Opinion ID: 200604
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Duplicate damages

Text: This argument, which is premised on an error of law, has more force than defendants' factually grounded claim of excessive damages. Before addressing the consequences of defendants' failure to preserve this argument below, we examine the merits of the claim itself. By way of background, the jury award was broken down into five components for the eight plaintiffs alleging discrimination, due process violations and harassment:

harassment; (3) Political discrimination resulting in dismissal causing pain and suffering; (4) Political discrimination resulting in dismissal causing loss of earnings; and (5) Punitive damages For the twelve plaintiffs alleging only political discrimination and due process injuries, the jury award contained all of the above components except (2).7 7 The individual damage awards for each plaintiff are too lengthy to list here. As a general matter, there was some uniformity among the damage awards. For category (1), all twenty plaintiffs received $75,000 in compensatory damages from Defendant Vera and $75,000 from Defendant Gonzalez. Every plaintiff also received $15,000 in punitive damages from Defendant Vera and $15,000 in punitive damages from Defendant Monroig. Categories (2), (3), and (4) produced some variation. For the eight plaintiffs alleging political harassment, the jury found that four had failed to prove political harassment, and awarded no damages in this category. Two plaintiffs received $50,000, and the other two received $75,000. Finally, the awards for pain and suffering ranged from $75,000 to $150,000, and the awards for lost earnings ran the gamut from zero damages awarded to $55,000 (all awards in this category reflected varying percentage reductions for -35- Defendants point out that plaintiffs' Fourteenth Amendment due process claims arise from the municipality's failure to offer the claimants alternatives to outright termination. The consequences of this denial of due process include the normal injuries associated with removal from a secure job -- lost earnings, pain and suffering associated with unemployment, lost future income, etc. Defendants contend that their alleged violation of defendants' First Amendment rights resulted in precisely the same harms. Because the jury essentially compensated plaintiffs for their unemployment injuries twice -- once under a First Amendment theory and once under a Fourteenth Amendment theory -- defendants argue that the court erred as a matter of law in entering judgment on a double award for the same injury. It is well-settled that double awards for the same injury are impermissible. Lewis v. Kendrick, 944 F.2d 949, 954 (1st Cir. 1991); Freeman v. Package Mach. Co., 865 F.2d 1331, 1345 (1st Cir. 1988). Moreover, Congress intended for compensatory damages in section 1983 cases to remedy only actual injuries caused by a deprivation of constitutional rights, and not the abstract 'value' of [] due process and First Amendment rights. Memphis Community Sch. Dist. v. Stachura, 477 U.S. 299, 313 (1986). The Supreme Court elaborated in Stachura that required mitigation of damages). -36- when § 1983 plaintiffs seek damages for violations of constitutional rights, the level of damages is ordinarily determined according to principles derived from the common law of torts . . . . Congress adopted this common-law system of recovery when it established liability for constitutional torts. Consequently, the basic purpose of § 1983 damages is to compensate persons for injuries that are caused by the deprivation of constitutional rights. Id. at 306-07 (quoting Carey v. Piphus, 435 U.S. 247, 254 (1978)). Consequently, any duplication problem cannot be resolved by conceptualizing First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment violations as distinct injuries warranting separate compensation. In defending the jury verdict, plaintiffs argue that the damages awarded for the due process violations were retrospective in nature, designed to compensate the claimants for wages lost from the date of dismissal to the date of the verdict. By contrast, the compensatory damages awarded for defendants' Fourteenth Amendment violations were forward-looking and intended to remedy the plaintiffs' lost property rights8 in their career employment positions. Specifically, plaintiffs argue that because career employment carries with it an expectancy of continued income prospectively (front pay), retirement and medical insurance 8 Puerto Rico law grants career employees a property interest in their government positions: Regular career employees are those who have entered the system after undergoing the recruitment procedure established in this subtitle, including the probational period. These employees shall be entitled to permanent status and may only be removed from their positions for just cause after due filing of charges. 