Opinion ID: 4417118
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Defendants’ Counter-argument

Text: A busy reader might be forgiven for thinking that this opinion should end here. The municipal defendants seem to have conceded that the municipality’s policymakers unconstitutionally deprived Bradley of a recognized property interest without any due process. Yet defendants instead contend that their oﬃcial action—taken by the village’s highest-ranking oﬃcials with final policymaking authority—should be considered “random and unauthorized” and thus excused under Parratt. We reject this defense. To explain why, we first describe Parratt and its progeny (Hudson, Logan, Zinermon, and our circuit’s application of the Parratt exception in Easter House). We then explain why defendants’ proposal to extend the Parratt exception to municipal § 1983 liability is contrary to our own and other circuits’ precedent—and for good reasons. It makes no sense to speak of such oﬃcial policymaking as “random and unauthorized” in terms of Parratt. That’s why the Supreme Court has never suggested that Parratt can be extended to defend against an otherwise valid Monell claim. The defendants’ proposed exception is not necessary given Monell’s test for liability. And accepting defendants’ argument would conflict directly with Monroe, Monell, Pembaur, Owen, and Bryan County. We would have to reach the improbable conclusion that a municipality 16 No. 16-3456 is not liable for its highest oﬃcials’ decision to deprive a person of his federal constitutional rights. Finally, even if the Parratt exception were relevant here, neither Supreme Court precedent nor our decision in Easter House supports defendants’ theory that, so long as municipal policymakers violate both the federal Constitution and state law, and some state remedy exists, the municipality is excused from § 1983 liability. In the past we have disparaged similar attempts to evade municipal liability, dismissing as “extravagant” a claim that the “acts of [a] Mayor … are merely acts of an errant employee.” Vodak, 639 F.3d at 747. Defendants’ proposal would also undermine (1) the constitutional protection for public employees in Roth, Sindermann, and Loudermill, while creating a direct conflict with (2) the Monroe v. Pape line of cases recognizing that state or local oﬃcials may be liable under § 1983 for actions taken “under color of state law,” even if the oﬃcial’s actions also violate state or local law, as well as (3) Patsy v. Board of Regents’ holding that § 1983 plaintiﬀs need not exhaust state-law remedies before asserting their federal rights. We see no reason to avoid Supreme Court precedent or to read our precedent in such a disruptive manner. A. Parratt and State Employees’ “Random and Unauthorized” Actions 1. Supreme Court Precedent “Parratt is a rare exception to due process norms.” Brunson v. Murray, 843 F.3d 698, 715 n.9 (7th Cir. 2016). A close look at the facts and holdings of Parratt and its progeny demonstrates the narrow, pragmatic reasoning underlying this exception to § 1983 due process liability. No. 16-3456 17 In Parratt, a state prisoner ordered the famous “hobby materials valued at $23.50.” 451 U.S. at 529. Due to the actions of state prison guards, the hobby materials were lost before they reached the prisoner. He sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 to recover their value as damages for depriving him of property without due process of law. In that situation, it would have been impossible for the state to provide a predeprivation hearing. The initial deprivation—the property loss—was as a practical matter “beyond the control of the State.” Id. at 541. Parratt is thus based on the following narrow grounds: If a predeprivation hearing “is not only impracticable, but impossible,” and yet “some meaningful opportunity subsequent to the initial taking” is available to provide redress, then that is all the due process the state can be expected to provide, and the aggrieved person’s constitutional rights have not been violated. Id. at 541–43. In later cases, the Supreme Court elaborated on Parratt’s limits. The Court emphasized that “absent ‘the necessity of quick action by the State or the impracticality of providing any predeprivation process,’ a postdeprivation hearing [ ] would be constitutionally inadequate,” which “is particularly true where … the State’s only post-termination process comes in the form of an independent tort action.” Logan v. Zimmerman Brush Co., 455 U.S. 422, 436 (1982), quoting Parratt, 451 U.S. at 539. If the state lacks the opportunity to provide any predeprivation process (e.g., due to an emergency or the actions of a rogue employee), the state can still meet its constitutional due process obligations by providing adequate postdeprivation procedures because the “state’s action is not complete until and unless it provides or refuses to provide a suitable postdeprivation remedy.” Hudson, 468 U.S. at 533 (extending Parratt to intentional but random and unauthorized 18 No. 16-3456 deprivations of prisoners’ property). In