Young v. City of Providence ex rel. Napolitano, 04-1374.

CourtUnited States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (1st Circuit)
Citation404 F.3d 4
Docket NumberNo. 04-1374.,No. 04-1390.,No. 04-1418.,04-1374.,04-1390.,04-1418.
PartiesLeisa YOUNG, in her capacity as Administratrix of the Estate of Cornel Young, Jr., Plaintiff, Appellant, Cross-Appellee, v. CITY OF PROVIDENCE by and through its treasurer, Stephen NAPOLITANO; Urbano Prignano, Jr., individually and in his official capacity as Providence Chief of Police; Richard Sullivan, individually; John Ryan, individually; and Kenneth Cohen, individually, Defendants, Appellees, Cross-Appellants.
Decision Date11 April 2005

Barry Scheck, with whom Nick Brustin, Cochran Neufeld & Scheck, LLP, David T. Goldberg, The Law Offices of David T. Goldberg, Robert B. Mann, and Mann & Mitchell were on brief, for plaintiff, appellant, cross-appellee Leisa Young.

Kevin F. McHugh, Assistant City Solicitor, Providence Law Department, with whom Joseph M. Fernandez, City Solicitor, Providence Law Department, and Caroline Cole Cornwell, Assistant City Solicitor, Providence Law Department, were on brief, for defendants, appellees, cross-appellants City of Providence, Urbano Prignano, Jr., and Richard Sullivan.

Michael J. Colucci, with whom Olenn & Penza, LLP was on brief, for defendants, appellees, cross-appellants John Ryan and Kenneth Cohen.

Peter T. Barbur and Cravath, Swaine, & Moore, LLP on brief for National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers, Inc. and the Rhode Island Minority Police Association, Inc., amici curiae.

John W. Dineen and Yesser Glasson & Dineen on brief for Rhode Island Affiliate, American Civil Liberties Union, amicus curiae.

Norman J. Chachkin, Theodore M. Shaw, and Miriam Gohara on brief for NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., amicus curiae.

Before BOUDIN, Chief Judge, LYNCH and LIPEZ, Circuit Judges.

LYNCH, Circuit Judge.

In January 2000, two on-duty Providence, Rhode Island, police officers, Michael Solitro and Carlos Saraiva, while responding to a call, shot and killed an off-duty Providence police officer, Cornel Young ("Cornel"), who was attempting to respond to the same incident under a city policy (the "always armed/always on-duty" policy) that required him to act despite being off-duty and out of uniform. The two on-duty officers, who are white, apparently mistook Cornel, an African-American, for a threat.

Cornel's mother, Leisa Young ("Young"), filed suit in federal court, as administratrix of her son's estate, against Solitro and Saraiva for use of excessive force during the course of a seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution; she later dismissed these officers as parties to the case but sought to hold others liable for the shooting. Young sued the City of Providence and various Providence Police Department ("PPD") supervisors, alleging that they were responsible for Solitro's and Saraiva's underlying excessive force violation due to their deficient training, hiring, and discipline of these two officers.

After the first phase of a bifurcated trial, the jury found that Officer Solitro, but not Officer Saraiva, had violated Cornel's constitutional rights by using excessive force against him. The district court then granted summary judgment to Providence and the supervisors, holding that there was insufficient evidence that these defendants a) caused the underlying constitutional violation by Solitro and b) possessed the requisite level of fault (deliberate indifference) to allow the case to go to a jury. Young appealed; certain defendants cross-appealed.

After a thorough review of the evidence, we affirm the district court in part and reverse in part. The jury verdict in the first phase of the case — finding that Solitro, but not Saraiva, violated Cornel's constitutional rights — stands against challenges from both sides. We also affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment against Young on a claim that Providence's screening of Solitro before hiring him constituted deliberate indifference by the City to Cornel's constitutional rights (the "hiring claim"). We explain the exceptional difficulty in bringing this sort of hiring claim against the City, in light of Board of the County Commissioners of Bryan County v. Brown, 520 U.S. 397, 117 S.Ct. 1382, 137 L.Ed.2d 626 (1997), because of the difficulty of showing a causal link between decisions to hire police officers and subsequent constitutional violations by those officers.