21 P.R. Laws Ann. § 4554(b) (1991). -37- (lost benefits), and the security of continuing employment terminable only for cause, a deprivation of that right permits an additional award. This award is legally distinguishable in that it represents compensation for prospective losses, from the date of the trial forward, whereas political discrimination damages are calculated retroactively from the date of trial. We agree with plaintiffs that both front and back pay are valid elements of a compensatory damage award under section 1983. Indeed, compensatory damages may include not only out-of-pocket loss and other monetary harms, but also such injuries as 'impairment of reputation . . ., personal humiliation, and mental anguish and suffering.' Stachura, 477 U.S. at 307 (quoting Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323, 350 (1974)); see Davet v. Maccarone, 973 F.2d 22, 29 (1st Cir. 1992). In support of their argument that the jury apportioned its compensatory damage awards between the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment violations, plaintiffs refer us to the Political Discrimination section of the special verdict form, which directs the jury to indicate the amount of back pay to date [plaintiff] should receive if political affiliation was a substantial or motivating factor in his/her dismissal (emphasis added). Yet there is no analogous reference to front pay in either the jury instructions or the due process section of the verdict form, which simply provides that [u]nder the law you may choose to award damages for a violation of due process. If you answered -38- 'YES' to the previous question [addressing liability], state the amount of damages this Plaintiff should be awarded from [defendants] (emphasis added). Moreover, plaintiffs' theory of apportionment arguably suffers from another flaw. If the jury had found defendants guilty of either a due process violation or a First Amendment violation, but not both, plaintiffs would still be entitled to front pay, back pay, and pain and suffering, because the singular violation would still have resulted in the loss of career employment and any secondary harms flowing from that loss. Put differently, nothing inherent in the nature of a due process violation limits the resulting economic injury to front pay, and nothing inherent in an act of political discrimination inflicts an injury that is limited to back pay. Finally, we note that the court's duplicative damage instruction was worded so as to suggest that the relevant injury that could not be doubly compensated was the violation of a constitutional right, rather than an actual loss or harm. In awarding damages you should be careful not to award duplicate damages. Plaintiffs are entitled to collect full compensation for their injuries if proved, but they must not collect more than once for the same wrong . . . . Again, each plaintiff is entitled to collect full compensation for his or her injury but the plaintiff must not collect more than once for the same wrong. -39- (emphasis added). The court's use of the term wrong, read in conjunction with a special verdict form divided into separate sections for each constitutional violation, may have led the jury to conceptualize the term injury as the violation of a constitutional right vel non, rather than an actual loss caused by the violation of that right. See Stachura, 477 U.S. at 306-07; Carey, 435 U.S. at 254. Possibly, in the absence of more detailed instructions supporting plaintiffs' front pay/back pay theory, the jury may have erroneously awarded duplicative damages by compensating plaintiffs for the same actual losses under both a due process and political discrimination theory of liability. We acknowledge, therefore, that the lack of clarity in the court's duplicative damages instruction was obvious error which may potentially have resulted in an improper award of double damages. We must now decide whether defendants are entitled to relief in the face of this error. Defendants were on notice throughout the proceedings that plaintiffs were seeking recovery for both due process violations and political discrimination. To the extent that a jury award on both claims would be duplicative, the proper practice is to ensure that the verdict form is structured so as to allow the jury to recompense the plaintiffs' injuries just once. As we observed in Britton v. Murphy, 196 F.3d 24, 32 (1st Cir. 1999): The problem of guarding against double recovery is a familiar one when multiple -40- claims exist but separate damages on each would be partly or wholly duplicative. If the parties explicitly agree that the damages should be the same on each claim, then it is easy enough to construct special interrogatories that identify separate bases for liability but have only a single line for damages. On the other hand, when the amounts awarded