Court Opinion

ID: 9476481
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:57:00.524103+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:20.589038
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I fully agree with the court’s disposition of the “malicious prosecution” claim, but I write separately to state my views on certain issues that the court did not reach.
The court’s opinion suggests that “plaintiffs [have not] claimed substantive due process violations based on the operative act of dismissal.” The plaintiffs’ complaint, however, which alleges that employees of Kentucky’s Cabinet for Human Resources, acting under color of state law, willfully and maliciously and conspiratorially dismissed the plaintiffs from their state jobs knowing that there was no just cause for doing so, appears to me to have been intended to assert a “substantive due process” claim of a type recognized in Russell v. Harrison, 736 F.2d 283, 288 (5th Cir.1984), and Barnett v. Housing Authority, 707 F.2d 1571, 1577 (11th Cir.1983). As the plaintiffs state in their opening brief, “[t]he manner of [the plaintiffs’] dismissal from their employment clearly violated the requirements of substantive due process.” The plaintiffs repeat this claim in the next paragraph of their brief: “the Defendants ... maliciously conspired together to terminate [Plaintiffs’] protected property interest. * * * This was a patent violation of the requirements of substantive due process.”
The mere fact that the theory is asserted, of course, does not mean that it has any merit. Conspiratorial termination of the supposed “property interest” in public employment would not constitute a denial of “substantive due process” under any interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment with which I am familiar, absent the infringement of some “fundamental” right that the plaintiffs have failed to mention. Illinois Psychological Association, et al. v. Marshall Falk, et al., 818 F.2d 1337, 1342 (7th Cir.1987); Brown v. Brienen, 722 F.2d 360, 366-67 (7th Cir.1983), 368-69 (Flaum, J., concurring).
Even if the plaintiffs could somehow persuade us that they might once have had a justiciable “substantive due process” claim, however, I believe the claim would be barred. Before explaining why, I shall pause to invite consideration of the remedies that were available to the plaintiffs at the point when the dismissal from their jobs became effective, bearing in mind their concession that the procedures followed in their dismissal were not constitutionally defective.
The plaintiffs could have appealed administratively (as they did), and could have tried to persuade the Kentucky Personnel Board that there was no cause for the dismissals under Kentucky law. Alternatively, they could have brought a civil rights action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and could have tried to persuade a federal or state court that the dismissals were in violation of federal constitutional provisions that have been interpreted, as Judge Cohn indicates, as prohibiting state action that “shocks the conscience” of the judge by whom the § 1983 action is heard. Such an action would have had to stand or fall on *524the proposition that the dismissals constituted a denial of “substantive due process,” and it is fair to say that at that stage, at least, the plaintiffs’ chances of prevailing in a suit based on that “durable oxymoron,” as Judge Posner has called it, would be next to nonexistent.
Not surprisingly, the plaintiffs elected not to bring a § 1983 action at the time of their dismissal; they took an administrative appeal to the Kentucky Personnel Board instead. The Cabinet contested the appeal, but lost; the Personnel Board ordered that the plaintiffs be restored to their jobs and “be awarded back pay and emoluments from the date of their suspensions until reemployed....” The Cabinet for Human Resources appealed the Personnel Board’s decision to a Kentucky Circuit Court, as permitted by Kentucky law, but lost again. The Cabinet then threw in the towel; although it could have appealed to a higher court, it chose not to.
Only after the Cabinet had thus conceded defeat did the plaintiffs file their action under § 1983. Now, as they saw it, they had an additional argument that the Cabinet’s conduct shocked the conscience; not only had the Cabinet discharged them without cause, but it had maliciously defended the dismissals after the plaintiffs appealed, it had maliciously appealed the order of reinstatement entered when the plaintiffs won their administrative appeal, and it had maliciously pursued its appeal until the circuit court affirmed the reinstatement. The plaintiffs thus tried to depict the Cabinet as having engaged in a continuum of malicious misconduct, of constitutional magnitude, that did not end until the Cabinet abandoned the fight after losing its appeal in the Kentucky Circuit Court.
This theory of continuing misconduct (or “malicious prosecution,” as plaintiffs have chosen to label it) might be thought not only to add some semblance of muscle to the plaintiffs’ “substantive due process” claim, but also, if accepted by the courts, to solve the plaintiffs’ one-year statute of limitations problem. Because the judgment of the Kentucky Circuit Court affirming the order of reinstatement preceded the filing of the § 1983 action by less than one year, while the allegedly wrongful dismissals occurred more than one year before the § 1983 action was filed, the plaintiffs’ wrongful dismissal claim would obviously be barred by the statute of limitations unless the courts could be persuaded to accept the malicious prosecution theory. The district court, in a preliminary order, stated that “the court cannot see that the action is one for malicious prosecution.” The court saw nothing different after oral argument, and entered a final judgment determining that “this action does not meet the essential requirement of a malicious prosecution type § 1983 action and, therefore, this action is barred by the Statute of Limitations....” Insofar as the plaintiffs were contending that their “substantive due process” rights had been violated by the dismissals themselves, I believe that the district court was correct in concluding that the action was barred by the statute of limitations.
