates with medical conditions to enroll in the police academy. 8 Alexander argues that she had no such legal duties because the City's personnel department handled all such matters. 27 The court stated that Pittsfield's personnel department was unstaffed, and Alexander was fulfilling its responsibilities with regard to Powell. Id. at 127. Alexander counters that the department was staffed and operating at the time Powell sought reinstatement. The record shows that the personnel department was staffed but that it had no director at the relevant times. Personnel staff apparently gave Alexander a copy of Dr. Bird's letter because she was overseeing Powell's reinstatement under the settlement agreement. 28 This single misstatement by the district court that the personnel department was unstaffed is immaterial to the court's conclusion that Alexander should have referred Powell's case to the medical review board. Alexander undertook to coordinate Powell's reinstatement under the terms of the settlement, as evidenced by the voluminous correspondence documenting her central role in communicating various conditions of reinstatement to Powell's attorneys. The court was entitled to infer that Alexander had indeed taken control of the reinstatement process instead of leaving Powell's reinstatement for the City's personnel staff to handle according to routine procedures. 29 Although Dr. Bird forwarded to Alexander a copy of the police academy admission guidelines, including information about the medical review board, she stated at trial that she did not familiarize herself with them. Alexander asserts that, in contrast to Dr. Bird, she never viewed Powell's eligibility for admission to the police academy as determinative of his eligibility for reinstatement to the police force. Rather, active hepatitis might or might not be a bar to employment as a police officer, depending on the circumstances. Thus, Alexander maintains, any action by the medical review board permitting Powell's admission to the academy still would not have assuaged the City's independent concerns about his qualification for reinstatement: Only the liver biopsy could have provided the information required to assess Powell's ability to return to the police force. 9 30 Regardless of the City's ultimate decision under its own medical standards, the court found that Alexander's failure ... to submit the necessary documentation to the medical review board deprived Powell of the opportunity to obtain [an] exception [for admission to the police academy], which in view of his robust health and lack of symptoms he would very probably have received. Id. at 127. Alexander's inaction left Powell in limbo. Id. Instead of being allowed to satisfy one of the prerequisites for his return to the police force even as his biopsy and the City's final determination on reinstatement were pending, Powell continued in his ambiguous status, neither qualified nor disqualified for reinstatement, until 1996. Id. The court committed no clear error in determining that Alexander should have ensured that Powell's case reached the medical review board. 31 b. Alexander's Deliberate Suppression of Dr. Bird's July 5, 1994, Letter and Pressure on Dr. Bird to Suppress its Contents 32 The court found that Alexander deliberately hid Dr. Bird's second letter of July 5, 1994, which cleared Powell to go back to work, and pressured Dr. Bird to the point where he declined to communicate candidly with a patient of his who was suffering from a serious disease. Id. at 152. Based on testimony by the Mayor, Dr. Bird, and one of Powell's former attorneys, 10 the court found that the letter's existence was known only to Dr. Bird and to Alexander until its compelled disclosure during discovery. The court also credited Dr. Bird's testimony at trial that Alexander had told him to keep the letter confidential and to avoid communicating directly with Powell. Although Alexander denied ... ever asking Dr. Bird to keep the letter confidential, the court found that she had testified without credibility and had conceded that she never told anyone else about the letter. Id. at 132. 33 Alexander stresses that she did not forward Dr. Bird's July 5, 1994, letter to the Mayor or to anyone else because she did not consider the letter to be a report reflecting the City [P]hysician['s] satisf[action] that Mr. Powell may safely return to work and perform his duties as required by her May 12, 1994, letter to Powell's attorney. She argues that Dr. Bird's second letter did not, in fact, clear[ ] Powell to go back to work. Rather, Alexander interprets Dr. Bird's second letter as merely reflecting his own realization that Powell's disqualification for admission to the police academy did not automatically bar him from eventual employment as a police officer after all, a conclusion Alexander had reached long before in refusing to declare Powell qualified or disqualified for reinstatement (regardless of his eligibility for police academy admission) until he had a liver biopsy. 