Court Opinion

ID: 9465694
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 00:53:10.667503+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:19.034461
License: Public Domain

ON PETITION FOR REHEARING
PER CURIAM.
This case was brought, and .heard, to determine plaintiffs’ rights under 7 L.P. R.A. § 768a as established by Article 18A of Law No. 94 of May 31, 1976. Thereafter the case was briefed and argued on appeal on the same basis. Defendants have now filed a petition for rehearing on the ground that, four days before plaintiffs were removed from office section 768a had been amended by Law No. 16 of May 5, 1977. This rewrote the statute, in the disjunctive, instead of in the conjunctive, in a matter that figured in our opinion.
It does not follow that we should grant the petition. Even under the amended statute, it is a close question, given the accompanying circumstances, whether there was not such a stigma as to give rise to the due process rights discussed in our opinion. In any event, we find defendants’ failure to call our attention to the amended language inexcusable.
Defendants, by virtue of their official positions, were no strangers to the banking laws. Their counsel was not some fly-by-night, but the Solicitor General of the Commonwealth. After taking the time of a magistrate, a district judge, and a court of appeals, they offer no explanation why they were not familiar with their own statutes; not even an apology. Instead, their petition concludes with the extraordinary statement that “[e]ven though no mention of the amended law, applicable in this case, was made either in appellants’ or appellees’ brief, the same was fully discussed at the hearing of the case held on November 7, 1978 before this Honorable Court.”
The court has no such recollection. Rather, defendants’ counsel presented the court with individual copies of the May, 1976 law, with no indication of any change. Black does not become white with the stroke of a pen. Seldom, if ever, do we grant petitions to rehear matters which were not presented merely because of some counsel’s oversight. By the same token, where so elementary an error is committed as the failure to acquaint the court with the text of a controlling amendment, particularly one to which we have no ready access except through the parties, this is not excusable neglect. Cf. Spound v. Mohasco Industries, Inc., 1 Cir., 1976, 534 F.2d 404, 411, cert. denied, 429 U.S. 886, 97 S.Ct. 238, 50 L.Ed.2d 167. We find it an intolerable imposition on our time and limited resources to grant a rehearing for the purpose of entertaining arguments addressed to that hitherto undisclosed statute. The case stands on the statute prior to the amendment and the district court is instructed so to regard it.

Petition denied.