If one were to conclude that the “continuing misconduct” somehow tolled the statute of limitations, I believe there is another reason why the judgment of the district court ought to be affirmed. The plaintiffs having elected to pursue their administrative remedies under state law, and having received the full measure of relief to which those remedies entitled them — i.e., reinstatement with back pay— familiar concepts of claim preclusion would prevent the plaintiffs from suing for the additional million dollars sought here for mental anguish, injury to reputation, legal fees and punitive damages. That, as I read it, is the clear teaching of Punton v. City of Seattle, 805 F.2d 1378 (9th Cir.1986), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 107 S.Ct. 1954, 95 L.Ed.2d 527 (1987), and the decisions cited therein.
Punton was a case where a Seattle police officer who had been dismissed from his job took an administrative appeal, won an order reinstating him with back pay, and then brought a § 1983 action in federal court seeking damages for emotional distress and attorney fees. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the judgment recovered by the plaintiff in the *525state court was a complete bar to the recovery of any supplemental relief under § 1988:
“Punton’s election to proceed initially in the state court amounted to a splitting of his cause of action as well as an election of remedies. At the start, he could have proceeded directly in federal court with a § 1983 claim for reinstatement, back pay, and general damages. Instead, he first chose to seek the relief of reinstatement and back pay in the state court.
* * * * * *
“Punton now represents that he could not have litigated his § 1983 claim in state court, and therefore his § 1983 claim cannot be barred by the claim preclusion effect of his partial recovery under the state judgment. His point does not necessarily follow.
“It is highly unlikely that Congress intended to permit state court vindication of state created property interests to set up offensive collateral estoppel for federal claims brought pursuant to § 1983. * * * * * *
“We recently held in an employment grievance case originating in California that claim preclusion arising from a state court mandamus action in which substantial but incomplete relief was granted barred relitigation of the claim in federal court under § 1983. Clark v. Yosemite Community College District, 785 F.2d 781 (9th Cir.1986).
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“Another instructive case is that of a police officer in Philadelphia who was charged with a crime, discharged from his job, acquitted after trial, and upon application to the municipal Civil Service Commission, reinstated without back pay. Cohen v. City of Philadelphia, 736 F.2d 81 (3d Cir.1984). The commission found that whether or not Cohen had participated in the burglary for which he was acquitted, he had violated police department rules by lending money to a superior officer. Cohen thereupon sued in federal court, alleging a § 1983 claim. Summary judgment for the city was affirmed on the basis of claim preclusion. ******
“We have found no Supreme Court case holding that merely because litigation strategy and the perceived advantages of a more adequate award in federal court make it an attractive alternative, a person aggrieved by official state action can abandon a remedy that colorably satisfies due process of law in the state court after recovering substantially what he has lost. On the contrary, Migra v. Warren City School District Board of Education, 465 U.S. [75] at 85, 104 S.Ct. [892] at 898 [79 L.Ed.2d 56 (1984)], instructs to the contrary.” Punton, 805 F.2d 1378 at 1381-83, passim.
In a supplemental brief filed after oral argument, the plaintiffs have attempted to distinguish Punton on the ground that the state court held that Officer Punton’s dismissal — a dismissal effected without a hearing — violated the officer’s state and federal procedural due process rights, whereas:
“McMaster and King in this action are not complaining that they were denied procedural due process, or further that they did not receive a full and fair adjudication of their claims in the state admin-, istrative proceeding. As the Court is aware from reading the briefs and the vigorous oral argument, Appellants solely rest their claim on a more narrow area of law and assuming [sic] a greater burden than would have been carried under a collateral attack-type proceeding, i.e. a claim that they were denied substantive due process rights by having charges and termination proceedings initiated against them without probable cause. The damages and relief sought is [sic] the same as in any other malicious prosecution action.
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A malicious prosecution action pursuant to 1983 requires exhaustion of state remedies and a successful resolution of those state remedies in favor of the one making the claim.” (Emphasis by the plaintiffs.)
*526The plaintiffs might have a point, I think, if they were willing to concede that their § 1983 action rested solely on the claim that the Kentucky Cabinet for Human Resources violated their constitutional rights by maliciously defending its position in the administrative proceedings that the plaintiffs initiated after their discharge and by maliciously prosecuting a first-level appeal from the administrative order reinstating the plaintiffs with back pay. The plaintiffs have made no such concession in their complaint or opening brief, however, at least as I read them, and the supplemental brief quoted above does not strike me as going that far either. To the extent that the plaintiffs contend that the dismissals themselves were unconstitutional, it is immaterial whether they are claimed to have been unconstitutional on procedural due process grounds or on substantive due process grounds; the Commonwealth of Kentucky having restored the plaintiffs to their jobs, as demanded in the administrative proceedings the plaintiffs themselves elected to initiate, the order of reinstatement bars any additional recovery, including recovery of compensatory or punitive damages on account of emotional distress, loss of reputation, or legal expenses incurred in gaining reinstatement.