Court Opinion

ID: 9469780
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:49:02.417503+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:33.883822
License: Public Domain

MERRITT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully disagree with our Court that District Judge Ann Aldrich erred by denying attorney’s fees to plaintiff in this fair housing case. The District Court reasoned as follows:
The true beneficiary of an award of attorney fees is the prevailing party. Where a party has vindicated his or her rights in a civil rights case of this nature, that party should be entitled to receive the additional benefit of having his or her counsel fees assessed against the wrongful party. However, where a party offers perjured testimony in order to support a claim of humiliation, anger, and *103embarrassment due to racial discrimination, an award of attorney fees to that party would be unjust.
(App. at 102.)
Although the defendants committed a serious wrong under the Fair Housing Act and were required to pay for it in damages, the plaintiff committed another serious wrong: she lied several times under oath in the court below in answer to questions concerning her credibility, character and damages. She testified that she had a steady job, was married, had a good previous record and had never been evicted for misconduct. These statements were false.
Our Court has now apparently read equitable principles completely out of the Civil Rights Attorneys Fees statute, 42 U.S.C. § 1988, and has advanced the view that a prevailing plaintiff must, willy-nilly, be awarded such fees in a civil rights case no matter how inequitable. Although I agree that “prevailing” civil rights plaintiffs should ordinarily be awarded attorney’s fees, I would not eliminate equitable considerations from the decisional process. I would follow the principle stated in Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, Inc., 300 U.S. 400, 88 S.Ct. 964, 19 L.Ed.2d 1263 (1968), interpreting a similar discretionary-fee-award provision of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Court held that successful plaintiffs are entitled to recover “unless special circumstances would render such an award unjust.” Id. at 402, 88 S.Ct. at 966. Those “special circumstances” are present here, as Judge Aldrich found.
Historically at common law in America the award of attorney’s fees was an “equitable” matter that addressed itself in certain cases to the chancellor’s “discretion” or conscience. The Supreme Court has observed that the question “is part of the historic equity jurisdiction of the federal courts” and “part of the original authority of the chancellor to do equity in a particular situation.” Sprague v. Ticonic Nat’l Bank, 307 U.S. 161, 166, 59 S.Ct. 777, 779, 83 L.Ed. 1184 (1937). For a thorough discussion of the history of awards of attorney’s fees in the United States, see the majority and dissenting opinions of Justices White and Marshall in Alyeska Pipeline Co. v. Wilderness Society, 421 U.S. 240, 272, 95 S.Ct. 1612, 1629, 44 L.Ed.2d 141 (1975), and Professor Dawson’s article, Lawyers and Involuntary Clients in Public Interest Litigation, 88 Harv.L.Rev. 849 (1975).
Section 1988 provides that a successful civil rights plaintiff should be awarded fees “in the discretion” of the district judge. Nothing in this language suggests that it was intended to eliminate equitable considerations from the equation. I do not know what the rationale for such a strange reading of the word “discretion” would be, and the Court has not tried to provide a rationale. It has not tried to argue that such awards are designed simply to compensate the lawyer rather than benefit the client by easing the burden of litigation, and my review of the legislative history of the statute and the cases indicates there is no support whatever for the plaintiff’s position that § 1988 should be read as a lawyer’s welfare bill.
The fact that the plaintiff’s misconduct was not directly connected with her testimony regarding defendants’ liability, a point stressed by the Court, seems irrelevant to me. Her misconduct took place in the courtroom and was directly connected with the case. If she had engaged in an assault on the defendants, their lawyer or other participants in the case, I think that also might justify the denial of attorney’s fees, although such conduct does not go to the liability phase of the case. I know of no principle that limits the clean hands doctrine and other equitable considerations so narrowly.
Despite her conduct in the court below, the “legal” rights of the plaintiff were enforced in the main action. No clean hands doctrine or other equitable principle was used to bar her from obtaining her due under the Fair Housing Act. But the question of attorney’s fees is a question of equity, and the plaintiff has not done equity. Her deliberate and repeated falsehoods under oath to the District Court, like the defendants’ conduct, is reprehensible. The *104District Court was entitled to exercise its discretion to deny attorney’s fees. It sought to redress both of the wrongs committed in this case — the plaintiff’s as well as the defendants’. Our Court’s willingness to recognize only the defendants’ wrong and to overlook plaintiff’s perjury provides an incentive for civil rights plaintiffs and their counsel to win cases and attorney’s fees through deception and unethical conduct, thereby undermining the integrity of the judicial process. Refusal to reward plaintiff’s conduct does not disparage civil rights or any principle of equality. It enhances the principle of equality by requiring an equal respect for the dignity of others from both the civil rights plaintiff and the civil rights defendant and expresses the view that both must observe the ties that bind society.