Opinion ID: 200616
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: A Forsyth Appeal

Text: On December 2, 2002 -- nearly one week after the district court's ruling granting partial summary judgment and denying qualified immunity -- Ortiz filed a notice of appeal of the district court's decision to deny qualified immunity. In Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511 (1985), the Supreme Court ruled that a defendant denied qualified immunity by a district court could file an interlocutory appeal to obtain review of any disputed question of law. [W]e hold that a district court's denial of a claim of qualified immunity, to the extent that it turns on an issue of law, is an appealable 'final decision' within the meaning of 28 U.S.C. § 1291 notwithstanding the absence of a final judgment. Forsyth, Id. at 530. The Forsyth Court reasoned that the entitlement [to qualified immunity] is an immunity from suit rather than a mere -11- defense to liability; and like an absolute immunity, it is effectively lost if a case is erroneously permitted to go to trial. Id. at 526 (emphasis in original). The act of filing an interlocutory appeal has jurisdictional implications: The filing of . . . an interlocutory appeal, confers jurisdiction on the court of appeals and divests the district court of control over those aspects of the case involved in the appeal. Griggs v. Provident Consumer Discount Co., 459 U.S. 56, 58 (1982) (per curiam). The district court does not regain jurisdiction over those issues until the court of appeals issues its mandate. Courts have carved out a few narrow exceptions to this rule, such as where the defendant frivolously appeals or takes an interlocutory appeal from a non-appealable order. United States v. Defries, 129 F.3d 1293, 1302-03 (D.C. Cir. 1997) (emphasis added). These exceptions to the jurisdictional rule recited in Defries figure prominently in the post-Forsyth jurisprudence of several circuits. In Apostol v. Gallion, 870 F.2d 1335 (7th Cir. 1989), the court of appeals observed that although [Forsyth] protects the interests of the defendants claiming qualified immunity, it may injure the legitimate interests of other litigants and the judicial system . . . . Defendants may seek to stall because they gain from delay at plaintiffs' expense, an incentive yielding unjustified appeals. Defendants may take Forsyth appeals for tactical as well as strategic reasons: disappointed by the denial of a continuance, they may help themselves to a postponement by lodging a notice of appeal. -12- Id. at 1338-39. In a subset of interlocutory appeals of qualified immunity rulings, the notice of appeal may be so baseless that it does not invoke appellate jurisdiction even when filed. Id. at 1339. To address other sham appeals whose lack of merit is not so transparent as to preclude the transfer of jurisdiction to the appellate court in the first instance, the Seventh Circuit developed a certification process whereby a district court may certify to the court of appeals that the appeal is frivolous and [retrieve jurisdiction to] get on with the trial. Id. The court admonished that [s]uch a power must be used with restraint, just as the power to dismiss a complaint for lack of jurisdiction because it is frivolous is anomalous and must be used with restraint. But it is there, and it may be valuable in cutting short the deleterious effects of unfounded appeals. Id. Following the Seventh Circuit's lead, the Sixth, Ninth, and Tenth circuits established similar certification procedures to address interlocutory appeals challenging the denial of qualified immunity (Forsyth appeals). See Yates v. City of Cleveland, 941 F.2d 444, 448-49 (6th Cir. 1991); Chuman v. Wright, 960 F.2d 104, 105 (9th Cir. 1992); Stewart v. Donges, 915 F.2d 572, 577 (10th Cir. 1990). The circuits adopting this certification procedure have held or implied that the district court's act of filing the -13- certification of frivolousness is an event of jurisdictional significance. [I]t is the district court's certification of the defendant's appeal as frivolous or forfeited rather than merely the fact that the appeal is frivolous which allows the district court to retain jurisdiction to conduct a trial . . . . Once a notice of appeal on an appealable issue such as qualified immunity is filed, the status quo is that the district court has lost jurisdiction to proceed. To regain jurisdiction, it must take the affirmative step of certifying the appeal as frivolous or forfeited, and until that step is taken it simply lacks jurisdiction to proceed with the trial. Stewart, 915 F.2d at 577-78 (emphasis in original); see also Chuman, 960 F.2d at 105; Yates, 941 F.2d at 449; Apostol, 870 F.2d at 1339. This proposition -- that a district court must actually file the certification of frivolousness to retrieve jurisdiction over the proceedings -- is the springboard for defendants' argument that the trial in this case was a nullity. On November 26, 2002, the district court initially entered an Opinion and Order denying defendants' pre-trial request for qualified immunity. On December 2, defendants responded by filing a notice of appeal from the denial of immunity and moving the district court to stay the proceedings pending the resolution of the appeal. Immediately thereafter they petitioned this court for a stay of the district -14- court proceedings.4 Without the benefit of an order from the district court denying the motion to stay, we denied the requested stay in a summary order issued that same day: The motion to stay trial is denied. In denying appellants' motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity, the district court stated that Ortiz's