However, we reverse the district court's grant of summary judgment for the City on a claim that it is responsible for inadequately training Solitro on how to avoid on-duty/off-duty misidentifications in light of the department's policy that officers are always armed, and always on-duty. In Brown and City of Canton v. Harris, 489 U.S. 378, 109 S.Ct. 1197, 103 L.Ed.2d 412 (1989), the Supreme Court recognized that failure to train in a specific area — such as avoiding on-duty/off-duty misidentifications of fellow officers — may have a more demonstrable causal link to a subsequent constitutional violation by a police officer than the hiring of that officer. It is plaintiff's burden to make that demonstration. We hold that there is enough evidence that the City was deliberately indifferent in its training and lack of protocols in this area and that the training deficiencies and absence of protocols were causally linked to Solitro's use of excessive force against Young that a reasonable jury could find in Young's favor on this training and lack of protocol claim (the "training claim"). A jury could also rationally conclude in defendant's favor, but that is not the test on summary judgment. The error by the court lay in taking the case away from the jury. Finally, we remand, without discussion, claims against various supervisors to the district court for consideration in light of our disposition of the training and hiring claims against the City.

Our decision results in a remand for jury trial on Young's claim that the City violated 42 U.S.C. § 1983 by failing to adequately train Solitro on issues relating to on-duty/off-duty interactions in a manner that was both causally related to Solitro's deprivation of Cornel's constitutional rights and deliberately indifferent to those constitutional rights.

I.

Young filed suit in federal court on June 7, 2001; an amended complaint was filed on December 16, 2002. She asserted (1) 42 U.S.C. § 1983 claims against Solitro and Saraiva for excessive force under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution; (2) § 1983 claims against the City of Providence under Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658, 98 S.Ct. 2018, 56 L.Ed.2d 611 (1978), for failure to train Solitro, Saraiva, and Cornel, failure to discipline Saraiva after an earlier incident, and the hiring of Solitro;1 (3) § 1983 supervisory liability claims against Urbano Prignano, Jr., Richard Sullivan, John Ryan, Kenneth Cohen, and Saraiva in their personal capacities; and (4) pendent state law claims against Solitro, Saraiva, Prignano, Sullivan, Ryan, Cohen, and the City of Providence. We describe later the titles and roles of each of these individual defendants.

On January 24, 2003, defendants Prignano and Sullivan moved for summary judgment on the merits of the supervisory claims against them. This initial motion was granted in part and denied in part on May 30, 2003. The district court held that Sullivan was entitled to summary judgment on claims that he inadequately investigated an incident involving Solitro's assault of a minority officer when hiring Solitro and that he failed to discipline Saraiva after a prior shooting. Other claims against Sullivan connected with the hiring of Solitro, however, could go forward, and hiring, training, and disciplinary claims against Prignano also survived. Regarding the training claim, the court noted that plaintiff's evidence suggested that "the department lacked policies concerning the manner in which off-duty officers were to identify themselves or to initiate action" and that "at best, only minimal off-duty response training was provided at the police academy."2 Some additional evidence was taken between the date of this order and the subsequent final order where the district court granted summary judgment for all municipal and supervisory defendants.

Solitro and Saraiva moved for summary judgment as to the claims against them on March 12, 2003. The district court granted this motion in part and denied it in part on July 1, 2003. The court held that the excessive force claims against the two officers survived summary judgment, particularly given that there were factual disputes surrounding how Cornel was holding his gun and whether he verbally identified himself as an officer in Solitro and Saraiva's presence.

On August 13, 2003, Solitro and Saraiva moved for a separate trial pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. 42(b), seeking to have the claims against them severed from the claims against the other defendants. On September 12, 2003, the court granted Young's motion to voluntarily dismiss Solitro and Saraiva as defendants from the case, in return for Saraiva and Solitro dropping their motion to bifurcate the trial. However, the other defendants had meanwhile joined the motion for a bifurcated trial, and the court granted their motion on the same day. The court correctly interpreted the case law as stating that even without Solitro and Saraiva in the case as defendants, any liability against the City and the supervisory defendants would need to be conditioned on a finding that at least one of the officers (Solitro or Saraiva) violated Cornel's underlying constitutional right to be free of excessive force during the course of a seizure. Thus, the court ruled that the trial would proceed in two phases: phase one would determine whether Solitro and/or Saraiva had violated Cornel's constitutional rights, and, if the answer on phase one were yes for at least one...

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