could conceivably differ depending on the claim but may also involve some overlap, verdict forms sometimes require a separate specification of damages for each claim on which the jury determines liability, leaving it to the judge to make the appropriate adjustments to avoid double recovery. Id. (internal citation omitted). Defendants could also have requested jury instructions that clearly directed the jury to compensate the plaintiffs' unemployment injuries just once. Here, defendants failed to lodge a pertinent objection to either the jury instructions or the verdict form. Even after the jury delivered its sizeable verdict, defendants never submitted a post-trial motion challenging the actual award as duplicative. Accordingly, we review the appellants' allegation of duplicative damages for plain error only. See Chestnut, 305 F.3d at 20 (verdict form); M & I Heat Transfer Prods. v. Gorchev, 141 F.3d 21, 23 (1st Cir. 1998) (jury instructions); Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Report of the Civil Rules Advisory Committee 62-68; supra. We apply the plain error doctrine 'in exceptional cases or under peculiar circumstances to prevent a clear miscarriage of justice . . . [or] where the error seriously affected the fairness, -41- integrity or public reputation of judicial proceedings.' Rocafort v. IBM Corp., 334 F.3d 115, 122 (1st Cir. 2003) (citing Beatty v. Michael Bus. Machs. Corp., 172 F.3d 117, 121 (1st Cir. 1999). Our previous cases reflect a marked reluctance to find plain error in civil cases: [E]specially in a civil case this is a very hard test to meet because over and above plain error, it requires a showing both of prejudice and a miscarriage of justice or something of this magnitude. Fraser v. Major League Soccer, L.L.C., 284 F.3d 47, 62 (1st Cir. 2002) (citing Davis v. Rennie, 264 F.3d 86, 100-01 (1st Cir. 2001), cert. denied, 123 S.Ct. 118 (2002)). Defendants' claim for relief from the alleged double damages founders on the prejudice prong of the plain error standard. In reaching this conclusion, we are in no way trivializing the consequences of this verdict for the municipality of Adjuntas and the individual defendants. The jury returned a verdict of $6,956,400, of which $6,356,400 (the total jury award, excluding punitive damages)9 was against a municipality whose entire annual budget in 1996-97 was only $4,529,327. See Exhibit 2, Defendants' Statement of Uncontested Facts (July 17, 1998). Moreover, this figure reflects the damages owed only to the first twenty plaintiffs; sixty-two plaintiffs remain in the queue. But prejudice, as that term is incorporated into the plain error test, 9 In City of Newport v. Fact Concerts, Inc., 458 U.S. 247 (1981), the Supreme Court ruled that municipalities are immune from punitive damages under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. See id. at 271. -42- requires a strong causal link between the harm to the aggrieved party and the legal error. At best, defendants can only demonstrate the possibility that faulty jury instructions resulted in a duplicative damage award. Indeed, the appellate materials set forth competing explanations for the jury's award of damages under both a due process and First Amendment theory of liability. Appellants argue that the compensatory damages awarded under each theory doubly recompensed claimants for their actual losses, while appellees insist that the jury compensated plaintiffs for their total loss just once, but divided that single award between the due process and First Amendment causes of action. Nothing in this record precludes that possibility, or rules out other appropriate bases for the jury award. For defendants who fail to protect themselves on the record by requesting jury instructions and/or special verdict forms structured to preclude the possibility of a double damage award, these possibilities are fatal to a request for plain error relief. The prejudice component of the plain error standard implies a stringent demonstration of causation. Thus, in Chestnut v. City of Lowell, our decision to vacate a punitive damage award on plain error review rested in part on the finding that [p]rejudice in the sense of affecting the final outcome is . . . obvious: had the jury been instructed as to the City's immunity [from punitive damages] there almost certainly would not be a $500,000 judgment against it -43- today, although conceivably the jury might have somewhat increased the compensatory damages. Chestnut, 305 F.3d at 20 (emphasis added). Here, although we can speculate that the court's instructions may have led the jury to erroneously award duplicative damages, we have no concrete basis for accepting defendants' characterization of the jury award. Under these circumstances, we decline to expand the rule of Chestnut to encompass cases in which prejudice to the aggrieved party is not manifest on the face of the record.