Court Opinion

ID: 9477825
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:32:20.992309+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:04.344794
License: Public Domain

GEE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
The question in this case is a simple one: Did the Texas courts possess jurisdiction to enter this judgment against the United States? If the United States has waived sovereign immunity as to the claim advanced, it did; if not, it did not.
The United States has, indeed, waived sovereign immunity and agreed to submit *1549to garnishment of servicemen’s retirement benefits where the claim is one for child support or alimony. And a Texas court has, in today’s appeal, entered judgment in a proceeding to which the United States was not a party that the general tort recovery for child molestation in today’s case (composed in main of exemplary damages) is in fact child support — an adjudication roughly on a par with deciding that a bull is a bull-frog. To call such a decision ludicrous is to be kind, but its inanity does not render it any the less binding on the retired culprit. The question is whether the subsequent state court adjudication against the United States, garnishing funds in its hands as taken to pay “child support,” is entitled to full faith and credit. In the judgment appealed to us, the federal district court held that it is: the majority agrees, and I respectfully disagree.
The effect of the various adjudications in the Texas courts in this general controversy has been to decide as between the plaintiffs and the retiree that (contrary to fact) this general tort recovery constitutes child support1 and as between the plaintiffs and the United States that the retiree owes the plaintiffs a big judgment and the United States owes the retiree periodic retirement benefit payments. Nowhere, however, in any proceeding to which the United States was a party, has it been adjudged that the Salazar tort recovery for child molestation and exemplary damages constitutes what it does not: child support or alimony.2 It follows, therefore, that the United States is not precluded from announcing the obvious: the Emperor has no clothes.
Title 28 United States Code Section 1738 commands the federal courts to accord state judgments the same force as they should receive in the courts of the state where they were rendered. The state decree garnishing the retiree’s federal benefits to satisfy a tort judgment would be granted preclusive effect in a Texas court “only if the first court ... had jurisdiction, that is, to render judgment.” A.L.T. Corporation v. Small Business Administration, 801 F.2d 1451, 1455 (5th Cir.1986). The attack on the state garnishment decree in federal district court was a collateral one; and, as we recognized in A.L.T. Corporation, it is a settled rule in Texas that “where a judgment is collaterally attacked, plain jurisdiction recitals contained therein must be accorded absolute verity.” Id. Yet, our A.L.T. opinion also notes some exceptions to the “absolute verity rule.” Id. at 1457 n. 8. One exception to the rule is “where the original court is ‘absolutely unauthorized to give the relief asked.’ ” Id. Another is when the judgment is silent on the issue of jurisdiction. Our opinion concludes that “a Texas court would not enforce the judgment of a court clearly lacking subject matter jurisdiction, at least where the judgment itself is silent on this aspect.” Id. Both of these exceptions are present here.
This being so, and the United States therefore being free to point out both that no state judgment to which it is a party bindingly determines that the Salazars’ tort judgment is what it is not and that the state court error in its judgment is so clear that it falls within an exception to the Texas verity rule — “the original court is ‘absolutely unauthorized to give the relief asked.’” A.L.T. Corporation, 801 F.2d at 1457 n. 8.3 No state court or courts, by one judgment or by a combination of judgments, is empowered to garnish the United States in a matter as to which it has not waived its sovereign immunity — such as the one before us today. It is settled that the federal court must give “the same pre-clusive effect as would be given that judg*1550ment under the law of the State in which the judgment was rendered,” A.L.T. Corporation, 801 F.2d at 1455; and since under Texas law the Texas garnishment decree is subject to challenge for being “absolutely unauthorized,” it follows that the federal district court erred in giving the state court judgment full faith and credit in the face of that challenge, when at last it was made. Late it was in coming, but not too late; for it was made along a narrow avenue of collateral attack recognized by state law. Because the majority determines the contrary, I respectfully dissent.

. Doubtless in some broad and general sense it may, but not in the sense of the strictly-construed federal statutes waiving sovereign immunity.

. Indeed the state court might as well have called it the one as the other, for the retiree is as much the former husband of his victim as he is her father — that is to say, not at all.

.I agree with my colleagues in the majority that the procedural posture of the two Texas judgments comes about as close to compelling the curious result at which they arrive as can be imagined.
The first judgment (by which the United States was not bound) erroneously decides that the tort recovery is child support. The pleading for the second judgment recites that the first judgment so determined and adds that "there*1550fore, as a matter of law, Plaintiffs herein is [sic] entitled to receive 65% of the military retirement pay of Paul Thomas Byrne____” The addition is, of course, untrue; for the tort recovery is not child support as a matter of fact, nor is the United States required to recognize it as such: it was not a party to the first proceeding and not bound by that judgment. The second judgment, by which the United States is bound, recites vaguely that "the allegations contained in Plaintiffs [pleadings] are true____”
If this recitation be taken as a re-determination that the tort recovery is child support, then I agree that it it binds the United States; and the majority is correct. Indeed, if the pleading in the second case had contained a square assertion to that effect — such as, “Plaintiffs' recovery has been determined to be child support and the United States is, therefore, required to pay to the Plaintiffs 65% of the military retirement pay of Paul Thomas Byrne" — I would agree that we should decide as does the majority. Instead, however, the pleading merely recites that because of the former judgment the plaintiffs are "entitled to receive” a portion of Byrne’s benefits. This may well be true if they can recover them from Byrne, who was bound by that judgment; but the fact that they are entitled to receive them does not mean that they are entitled to compel the United States to pay them over to them directly by means of a writ of garnishment. Any person from whom Byrne may have borrowed money is "entitled to receive” what he can get of Byrne’s benefits after they reach him, but cannot get them from the sovereign itself.