34 The court found Alexander's interpretation of Dr. Bird's July 5, 1994, letter untenable and her testimony that she did not view the letter `as significant' ... because in her mind, it `wasn't a report' lacking in credibility. Id. Instead, after analyzing the text of both of Dr. Bird's letters and the trial testimony about the circumstances in which those letters were written, the court permissibly concluded that Dr. Bird's July 5, 1994, letter was indeed a report, that it provided all the information Alexander purported to require in her May 12, 1994, letter, and that it should have cleared the way for Powell's reinstatement as early as July 1994. 35 The district court had more than sufficient evidence before it from which to infer not only that Alexander's idiosyncratic interpretation of Dr. Bird's letter was objectively unreasonable, but also that she obviously repressed [the letter] as part of the effort to forestall Powell's reinstatement and to avoid performing on [her] promise to permit reinstatement `if the City [P]hysician is satisfied.' Id. This finding was not clearly erroneous. 36 c. Alexander's Efforts to Mask her Interference and the Alleged Agreement to Hold off on Dr. Bird's Report 37 The district court found that Alexander methodically kept a stream of letters going to Powell and his counsel in an effort to mask her interference with his reinstatement, and went so far as to manufacture a nonexistent agreement that Dr. Bird `hold off' on his report on Powell's health. Id. at 152. Alexander maintains that Powell's attorney told her in a phone conversation on July 13, 1994, shortly after her receipt of Dr. Bird's July 5, 1994, letter, that Powell was now seeking disability retirement instead of reinstatement and that Dr. Bird could therefore hold off on writing a report based on the biopsy results regarding Powell's fitness for reinstatement. Alexander asserts that Dr. Bird was free at any time to send a copy of his July 5, 1994, letter (which she did not consider to be a report) to Powell, and that Dr. Bird misunderstood her direction to hold off on writing a true report (while Powell pursued disability retirement) as a direction to keep the letter under wraps. At trial, Powell's former attorney denied that he agreed to delay Dr. Bird's report and testified that it was Alexander who suggested that Powell apply for disability retirement. The court did not credit Alexander's testimony to the contrary. 38 In July 1994, unaware that Dr. Bird had just written to Alexander to state that he felt that [Powell] does not have a condition which would disqualify him from returning to the police force, Powell sought Dr. Bird's signature on his application for disability retirement, based on Dr. Bird's original December 21, 1993, opinion that Powell was disqualified from employment on the police force. On July 28, 1994, Dr. Bird wrote to Powell, declining to sign the form and stating that Powell's treating physician should sign the form instead. In November 1994, after Powell approached him a second time to sign his disability form, Dr. Bird wrote to Powell that [a]fter discussion of your request with the City Solicitor, I have been advised that it would be ethically inappropriate as the city physician for me to give you directly any statement of disability or complete the application because you are not under my professional care, nor have I been treating you. Dr. Bird testified that he would also have told Powell that he did not consider him to be disabled if he had not been told to keep the information secret. Powell's application for disability retirement eventually stalled because he had not accrued the necessary number of service years on the police force. 39 During this same period, from September 1994 to January 1995, Alexander wrote monthly letters to Powell's attorneys seeking information on the status of [his] application for [disability] retirement and to discern what, if anything, the City could do to help with closure of this matter. Each of these letters fails to mention Dr. Bird's change of opinion regarding Powell's fitness to work. The court specifically rejected the credibility of Alexander's trial testimony on cross-examination that it never occurred to her that Powell might have abandoned his disability retirement application if he had been aware of Dr. Bird's conclusions about his ability to return to the police force as stated in the July 5, 1994, letter. 40 The court also found that Alexander's September 20, 1994, letter to Powell's attorney, the first in a stream of letters regarding Powell's disability retirement application status, id., contained 41 what can only be characterized as the outrageously misleading statement that at the time of settlement, no one anticipated that [Powell] would have a health problem which would impede the reinstatement. This statement was made at a time when [Alexander] was perfectly aware of the unanimous medical opinion, including the considered view of the City's own physician, that no health problem impeded Powell's reinstatement. 