essence, “[t]he controlling inquiry is solely whether the state is in a position to provide for predeprivation process;” if “the property deprivation is eﬀected pursuant to an established state procedure,” Parratt is irrelevant. Id. at 534. Parratt generated disagreement among circuit courts of appeals, and the Supreme Court stepped in to clarify the scope and rationale of Parratt (and Hudson) in the context of Florida’s civil commitment process for people with serious mental illness in Zinermon v. Burch, 494 U.S. 113, 116 & n.2 (1990). The Zinermon plaintiﬀ alleged that he had been committed to a state mental hospital as a voluntary admittee even though his condition should have prompted assessment under the state’s more elaborate procedures for involuntary commitment. Id. at 115, 122–23. The plaintiﬀ made clear that he was “not attacking the facial validity of Florida’s voluntary admission procedures any more than he is attacking the facial validity of Florida’s involuntary admission procedures.” 494 U.S. at 117 n.3. In fact, he conceded “that, if Florida’s statutes were strictly complied with, no deprivation of liberty without due process would occur.” Id. Furthermore, the plaintiﬀ did “not dispute that he had remedies under Florida law for unlawful confinement,” including damage remedies under state mental health statutes and recourse to the state’s common-law tort of false imprisonment. Id. at 130 n.15. The defendants, who were state hospital oﬃcials, argued that Parratt and Hudson should excuse them from § 1983 liability. The plaintiﬀ was alleging at most “only a random, unauthorized violation of the Florida statutes governing admission of mental patients,” they argued, and he thus should be No. 16-3456 19 limited to “the postdeprivation remedies provided by Florida’s statutory and common law.” Id. at 115, 130. The Supreme Court rejected that argument. The Court first acknowledged that the state could have imposed additional safeguards at a predictable juncture in the hospital admission process—i.e., upon admission. 494 U.S. at 135. But the Court also noted the evidence that the hospital staﬀ had disregarded existing procedures in determining whether plaintiﬀ was competent to be admitted voluntarily, noting the psychiatrist’s admission notes on petitioner’s confused mental state. Id. at 134, 118 (after plaintiﬀ was found wandering on a highway “bruised and bloodied,” hospital staﬀ gave him voluntary admission forms to sign while he “was hallucinating, confused, and psychotic and believed he was ‘in heaven’”). The staﬀ “knew or should have known that he was incapable of informed consent,” and the way in which he was admitted “certainly did not ensure compliance with the statutory standard for voluntary admission.” Id. at 134; see also id. at 135 (“The [hospital] staﬀ are the only persons in a position to take notice of any misuse of the voluntary admission process and to ensure that the proper procedure is followed.”). Thus, the additional guidance the Court apparently envisioned Florida providing was: do not direct incompetent patients to sign the voluntary admission forms for competent patients. That would have come close to “a rule forbidding a prison guard to maliciously destroy a prisoner’s property,” which would have seemed futile. Id. at 137. Zinermon took care to distinguish Parratt and Hudson: [P]etitioners cannot characterize their conduct as ‘unauthorized’ in the sense the term is used in Parratt and Hudson. The State delegated to 20 No. 16-3456 them the power and authority to eﬀect the very deprivation complained of here, Burch’s con- finement in a mental hospital, and also delegated to them the concomitant duty to initiate the procedural safeguards set up by state law to guard against unlawful confinement. In Parratt and Hudson, the state employees had no similar broad authority to deprive prisoners of their personal property, and no similar duty to initiate (for persons una- ble to protect their own interests) the procedural safeguards required before deprivations occur. The deprivation here is ‘unauthorized’ only in the sense that it was not an act sanctioned by state law, but, instead, was a ‘depriv[ation] of constitutional rights ... by an oﬃcial’s abuse of his position.’ Monroe [v. Pape, 365 U.S. 167, 172 (1961)]. 494 U.S. at 138 (emphasis added). The Court’s citation to Monroe v. Pape confirmed that a defendant’s admissions that he had violated state law and that state law provides a postdeprivation remedy, as defendants admit here, are not by themselves a defense to the federal constitutional claim. And the quoted passage from Zinermon maps exactly onto the facts of this case: Illinois law “delegated to [defendants] the power and authority to eﬀect the very deprivation complained of here, [Burch’s confinement or Bradley’s termination], and also delegated to them the concomitant duty to initiate the procedural safeguards set up by state law to guard against unlawful [confinement or termination].” Id. at 138. This point was hammered home further by the Court’s explicit rejection of the village’s position here. The Court No. 16-3456 21 reiterated that Parratt and Hudson “do not stand for the proposition that in every case where a deprivation is caused by an ‘unauthorized … departure from established practices,’ state oﬃcials can escape § 1983 liability simply because the State provides tort remedies.” 