motivation for denying and deferring Plaintiff's resignation is an unresolved issue of material fact. As appellants have not adequately explained why the denial is immediately appealable, see Stella v. Kelley, 63 F.3d 71, 74 (1st Cir. 1995) (a district court's pretrial rejection of a qualified immunity defense is not immediately appealable to the extent that it turns on either an issue of fact or an issue perceived by the trial court to be an issue of fact), the motion for stay is denied. On December 3, 2002, the district court began the trial. Meanwhile, defendants had filed a motion for reconsideration of our December 2, 2002 order denying the stay. By order dated December 6, 2002, we rejected the defendants' motion for reconsideration: To the extent that defendant is asking this court to immediately stay any further trial, the request is denied. We request the district court, however, to expressly act on defendant's motion for stay. See Hegarty v. Somerset County, 25 F.3d 17, 18 (1st Cir. 1994); Chuman v. Wright, 960 F.2d 104, 105 (9th Cir. 1992) (Should the district court find that the defendants' claim of qualified immunity is frivolous or has been waived, the 4 The district court's order of December 6, 2002 indicates that defendants filed both their notice of appeal and request for a stay with the district court at 4:48 p.m. on December 2. Defendants also petitioned this court for a stay of the district court proceedings that same day, although the precise time this request was filed is not clear from the record. -15- district court may certify, in writing, that defendants have forfeited their right to pretrial appeal, and may proceed with trial). Any renewed request for a stay filed in the court of appeals must be accompanied by sufficient portions of the record to allow for intelligent review. In the interim, however, the district court had nearly completed the trial. On December 6, after entertaining closing arguments and issuing instructions to the jury, the district court denied the defendants' motion for stay in an order dated that day: [O]ur denial of summary judgment turned on an unresolved issue of fact in a clearly established legal scenario strongly indicative of improper political discrimination. Under these circumstances, an appeal of an unresolved factual question is baseless and is not immediately appealable. Therefore, we necessarily certify that Defendant's appeal is frivolous under the present circumstances. Rivera-Torres v. Ortiz-Velez, Civil No. 01-1244 at 5-6 (D.P.R. December 6, 2002). Defendants now insist that [g]iven the uncontested fact that the Trial Court proceeded without jurisdiction, the judgment entered in the instant case suffers from the incurable vice of nullity and must be vacated. This jurisdictional dispute might have been avoided if the district court had promptly ruled on the defendants' motion to continue the trial pending the resolution of their Forsyth appeal. See Fed. R. App. P. 8(a) (A party must ordinarily move first in the district court for . . . a stay of the judgment or order of a district court pending appeal.). Under well-settled law, courts -16- entertaining a motion for stay are compelled to evaluate the merits of the petition and anticipate its disposition on appeal. See Acevedo Garcia v. Vera-Monroig, 296 F.3d 13, 16 (1st Cir. 2002) (The sine qua non of the stay pending appeal standard is whether the movants are likely to succeed on the merits.) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). This evaluation closely resembles the frivolousness analysis required under the Apostol certification procedure, as the court's order of December 6 noting the unappealability of its qualified immunity ruling demonstrates. See supra. If the court had entered that order denying the stay on December 2, prior to beginning the trial, its jurisdiction over the proceedings would have been clearly established even without the inclusion of certification language in the opinion. We have never adopted the Apostol certification procedure in this circuit. Although appellants urge us to do so here in the hopes of adding fuel to their trial nullity argument, we decline their invitation. Whatever the merits of the certification procedure may be, its primary innovation -- permitting the district court to reclaim jurisdiction from the court of appeals in the wake of a Forsyth appeal -- has no relevance to this case. The defendants' notice of appeal was patently meritless, and therefore failed to divest the district court of jurisdiction in the first instance. As we observed in United States v. Brooks, 145 F.3d 446 (1st Cir. 1998): -17- [l]ike most rules, the rule that either the trial or the appellate court - but not both - may have jurisdiction over a case at any given point in time admits of some exceptions. Thus, a district court can proceed, notwithstanding the filing of an appeal, if the notice of appeal is defective in some substantial and easily discernible way (if, for example, it is based on an unappealable order) or if it otherwise constitutes a transparently frivolous attempt to impede the progress of the case. Id. at 456. In this case, the defendants' interlocutory appeal was based on an unappealable order. As we ruled in Stella: a district court's pretrial rejection of a qualified immunity defense is not immediately appealable to the extent that it turns on either an issue of fact or an issue perceived by the trial court to be an issue of fact . . . in such a situation, the movant must await the entry of final judgment before appealing the adverse ruling. Stella, 63 F.3d at 74 (emphasis added). This principle, which we reiterated in our initial order denying defendants' request