McIntosh v. Antonino

• Citation: 71 F.3d 29
• Decision Date: 09 November 1995
• Docket Number: 95-1200,Nos. 95-1004,s. 95-1004
• Parties: Audley McINTOSH, Plaintiff, Appellant, v. Thomas ANTONINO, et al., Defendants, Appellees. . Heard
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (1st Circuit)

Page 29

71 F.3d 29

33 Fed.R.Serv.3d 1

Audley McINTOSH, Plaintiff, Appellant, v. Thomas ANTONINO, et al., Defendants, Appellees.

Nos. 95-1004, 95-1200.

United States Court of Appeals First Circuit.

Heard Nov. 9, 1995.

Decided Dec. 1, 1995.

Bernard A. Kansky, Needham, MA, for appellant.

Thomas C. Tretter, Assistant Corporation Counsel, with whom Stephen H. Clark, Acting Corporation Counsel, was on brief, Boston, MA, for appellees.

Before SELYA, CYR and STAHL, Circuit Judges.

SELYA, Circuit Judge.

Well after he had been arrested and allegedly manhandled by Boston police officers plaintiff-appellant Audley McIntosh commenced a civil action under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983. The district court granted summary judgment in the defendants' favor on the ground that McIntosh had brought suit a day late. McIntosh appeals. We affirm.

I. BACKGROUND

We set forth the substantiated facts in the light most congenial to the party opposing summary judgment. See Pagano v. Frank, 983 F.2d 343, 347 (1st Cir.1993).

Boston police officers arrested appellant during the morning of January 7, 1990. He alleges that the gendarmes wrongfully detained him for several hours and battered him to boot. That afternoon, the police transported appellant to the emergency room of a local hospital where he was treated and released at approximately 7:00 p.m. The authorities charged him with a multitude of offenses (including assault and battery of a police officer), but they did not further detain him.

In short order, a Massachusetts state court dismissed all the charges. At a much later date, appellant's attorney prepared a four-page complaint confined exclusively to a claim premised on 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983. The complaint contained no pendent causes of action. It named Mayor Raymond Flynn, Police Commissioner Francis Roache, and several "John Does" as defendants. On January 7, 1993--three years to the day after appellant's infelicitous encounter with the police--the lawyer (1) transmitted a facsimile of the complaint's first two pages to the clerk's office of the federal district court, and (2) sent the original complaint, with the required filing fee, to the clerk by certified mail. The clerk's office received the abbreviated facsimile transmission after hours (i.e., between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. on January 7). ¹ The mailed envelope reached the office on January 8 and a deputy clerk docketed the case that day.

The defendants answered the complaint, denied any wrongdoing, and asserted an affirmative defense based on the statute of limitations. Following the completion of discovery and a belated effort to reconfigure the suit, ² the remaining defendants moved for brevis disposition under Fed.R.Civ.P. 56(c). The lower court granted appellant two extensions of time for responding to the motion. When the second extension expired, the court denied a third request and subsequently decided the Rule 56 motion in the defendants' favor without considering the delinquent opposition that appellant's counsel eventually produced. See D.Mass.Loc.R. 56.1 (providing that the facts as presented by the movant are deemed admitted for the purpose of a summary judgment motion when no timely opposition is filed). These appeals ensued.

II. THE LEGAL LANDSCAPE

The district court rested its decision on the ground that appellant's section 1983 claim was time barred. On appeal, McIntosh disputes this conclusion. To afford needed perspective, we start by reviewing certain abecedarian legal principles that inform our analysis of the issues presented.

A. The Summary Judgment Standard.

Summary judgment is appropriate when the "pleadings, depositions, answers to interrogatories, and admissions on file, together with the affidavits, if any, show that there is no genuine issue as to any material fact and that the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law." Fed.R.Civ.P. 56(c). We have written copiously on the idiosyncracies of this rule and on its ramifications, see, e.g., McCarthy v. Northwest Airlines, Inc., 56 F.3d 313, 314-15 (1st Cir.1995); Morris v. Government Dev. Bank, 27 F.3d 746, 748 (1st Cir.1994); National Amusements, Inc. v. Town of Dedham, 43 F.3d 731, 735 (1st Cir.), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 115 S.Ct. 2247, 132 L.Ed.2d 255 (1995); Vasapolli v. Rostoff, 39 F.3d 27, 32 (1st Cir.1994); Dow v. United Bhd. of Carpenters, 1 F.3d 56, 58 (1st Cir.1993); Pagano, 983 F.2d at 347; Wynne v. Tufts Univ. Sch. of Med., 976 F.2d 791, 793-94 (1st Cir.1992), cert. denied, 507 U.S. 1030, 113 S.Ct. 1845, 123 L.Ed.2d 470 (1993); United States v. One Parcel of Real Property (Great Harbor Neck, New Shoreham, R.I.), 960 F.2d 200, 204 (1st Cir.1992); Rivera-Muriente v. Agosto-Alicea, 959 F.2d 349, 351-52 (1st Cir.1992); Medina-Munoz v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 896 F.2d 5, 7-8 (1st Cir.1990); Garside v. Osco Drug, Inc., 895 F.2d 46, 48-49 (1st Cir.1990), and it would serve no worthwhile purpose to rehearse that jurisprudence here. It suffices to reaffirm that "summary judgment's role is to pierce the boilerplate of the pleadings and assay the parties' proof in order to determine whether trial is actually required." Wynne, 976 F.2d at 794.

