Court Opinion

ID: 9485869
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:32:32.13819+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:24.843195
License: Public Domain

EDITH H. JONES, Circuit Judge,
concurring specially:
I concur with all of Judge Johnson’s fine opinion except for the following bit of dicta:
*1328To restrict a district court’s power to fashion appropriate sanctions, simply because the transgressor is a member of the executive or legislative branch, would violate the separation of powers doctrine, (footnotes omitted), (emphasis added)
This is as unfortunate an overstatement as the government’s contrary proposition that Judge McBryde’s order preventing Means from seeking reimbursement from the Justice Department somehow violates the separation of executive and judicial powers. This court recently described the scope of a court’s sanction against the backdrop of the constitutional separation of powers and concluded that sanctions fall within the court’s inherent powers “necessary to the exercise of all others.” In re Stone, 986 F.2d 898, 902 (5th Cir.1993), citing Roadway Express v. Piper, 447 U.S. 752, 764, 100 S.Ct. 2455, 2463, 65 L.Ed.2d 488 (1980).1 Stone then says:
Congress may interfere with this category of inherent power within “limits not previously defined,” so long as it does not abrogate or render the specific power inoperative. Id., citing Michaelson v. U.S., 266 U.S. 42, 65-66, 45 S.Ct. 18,19-20, 69 L.Ed. 162 (1924).
On the same page, Stone says that
If the power belongs in the ... category [of sanctions], we must ascertain whether a valid statute or rule attempts to regulate the court’s use of the power. If such a law exists, we then must determine whether the law abrogates or renders the power practically inoperative. Id., citing Michaelson, 266 U.S. at 66, 45 S.Ct. at 20.
Stone disposes of this case. That the government says there is a violation of the separation of powers doctrine does not ipso facto make it so. The government’s concern is too speculative upon the facts before us. First, contrary to the Justice Department’s argument, it is not at all clear that its regulation bears on, much less purports to limit the court’s independent power to determine how it will sanction a government employee. Second, the Justice Department offered no evidence or argument that Means would qualify for reimbursement but for the district court’s order. Further, the government does not assert that the district court’s order actually impinged upon the policy and personnel interests that it asserts are protected by immunity from such an order. These facts counsel against our rushing to opine upon an important constitutional issue. If the regulation affected the court’s sanction power to the limited extent of preventing the court from issuing a sanction against an assistant United States attorney individually and non-reim-bursably, it appears to me that such a regulation would not render this court’s inherent sanction power “inoperative”. A court has numerous other types of sanction remedies available against the federal government and its attorneys even if this one is not. To decide this point precisely is, however, unnecessary. The government’s argument fails on the facts before us.

. I do not know whether Stone's analysis of inherent powers, borrowed from an Eighth Circuit case, is fully valid. The Supreme Court declined to approve the Eighth Circuit analysis in Chambers v. NASCO, Inc., - U.S. -n. 12, 111 S.Ct. 2123 n. 12, 115 L.Ed.2d 27 (1991), but I do not rely upon that aspect of Stone.