Wright v. South Arkansas Regional Health Center, Inc., 86-1262

Citation800 F.2d 199
Decision Date02 September 1986
Docket NumberNo. 86-1262,86-1262
PartiesJack B. WRIGHT, Appellee, v. SOUTH ARKANSAS REGIONAL HEALTH CENTER, INC., and Edwin B. Alderson, Jr., L. Andrew Sheppard, Paul A. Abdella, Rodney Landes, Jr., James B. Weedman, the Rev. Charles W. Brown, and Dana Green, individually and as members of the Board of Directors of South Arkansas Regional Health Center, Inc., and Ray Scott, Director of the Department of Human Services, State of Arkansas, Appellant.
CourtUnited States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (8th Circuit)

E. Jeffrey Story, Little Rock, Ark., for appellant.

Counsel for appellee did not present oral argument.

Before McMILLIAN, ARNOLD, and WOLLMAN, Circuit Judges.

ARNOLD, Circuit Judge.

Ray Scott, director of the Arkansas Department of Human Services, appeals from the District Court's denial of his motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity. Mr. Scott was named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 by Jack B. Wright, former director of the South Arkansas Regional Health Center, Inc. (SARHC), in El Dorado, Arkansas. Mr. Wright alleges that his termination as director violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and that the firing was triggered by Mr. Scott's precipitous reporting to federal authorities of potential irregularities at SARHC. The lawsuit further claims that Mr. Scott's actions, which plaintiff alleges included the furnishing to investigators of false information, were motivated by a desire to retaliate politically against Mr. Wright. The District Court denied defendant's motion for summary judgment and Mr. Scott immediately appealed on the basis of the Supreme Court's decision in Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 105 S.Ct. 2806, 86 L.Ed.2d 411 (1985). We take jurisdiction of this appeal, and reverse.

I.

SARHC is a private mental health care organization which gets the bulk of its funding from the state and federal governments; Mr. Wright was its executive director from 1972 until he was fired by the board of SARHC on August 23, 1984, approximately two months after Mr. Scott indirectly received information from an SARHC employee about alleged financial irregularities at the center. Defendant had department investigators interview several persons connected with the center and then took the information thus gathered to the United States Attorney in Little Rock. Pursuant to a search warrant, federal investigators then seized and impounded SARHC records; no indictments followed, but the Center Board also initiated an investigation into Mr. Wright's dealings and voted to dismiss him. This lawsuit was filed on June 21, 1984 against SARHC and its board of directors; Ray Scott was added as a defendant on December 26, 1985, and his motion for summary judgment was filed January 23, 1986.

In essence, plaintiff alleges that Mr. Scott, in order to retaliate against him for the exercise of First Amendment rights, made false accusations of crimes against him, leading to his firing without due process by co-defendants. Amended Complaint p 8. During his deposition, Mr. Wright said "there was an ongoing disagreement between me and Ray Scott," Plaintiff's deposition at 59, dealing both with funding issues and with mental health treatment philosophies. As a result, "[w]hen [Governor] Bill Clinton was going into office, I asked [him] as part of my agreement to help his campaign to not reappoint Ray Scott to his office," id. at 96-97. Mr. Scott's response, according to plaintiff, set in motion the events leading to his dismissal.

Mr. Scott's motion for summary judgment argued principally that he was protected by the doctrine of qualified immunity. The District Court denied both the motion for summary judgment and defendant's motion for a continuance pending resolution of this issue on appeal. The writer of this opinion granted an emergency stay of further proceedings in the District Court under Fed.R.App.P. 8(a) on February 27, 1986, which was continued by the panel pending the outcome of the present appeal.

II.

Although neither of the parties has questioned our authority to hear Mr. Scott's appeal at this stage of the litigation, the Court must first consider whether we have jurisdiction before turning to the merits of this case.

The general rule is that the courts of appeals may, under 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1291, hear appeals only from "final decisions" of the district courts; usually, a denial of summary judgment is not treated as final and cannot be appealed until the conclusion of a case on the merits. One exception to the final-decision rule, however, is the collateral-order doctrine enunciated in Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp., 337 U.S. 541, 69 S.Ct. 1221, 93 L.Ed. 1528 (1949). Under Cohen, the courts of appeals may consider those decisions "which finally determine claims of right separable from, and collateral to, rights asserted in the action, too important to be denied review and too independent of the cause itself to require that appellate consideration be deferred until the whole case is adjudicated." Id. at 546, 69 S.Ct. at 1225. Rejection of a claim of absolute immunity, for example, is immediately appealable. Such immunity is violated when a person claiming it is forced to stand trial; a finding in the claimant's favor cannot undo the fact that such a person had to defend himself or herself in the first place.

In Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 105 S.Ct. 2806, 86 L.Ed.2d 411 (1985), the Supreme Court applied similar logic to the doctrine of qualified immunity, premising its decision on the need to protect officials from the disruptions of going to trial as well as from liability for money damages. Id. at 2815. Qualified immunity, the Court said, is "an immunity from suit rather than a mere defense to liability; and ... it is effectively lost if a case is erroneously permitted to go to trial." Id. at 2816 (emphasis in original). Mitchell further reasoned that such a denial was immediately appealable because it "conclusively determines the defendant's claim of right not to stand trial," ibid. (emphasis in original). The Court also considered the issue of qualified immunity to be conceptually divisible from the plaintiff's claim on the merits: "the appealable issue is a purely legal one: whether the facts alleged ... support a claim of violation of clearly established law." Id. at 2816 n. 9. Therefore, the Court said, "a district court's denial of a claim of qualified immunity, to the extent that it turns on an issue of law, is an appealable final decision." Id. at 2817.

Since Mitchell was decided, a number of courts of appeals have been asked to take jurisdiction of immediate appeals by public officials denied summary judgment premised on qualified immunity, and all have done so. De Abadia v. Izquierdo Mora, 792 F.2d 1187 (1st Cir.1986); Huron Valley Hospital, Inc. v. City of Pontiac, 792 F.2d 563 (6th Cir.1986); Carson v. Block, 790 F.2d 562 (7th Cir.1986); Fernandez v. Leonard, 784 F.2d 1209 (1st Cir.1986); Flinn v. Gordon, 775 F.2d 1551 (11th Cir.1985), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 1972, 90 L.Ed.2d 656 (1986); Lojuk v. Johnson, 770 F.2d 619 (7th Cir.1985), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 822, 88 L.Ed.2d 795 (1986); Ricci v. Key Bancshares of Maine, Inc., 768 F.2d 456 (1st Cir.1985). See also Helton v. Clements, 787 F.2d 1016 (5th Cir.1986) (per curiam) (holding that the refusal to consider a motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity is, like the denial of such a motion, immediately appealable). 1

As we have noted, plaintiff's theory here is essentially that defendant, motivated by a desire to retaliate against plaintiff for the exercise of First Amendment rights, initiated an investigation that led to plaintiff's losing his job. Defendant's motion for summary judgment was based on the argument that there was no substantial evidence to support this theory. This sort of defense is not identical to the kind of question involved in Mitchell. There, current law was clear that the defendant had violated the plaintiff's constitutional rights. The question was whether, at the time of the acts in question, defendant knew or should have known that those rights were clearly established. To answer that question, the Court had only to examine the cases extant at the time of the acts alleged and make a judgment of law as to what a reasonable public official would or should have known at the time. The present case does not involve qualified immunity in quite that sense. Here, there is no doubt that the right to be free from official retaliation for the exercise of First Amendment rights has been clear all along. The issue is rather whether there is any substantial evidence that what Mr. Scott concededly did in fact violated those rights. The defendant's motivation is crucial to the very existence of a constitutional claim. Without an impermissible motive to retaliate, Mr. Scott did nothing more than perform his duty of reporting suspected violations of the law.

The question presented is thus both less clearly "legal," as opposed to "factual," than the issue in Mitchell, and less clearly separable from the merits, one of the requirements for immediate appealability under Cohen. We nevertheless hold that an interlocutory appeal is proper. If this is a step beyond Mitchell, it is a small one, and one fully consistent with the spirit and purpose of the Supreme Court in that opinion. It is important for public officials to be shielded from the burden of trial on insubstantial claims. Their right not to be forced to trial will be lost if an immediate appeal is not allowed. And the issue is, on close analysis, separable from the merits. To put it in terms of the present case, the issue is not whether defendant was improperly motivated in fact, but, rather, whether, when all the facts are viewed in the light most favorable to plaintiff, there is any genuine issue, triable to a jury, of...

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