Opinion ID: 1404508
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: City of Detroit's appeal

Text: The City is not entitled to invoke the defense of qualified immunity under federal law, and thus would ordinarily have no grounds to seek an interlocutory appeal of the district court's denial of its motion for summary judgment. See Swint v. Chambers County Comm'n, 514 U.S. 35, 43, 115 S.Ct. 1203, 131 L.Ed.2d 60 (1995) (holding that a local government's assertion that the constitutional violation at issue did not result from its policies or customs was not an immediately appealable claim for immunity, but rather only a defense to liability). It contends, however, that we should invoke pendent appellate jurisdiction, which permits the consideration of otherwise unappealable claims where the appealable and non-appealable issues are `inextricably intertwined' such that we, in our discretion, decide to extend our jurisdiction over the municipal claim. Bultema v. Benzie County, 146 Fed.Appx. 28, 38 (6th Cir.2005) (quoting Brennan v. Township of Northville, 78 F.3d 1152, 1157 (6th Cir.1996)). Bultema, however, actually illustrates why the opposite result is appropriate here. This court in Bultema reviewed prior cases in which it had accepted pendent appellate jurisdiction and distinguished them all on the basis that, in those cases, the court had found that no constitutional violation had occurred at all. Id. at 37. Where a court determines that no violation of the plaintiff's constitutional rights occurred, obviously the governmental entity cannot be liable for its failure to train or for developing a custom that led to a constitutional violation. Once a violation is determined to have occurred, however, the question of municipal liability turns not simply on the actions of the individual state actors, but rather on the separate question of whether the violation may be attributed to a municipal policy or failure to train. Id. at 38. That question, Bultema held, was not indisputably coterminous with, or subsumed in the question of the individual defendants' entitlement to qualified immunity. Id. at 39. The same result obtains here. Because a jury could find that Officers Quaine and Reynoso violated Floyd's rights, the question of the City's liability under both § 1983 and state law turns on the separate issues of its training practices and policies. Pendant jurisdiction is thus inapplicable, meaning that we lack jurisdiction to consider the City's interlocutory appeal.