Court Opinion

ID: 9488041
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:34:34.277879+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:39.092758
License: Public Domain

BOWNES, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring in the judgment.
I agree with the judgment mainly because there was an improbably close match between the information provided by the plaintiff and the detailed information in the arrest packet. Given this level of specificity and similarity, I must conclude that it would be entirely unreasonable for a finder-of-faet to posit liability against the government. It was not the government which was culpable but the impostor who framed the plaintiff some fifteen years before the arrest.
I write separately, however, to emphasize that the Restatement principles underlying our decision should not be applied mechanically where multiple government actors are engaged in collective action. In my view, it would be a mistake to treat the New York and Puerto Rico marshals piecemeal, as isolated actors rather than as co-agents of a common principal. Under the right circumstances, co-agents may have a duty to exchange certain information; where there is such a duty, the reasonableness of a given act — and the principal’s liability for that act — should be judged in light of what the actor knew or should have known, assuming the reasonable conduct of other concerned *49actors. This concept of imputed knowledge seems consistent with agency and vicarious liability principles.
The failings of the piecemeal approach can be illustrated using the facts of this ease. A piece of information may mean little in the abstract to the person who holds it, but might be decisive to another actor in context. In this ease, a photograph remained inert in Deputy Rodriguez’s file; had it been forwarded to the Puerto Rico marshals in the field, it would have prevented the plaintiffs arrest. Although I agree with my brother that, in light of the specificity of the information in her arrest packet, Deputy Rodriguez had no reason to fear that the wrong person might be arrested, the opinion nevertheless obscures the government’s one regrettable omission. After all, the Puerto Rico marshals saw fit to request the photograph; and the United States has never explained why it was not timely sent.
I doubt that common law principles either dictate a piecemeal approach, or foreclose a more integrated view of collective action. Indeed, my brother’s opinion momentarily adopts an integrated view when it rejects the instigation claim against Deputy Rodriguez. See ante at 46 (“The arrest packet Deputy Rodriguez forwarded to Puerto Rico ... matched almost precisely the personal and family information gathered on plaintiff Rodriguez in 1990.”). This correspondence matters only if Deputy Rodriguez is imputed with the knowledge of information that was gathered solely by the Puerto Rico marshals.
In sum, I have no quarrel with the bulk of my brother’s scholarly opinion. I merely wish to raise a word of caution against judging co-agents of a common principal as isolated actors; their actions should be assessed as of one piece.