494 U.S. at 138 n.20. Such a “reading of Parratt and Hudson detaches those cases from their proper role as special applications of the settled principles expressed in Monroe [v. Pape] and Mathews [v. Eldridge].” Id. Zinermon insisted that Parratt and Hudson remained tethered to a long line of § 1983 jurisprudence, emphasizing that those cases merely “represent a special case of the general Mathews v. Eldridge analysis, in which postdeprivation tort remedies are all the process that is due, simply because they are the only remedies the State could be expected to provide.” 494 U.S. at 128. In fact, the Court continued, “Parratt is not an exception to the Mathews balancing test, but rather an application of that test to the unusual case in which one of the variables in the Mathews equation—the value of predeprivation safeguards—is negligible in preventing the kind of deprivation at issue.” Id. at 129. This consideration swamped the other Mathews factors in Parratt itself because “no matter how significant the private interest at stake and the risk of its erroneous deprivation, see Mathews, 424 U.S. at 335, the State cannot be required constitutionally to do the impossible by providing predeprivation process.” Id. Thus, Zinermon made clear that Parratt and Hudson had not broadly repudiated existing § 1983 law. 2. Seventh Circuit Application of Parratt in Easter House Shortly after Zinermon was decided, we considered these questions in a case the Supreme Court had remanded for further consideration in light of Zinermon. Easter House v. Felder, 22 No. 16-3456 910 F.2d 1387 (7th Cir. 1990) (en banc). It would be diﬃcult to overstate how unusual the facts were in Easter House, or how much they diﬀered from mainstream public employee due process cases like Bradley’s. Plaintiﬀ Easter House was a private adoption agency that had been betrayed by a former director named Smith. Stung by some management decisions, Smith abruptly quit Easter House to start a competing adoption agency that she also named Easter House (for clarity’s sake, both we and the Easter House opinion refer to the imitator agency as “Easter House II”). Id. at 1391 & n.4, 1393 & n.7. She stole Easter House’s open and closed case files on adoptive families and children. She also induced Easter House’s only other trained social worker to join Easter House II, attempted to divert Easter House’s mail and telephone calls to her new address, and deceived a family in the middle of the adoption process to deal with and pay her rather than Easter House. Id. at 1391, 1393 & nn.7–9. The constitutional claims stem from the fact that Smith also roped into her scheme some state licensing oﬃcials in the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). She told them that Easter House was careless in handling confidential adoption records and would solicit aﬄuent former clients to increase the number of placements. She also “made vague allegations that Easter House was connected to foreign adoption agencies” and expected to “make a million” from those connections. 910 F.2d at 1391 & n.3. Although Easter House never lost its license and continued operating throughout this debacle, DCFS oﬃcials acted contrary to state licensing procedures and: (a) delayed Easter House’s license renewal, (b) sent Easter House a letter with some inaccurate licensing information that was corrected shortly thereafter, (c) incorrectly told three people that Easter House’s license had No. 16-3456 23 lapsed, and (d) did not oﬀer Easter House assistance in the license renewal process “as required by the DCFS’s regulations and enforcement manual.” Id. at 1391–92. At trial, a jury found that the defendant state oﬃcials had conspired with Smith to deprive Easter House of its state-issued license and had spread false information about it. 910 F.2d at 1390–94. The jury awarded damages on Easter House’s federal claim that the defendants temporarily deprived it of property—its interest in the prompt renewal of its license— without due process of law. We were “not wholly convinced” this property interest was “of constitutional magnitude,” given the fact that Easter House was able to operate without interruption, but we elected to “assume” this “diﬃcult question” was answered in the aﬃrmative. Id. at 1395–96. We reversed the judgment in favor of Easter House, finding that the due process claim was barred by Parratt. To the extent the state defendants conspired with Smith (and we found that much of the evidence seemed to indicate their “lack of active participation,” 910 F.2d at 1393 n.7), we held that the state employees’ actions to undermine the state’s licensing scheme to assist a competitor were “random and unauthorized” and that the state’s due process obligations could be met