Court Opinion

ID: 9467512
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:50:39.959437+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:23.112065
License: Public Domain

MURNAGHAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
In large measure I agree with what Judge Butzner has written. I write separately only to call attention to a point or two which seem to merit mention.
1. Judge Butzner tellingly quotes from Fuentes v. Shevin, 407 U.S. 67, 93, 92 S.Ct. 1983, 2000, 32 L.Ed.2d 556 (1972) its description of a situation (replevin under a conditional sales contract) essentially identical with our circumstances of a pre-judgment attachment.1 That language, especially the reference to “private parties, serving their own private advantage” indicates that, on the rationale of Judge Phillips in the majority opinion, even after the statute has been authoritatively declared to be unconstitutional, a private individual who manages to prevail upon a bumbling, but non-conspiring clerk to issue a replevin writ under the blatantly unconstitutional statute would still not be acting under color of state law, and, hence, would not infringe 42 U.S.C. § 1983. That result seems inescapably wrong.
2. Given the extant decisions, especially Fuentes v. Shevin, the constitutionality of the state attachment statute is, at the least, questionable.2 A hearing is necessary. *1073However, it is desirable to point out that such may not always be so, or that, in another case, regardless of constitutionality, good faith, while normally a matter of affirmative defense, might stand established from the pleadings, or from what the court might accept as a matter of judicial notice. There are situations where tremors first introduce a breach in what theretofore has been regarded as a solid, safe, and impenetrable legal wall. Such was, perhaps, the case with the seemingly unquestioned validity of wage garnishment and replevin under conditional sales contracts, each obtained without judicial intervention, until Sniadach v. Family Finance Corp., 395 U.S. 337, 89 S.Ct. 1820, 23 L.Ed.2d 349 (1969), and Fuentes first entered upon the scene. Before the decisions in those cases, a judgment for defendants in a § 1983 action probably would have been in order, even at the Fed. R.Civ.P. 12(b) stage. An allegation similar to the essentially conclusory allegation that attachment had been maliciously invoked would probably have been accorded little weight.
But such is not the case here, for Fuentes was decided eight years ago. The wall formerly impenetrable is honeycombed with fissures. The attachment act evidently may be unconstitutional, and defendants may have been chargeable with, at least, answerability should the act be found to violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

. The reference in footnote 23, 407 U.S. at 91, footnote 23, 92 S.Ct. at 1999, to attachment essential to the securing of the state court’s jurisdiction does not reach the present case, where non-residency of the defendant in the state court proceeding did not exist.

. The absence of any requirement for pre-seizure judicial action renders the statute suspect.