42 Id. at 135 (first alteration in original). In later correspondence with Powell's attorneys throughout the next year, Alexander continued to treat his medical condition as an unresolved issue. 43 Given this evidence, the court committed no clear error in concluding that: 44 Alexander's failure to disclose ... to [Powell's attorney] in her conversations with him that, as of July 5, 1994, she had in her possession unambiguous documentation of the City Physician's opinion that Powell was fit to return to work constitutes egregious misconduct and reflects the defendants' level of determination to retaliate against Powell for his earlier lawsuit by blocking his reinstatement by whatever means. 45 Id. at 133. 46 d. Omission of the Letter from Submissions to the Court and Efforts to Involve Dr. Bird in Those Omissions 47 The district court found that Alexander intentionally omitted any reference to Dr. Bird's July 5, 1994, letter from the affidavits and numerous exhibits she submitted to the court in 1996 in response to Powell's motion to vacate the settlement agreement. Worse, the court found, Alexander forced a kind of fraud upon Dr. Bird when she left any reference to the letter out of his affidavit, which she drafted. Id. at 152. As a result, the letter's existence remained unknown to anyone except Alexander and Dr. Bird until it materialized more than one year later during discovery in Powell's 1997 lawsuit. The court thus found that Alexander's deliberate suppression of the letter distorted the record submitted to the court in an effort to avoid disclosure of the defendants' bad faith. Id. at 138. 48 Alexander argues that she submitted the affidavits merely to document the City's timely responses to Powell's reinstatement requests and to show that any delay in Powell's reinstatement was not attributable to the City's lack of diligence but was the result of Powell's own equivocation about whether to pursue disability retirement instead. Dr. Bird's July 5, 1994, letter was, in her view, irrelevant to that showing. Yet Dr. Bird's affidavit describes his review of Powell's health status, including the biopsy results, in such detail that the absence of any reference to the July 5, 1994, letter in which he reported his conclusions based on that same review is striking. 49 Alexander reiterates that she simply did not view the July 5, 1994, letter or its contents as material to Dr. Bird's affidavit because it did not relate to the legitimate reasons for the delay in Powell's reinstatement, namely, Powell's own failure to satisfy the City's conditions by refusing to have a liver biopsy and by deciding to petition for disability retirement and expand his taxi/limousine business instead. The court refused to credit this argument in light of Alexander's professional experience as a litigation attorney engaged in a dispute about Powell's employment qualifications. Instead, the court found that 50 [a]ny fair presentation of the documents pertinent to the dispute about reinstatement and the Settlement Agreement generally must necessarily have included the July 5th letter, which would have confirmed the absence for nearly two years of any impediment to Powell's reinstatement. 51 Id. The court did not err in determining that the effort required to exclude a single letter from a list of notes and other proof of the communications between Alexander and Dr. Bird in his affidavit constituted circumstantial evidence of deliberate omission. 52 The court also credited Dr. Bird's testimony that he himself viewed the omission from the affidavit as unusual, although he made no effort to correct it. Alexander argues that she should not be charged with controlling Dr. Bird's submission to the court in the form of his affidavit merely because he misunderstood her directive to hold off on a report as meaning that he should keep his July 5, 1994, letter confidential. She maintains that Dr. Bird could easily have overridden her judgment that the letter had no bearing on Powell's fulfillment of the settlement agreement's reinstatement conditions and that he could have made the appropriate additions to his own affidavit. 11 We find no clear error in the court's conclusion, based on Dr. Bird's testimony and other evidence, that Dr. Bird deferred to Alexander's legal expertise, as he expected her to defer to his medical opinions. 53 As for Alexander's own affidavit, accompanied by forty-nine exhibits, in which she documented her efforts to cooperate with Powell's attorneys in his reinstatement effort, the court again was not clearly erroneous in finding that her decision to exclude the July 5, 1994, letter of Dr. Bird's from the court filing was deliberate, as was her decision in 1994 not to pass the letter on to Powell's attorney in the first place. 54 e. Summary 55 In short, after a careful review of the evidence of Alexander's overall course of behavior, we find nothing clearly erroneous in the findings of the district court that, cumulatively, Alexander engaged in particularly egregious misconduct, id. at 122, that was outrageous and worthy of condemnation. Id. at 152 (internal quotation marks omitted). 56