by existing state-law tort remedies after the fact. Id. at 1404–05. The en banc majority grappled with the tension between the Parratt-Hudson exception and Zinermon. Our circuit precedent had previously acknowledged that Parratt could be read more narrowly to focus on the fact that “the oﬃcials authorized to grant such a hearing are unaware of the deprivation before it occurs,” or could be read more broadly to “place[] beyond the reach of section 1983 any loss that ‘is not a result 24 No. 16-3456 of some established state procedure’ … [because] the state cannot predict when a loss will occur.” Matthiessen v. Board of Education, 857 F.2d 404, 407 n.3 (7th Cir. 1988) (holding that Parratt did not apply to municipal liability analysis under Monell), quoting Tavarez v. O’Malley, 826 F.2d 671, 677 (7th Cir. 1987), and Wilson v. Town of Clayton, 839 F.2d 375, 380 (7th Cir. 1988). We recognized in Easter House that the Supreme Court’s rejection of the Parratt defense in Zinermon “hints that a ‘narrow’ application of the Parratt rule may be the appropriate course,” and we tried to ascertain what that meant for Easter House. 910 F.2d at 1400, citing Matthiessen, 857 F.2d 404, Wilson, 839 F.2d 375, and Tavarez, 826 F.2d 671. Easter House saw the primary distinctions between Parratt and Zinermon as: (1) the Zinermon state hospital defendants had both the authority and duty to initiate predeprivation safeguards, while the Parratt state prison defendants had neither; and (2) although predeprivation process was impossible in Parratt, in Zinermon the state could have required additional procedures to determine if the existing predeprivation hospital admission procedure should be used. 910 F.2d at 1400–02. To apply this teaching in Easter House, we noted that, unlike the Zinermon defendants, the “DCFS oﬃcials did not have the duty to initiate [formal hearing] predeprivation safeguards,” but “[r]ather, the responsibility to initiate the procedural safeguards rested with the party aggrieved by the preliminary DCFS decision—in this case Easter House.” Id. at 1402. In addition, the appropriate lens for deciding state responsibility under § 1983 was whether “the state knew or should have known” about the defendants’ disregard of state law and procedure. Id. at 1401. Given that “Easter House point[ed] to nothing which would indicate that the state knew or should have known” that DCFS oﬃcials might engage in a No. 16-3456 25 conspiracy to give Easter House some incorrect advice and delay the renewal of their license in contravention of state procedure, § 1983 liability was inappropriate. Id. at 1401. Also, the Easter House opinion did not even cite Monell, and we rejected Easter House’s attempt to impose a Monelllike framework for determining state liability, declining to adopt Easter House’s proposed test that “the single act of a suﬃciently high-ranking policy-maker may equate with or be deemed established state procedure.” 910 F.2d at 1402. To the contrary, “we [did] not believe that Zinermon create[d] a per se ‘employee status’ exception to Parratt.” Id. at 1400. To be sure, “whether a state oﬃcial ranks ‘high’ or ‘low’ in the state hierarchy” would be “relevant as indicia of the discretion which that oﬃcial exercises.” Id.; see also id. at 1402 (“Without a doubt, the employee’s position in the governmental hierarchy is relevant to this inquiry.”). But in determining whether a state oﬃcial is liable for a constitutional violation, Easter House directs us to look to whether (1) “a state’s policy and procedures in a given area are delegated to a specified policymaker, be it a single person, a committee, or the state legislature,” in which case that entity’s “pronouncement in a given case reflects the state’s position,” even if informally made; or (2) if the state’s policy could be said to have “change[d] if the policymaker repeatedly deviates from established policy and procedure until his practice and custom has replaced the formal policy and procedures.” Id. at 1403. This liability analysis is at odds with the liability analysis required by Monell in cases against municipalities. But we can easily read Easter House as not creating a conflict with Monell because Easter House dealt with state oﬃcials, not local governments. We 26 No. 16-3456 simply did not address in Easter House any question of municipal liability under Monell.4 Applying this analysis to Easter House’s claim, we noted that it was the state that “promulgated policy and procedure by formal means,” rendering “the employment status of the state employee violating that procedure … much less important in determining whether a deviation from the policy may be characterized as random and unauthorized under Parratt.” 910 F.2d at 1403. Thus, “[e]ven if we assume that the [DCFS defendants] qualify as ‘policymakers’ themselves— which we doubt given their position in the governmental hierarchy—their ‘policy’, which at absolute best may be characterized as informal, cannot be said automatically to preempt or displace otherwise adequate existing state policy and procedure.” Id.