To be sure, the district court's assessment of the summary judgment record must comply with certain guidelines. The most salient of these guidelines requires the court to interpret the record in the light most hospitable to the nonmoving party, reconciling all competing inferences in that party's favor. See Pagano, 983 F.2d at 347. Nonetheless, a party contesting summary judgment must offer the court more than posturing and conclusory rhetoric. See Morris, 27 F.3d at 748; Medina-Munoz, 896 F.2d at 8. This principle is brought into bold relief when the motion targets an issue on which the nonmoving party bears the ultimate burden of proof. In that circumstance, the nonmovant must "produce specific facts, in suitable evidentiary form," Morris, 27 F.3d at 748, in order to demonstrate the presence of a trialworthy issue and thereby deflect the sharp blade of the summary judgment ax.

Questions anent the applicability and effect of the passage of time on particular sets of facts often are grist for the summary judgment mill. See, e.g., Rivera-Muriente, 959 F.2d at 352; Jensen v. Frank, 912 F.2d 517, 520 (1st Cir.1990); Kali Seafood, Inc. v. Howe Corp., 887 F.2d 7, 9 (1st Cir.1989). And when a defendant moves for summary judgment based on a plausible claim that the suit is time barred, the onus of identifying a trialworthy issue customarily falls on the plaintiff. See, e.g., Morris, 27 F.3d at 748.

B. The Statute of Limitations.

The linchpin of the appellant's case is his section 1983 claim. We, therefore, train our sights exclusively on this claim. ³

Section 1983 creates a private right of action for redressing abridgments or deprivations of federal constitutional rights. The resultant liability is akin to tort liability. See Heck v. Humphrey, --- U.S. ----, ----, 114 S.Ct. 2364, 2370, 129 L.Ed.2d 383 (1994); Memphis Community Sch. Dist. v. Stachura, 477 U.S. 299, 305, 106 S.Ct. 2537, 2541, 91 L.Ed.2d 249 (1986). Section 1983 does not contain a built-in statute of limitations. Therefore, in processing such actions, a federal court must lift a limitation period from state law. See Wilson v. Garcia, 471 U.S. 261, 276-80, 105 S.Ct. 1938, 1947-49, 85 L.Ed.2d 254 (1985); Morris, 27 F.3d at 748; Rivera-Muriente, 959 F.2d at 352.

Massachusetts prescribes a three-year limitation period for personal injury actions (such as tort suits for false arrest or assault), see Mass.Gen.L. ch. 260, Sec. 2A (1992); see also Street v. Vose, 936 F.2d 38, 40 (1st Cir.1991) (per curiam), cert. denied, 502 U.S. 1063, 112 S.Ct. 948, 117 L.Ed.2d 117 (1992), and the parties agreed before the district court that it was appropriate to borrow from this statute to derive the limitation period. Thus, the question before the district court was whether the appellant brought his section 1983 action within the prescribed three-year period.

In this venue, the parties briefed the appeal on the same underlying assumption. At oral argument, however, the appellant tried to recharacterize his section 1983 claim as one for malicious prosecution to take advantage of the differently configured limitation period. See Calero-Colon v. Betancourt-Lebron, 68 F.3d 1, 3-4 (1st Cir.1995) (discussing need and methodology for such characterization). This effort comes too late and offers too little. The original complaint asserted that appellant's civil rights had been abridged by means of "false arrest" and "assault and battery." The complaint did not mention malicious prosecution and, indeed, there is nothing in the record to suggest that any of the named defendants had a hand in whatever prosecution may have transpired. Since the district court properly characterized the suit as it stood as one for false arrest, the question before us is precisely the same as the question to which the district court responded. We review the district court's answer to the question de novo. See Rivera-Muriente, 959 F.2d at 352.

Although the limitation period is borrowed from state law, the jurisprudence of section 1983 directs us to examine federal law in order to determine the accrual period. See Calero-Colon, 68 F.3d at 3; Morris, 27 F.3d at 748. Under federal law, accrual starts when the plaintiff "knows, or has reason to know, of the injury on which the action is based." Rivera-Muriente, 959 F.2d at 353. Most accrual disputes focus on when the limitation period began to run, that is, when the plaintiff's causes of action accrued. See, e.g., Calero-Colon, 68 F.3d at 3-4; Morris, 27 F.3d at 749. Here, the commencement date is not a problem: all the relevant actions of the police officers took place on January 7, 1990; the appellant was treated and released from the hospital that day; and he knew then that he had been harmed. Thus, the appellant's cause of action accrued on January 7, 1990. But the...