for stay, rendered the district court's denial of qualified immunity unappealable. To avoid the application of this principle, appellants now lamely defend the legitimacy of their interlocutory appeal by arguing that the district court's qualified immunity determination turned on the legal question of whether a municipal officer's subjective intent is relevant to the qualified immunity analysis, and insisting that the court improperly considered the element of subjective intent as part of the qualified immunity inquiry. -18- Superficially, Ortiz draws support for his opposition from the Supreme Court's decision in Crawford-El v. Britton, 523 U.S. 574 (1998), and our post-Crawford-El jurisprudence. See Tower v. Leslie-Brown, 326 F.3d 290, 296 (1st Cir. 2003); Abreu-Guzman v. Ford, 241 F.3d 69, 73 (1st Cir. 2001) (Evidence concerning the officer's subjective intent is simply irrelevant to a qualified immunity defense.); Sheehy v. Town of Plymouth, 191 F.3d 15, 19 (1st Cir. 1999). To illustrate the flaw in Ortiz's argument, one must differentiate between constitutional violations that are strictly a product of the perpetrator's actions, and offenses where the perpetrator's subjective intent is an essential element of the violation. For example, an individual's Fourth Amendment rights are violated by the very fact that a police officer arrests him without probable cause, regardless of the officer's subjective intentions at the time of the arrest. See Abreu-Guzman, 241 F.3d at 73. Similarly, a suspect who is interrogated by the police without being advised of his right to counsel suffers a Fifth Amendment injury regardless of the questioning officer's intent or motives. In these situations, the rule of Crawford-El sensibly excludes evidence of the officer's intent from the qualified immunity analysis. On the other hand, subjective intent is an essential element of political discrimination. We have previously observed that -19- [w]hen a former government employee brings a First Amendment suit against his employer for taking an adverse employment action against him on the basis of his speech, the premier precedent is Mt. Healthy City Sch. Dist. Bd. of Educ. v. Doyle, 429 U.S. 274 (1977). Under the Mt. Healthy paradigm, the plaintiff must show both that his speech was constitutionally protected, and that it was a substantial or motivating factor for the adverse action taken against him. Stella, 63 F.3d at 74-75 (emphasis added). In other words, an employee's First Amendment right to be free from political discrimination is violated when the employer's adverse employment decision is motivated by the employee's political speech. Hence, the employer's subjective motive is an essential element of the constitutional violation itself, and cannot be divorced from the qualified immunity inquiry. Our previous decisions underscore the importance of the employer's subjective intent in political discrimination cases: Harlow does not rule out the need to inquire into the actual reasons behind an official's conduct when the official's state of mind is a necessary component of the constitutional violation he allegedly committed . . . . [T]he official's abnormal expertise in law, or his subjective, below par, lack of expertise, makes no difference. But determining whether defendant fired an employee for a discriminatory reason . . . is an altogether different matter. Feliciano-Angulo v. Rivera-Cruz, 858 F.2d 40, 45 (1st Cir. 1988). In Acevedo-Garcia v. Vera-Monroig, 204 F.3d 1 (1st Cir. 2000), we similarly dismissed defendants' contention that subjective intent -20- is irrelevant to qualified immunity, explaining that [t]he plaintiffs allege that they were terminated because of their political affiliation, a constitutional claim that has no meaning absent the allegation of impermissible motivation. Id. at 11. Accordingly, the proffered legal basis for the defendants' Forsyth appeal is meritless, having been foreclosed by our prior decisions in Feliciano-Angulo and Acevedo-Garcia, see supra, properly cited by the district court in its order denying defendants' request for a stay, and characterizing the interlocutory appeal as frivolous. Finally, we must note that the circumstances surrounding the defendants' Forsyth appeal betray its frivolousness. The district court's order of December 6 denying Ortiz's motion to stay the proceedings recounts that after the defendants' motion for summary judgment was denied on November 26, 2002, counsel for defendants failed to appear in court on December 2, the day the trial was scheduled to begin. Defendants insisted that they were unable to proceed because Johanna M. Emmanuelli-Huertas, the counsel of record for defendants, was simultaneously involved in another trial. The court rejected this excuse, sanctioned Emmanuelli's law firm, and rescheduled the trial for December 3. Later that day, Ortiz filed his notice of appeal, and immediately thereafter moved to stay the proceedings in the district court, asserting to the judge that this Honorable Court lacks subject matter jurisdiction to submit co-defendant Ortiz-Velez to the -21- rigors of trial.5 The timing and haste of the defendants' notice of appeal reveals its intended purpose -- to cloak a request for postponement in Forsyth interlocutory raiments. See Apostol, 870 F.2d at 1338-39 (Defendants may take Forsyth appeals for tactical as well as strategic reasons: disappointed by the denial of a continuance, they may help themselves to a postponement by lodging a notice of appeal.). In summary, we conclude that appellants' notice of appeal never divested the district court of jurisdiction, and we reject the claim that the entire trial was a nullity.