Opinion ID: 169076
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Officer Roberts’s Attempted Appeal

Text: Having held that we have jurisdiction over the appeal, we must now determine whether Officer Brandon Roberts is rightly before us. The notice of appeal, timely filed on D ecember 1, 2005, reads as follow s: Notice is hereby given that Defendants W arren Ploeger, Glen Leitch, Steve Roberts, County Commissioners of Brown County, Kansas, Lamar Shoemaker and Brett Hollister (“Defendants”), in the abovereferenced matter, hereby appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit from a M emorandum and Order denying Defendants’ claims for qualified immunity entered in this action on the 17th day of November, 2005. R. Doc. 42 at 1. Officer Brandon Roberts’s name does not appear at all in the text or the caption of the notice of appeal. See id. Pursuant to Fed. R. App. P. 3(c)(1)(A), a notice of appeal must “specify the party or parties taking the appeal by naming each one in the caption or body of the notice . . . .” In Torres v. Oakland Scavenger Co., the Supreme Court held that “[t]he failure to name a party in the notice of appeal is more than excusable ‘informality’; it constitutes a failure of that party to appeal.” 487 U.S. 312, 314 (1988). Following Torres, the Federal Rules of A ppellate Procedure w ere - 12 - amended to make clear that “[a]n appeal must not be dismissed for informality of form or title of the notice of appeal, or for failure to name a party whose intent to appeal is otherw ise clear from the notice.” Fed. R. App. P. 3(c)(4). M oreover, the amended Rule permits “an attorney representing more than one party [to] describe those parties with such terms as ‘all plaintiffs,’ ‘the defendants,’ ‘the plaintiffs A, B, et al.,’ or ‘all defendants except X.’” Id. R. 3(c)(1)(A). In light of these changes, the dispositive question is whether the notice of appeal has provided fair notice of the parties that intend to appeal the lower court’s decision. See Dodger’s Bar & Grill, Inc. v. Johnson County Bd. of County Comm’rs, 32 F.3d 1436, 1440-41 (10th Cir. 1994). W e have held that the jurisdictional nature of Rule 3(c) prevents us from considering an appeal by a party whose intent to appeal is not clear from the notice even when the omission of the party is inadvertent and the opposing party has suffered no prejudice. See Twenty M ile Joint Venture, PN D, Ltd. v. Comm’r of Internal Revenue, 200 F.3d 1268, 1274 (10th Cir. 1999). Accordingly, we have concluded that the omission of one party where others are mentioned by name is insufficient to indicate that the omitted party intended to appeal. See id. at 1273-74. Here, both the caption and the body of the notice listed five of the original six defendants by name. Nothing in the notice even suggested that Officer Roberts intended to appeal the denial of summary judgment. In these circumstances, we have little difficulty concluding that the notice of appeal did - 13 - not provide fair notice that O fficer Roberts intended to appeal. Therefore, we lack jurisdiction to consider whether Officer Roberts was entitled to summary judgment. 5 See id.