Santos-Santos v. Torres-Centeno

• Decision Date: 23 November 2016
• Docket Number: No. 15-1782,15-1782
• Parties: Wilmary Santos-Santos, Plaintiff, Appellant, v. Reynaldo Torres-Centeno, et al., Defendants, Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

842 F.3d 163

Wilmary Santos-Santos, Plaintiff, Appellant,

v.Reynaldo Torres-Centeno, et al., Defendants, Appellees.

No. 15-1782

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

November 23, 2016

Eric C. Marion , with whom Law Office of Eric Marion was on brief, for appellant.

Michelle Camacho-Nieves , Assistant Solicitor General of Puerto Rico, with whom Margarita L. Mercado-Echegaray , Solicitor General of Puerto Rico, was on brief, for appellee.

Before Lynch, Selya, and Lipez, Circuit Judges.

LIPEZ, Circuit Judge.

Appellant Wilmary Santos-Santos ("Santos"), an officer with the Puerto Rico Police Department ("PRPD"), filed this employment discrimination case against the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the PRPD, and a number of her coworkers under various federal and Puerto Rico statutes. Santos alleges that she was transferred against her wishes to a different department within the PRPD after she co-signed a sexual harassment complaint against a coworker, acted as a witness in a separate investigation of that coworker, and filed an unrelated complaint regarding the misuse of police property by her superiors. Santos sought compensatory and punitive damages, as well as an injunction barring the PRPD from further discrimination.

The district court granted summary judgment for the defendants on all of Santos's claims in two rulings in August 2012 and November 2014. On appeal, Santos attempts to challenge both entries of summary judgment. Because Santos failed to adhere to procedural requirements relating to the dispositions of a magistrate judge as set forth by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 72(b) and Puerto Rico Local Rule 72(d), we affirm the district court's decisions without reaching the merits of Santos's claims.

I.

We recount in detail the complicated procedural history of this case because it is determinative of the appeal. Santos filed this action in January 2011. While several discovery motions were pending before the district court, the defendants moved for summary judgment. Instead of filing a standard opposition to the defendants' summary judgment motion, Santos, citing Rule 56(d) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, filed a response asserting that she still required certain documents that were among her discovery requests to effectively counter the defendants' motion. In August 2012 the district court granted summary judgment in favor of defendants on nearly all of Santos's claims,¹ finding that her attempted reliance on pending discovery related only to her First Amendment claim—which the court dismissed for failing to state a claim upon which relief could be granted under Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410, 126 S.Ct. 1951, 164 L.Ed.2d 689 (2006).² Only Santos's retaliation claims under Title VII and Law 115 survived, and the court instructed Santos to file her opposition to the summary judgment motion on these issues.

After Santos filed her opposition memorandum, the district court dismissed her Title VII retaliation claims against individual defendants Gregorio Merced-Vázquez, Reynaldo Torres-Centeno, William Ruiz-Borrás, and Miguel Santiago-Rivera, and her Law 115 claim against William Ruiz-Borrás. At that point, the surviving claims consisted of Santos's Title VII claims against the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the PRPD and her Law 115 claims against the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the PRPD, Merced-Vázquez, Torres-Centeno, and Santiago-Rivera.

Defendants next filed a motion for reconsideration, asking the court to dismiss the case in its entirety, which the court denied. While the defendants' motion for reconsideration was pending, Santos sought interlocutory review in this court of the order dismissing her other claims. We concluded that we did not have jurisdiction to hear her appeal at that time, dismissed the interlocutory appeal without prejudice, and returned the case to the district court.

Discovery thus proceeded as the case moved toward trial. In June 2014, however, defendants filed a second motion for summary judgment on the remaining claims in light of the Supreme Court's decision in University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, ––– U.S. ––––, 133 S.Ct. 2517, 186 L.Ed.2d 503 (2013).³ Santos filed her opposition, and the court referred the matter to a magistrate judge, who recommended that the motion be granted. Santos did not file an objection to the magistrate judge's report and recommendation within the fourteen-day deadline prescribed by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 72(b) and Puerto Rico Local Rule 72(d). On November 20, 2014, the district judge adopted the magistrate judge's report and recommendation in full and entered final judgment dismissing Santos's claims with prejudice. In its dismissal order the court noted that "[a]bsent objection ... [a] district court ha[s] a right to assume that [the affected party] agree[s] with the magistrate judge's recommendation" and that the court "needs only [to] satisfy itself by ascertaining that there is no ‘plain error’ on the face of the record." Santos – Santos v. P. R. Police Dep't., 63 F.Supp.3d 181, 184 (D.P.R. 2014) (quoting Lopez – Mulero v. Velez – Colon, 490 F.Supp.2d 214, 217–18 (D.P.R. 2007) ).

On the same day that final judgment was entered, Santos responded by filing a "Motion to Reconsider and Set Aside Memorandum and Order as Well as Judgment." Santos complained that her lawyer was out of the jurisdiction when the magistrate judge posted his report and recommendation and, hence, did not see that it had been issued until final judgment was entered. She also asserted that because there was no docket entry informing parties of the motion's referral, her lawyer was never aware that it had been assigned to a magistrate judge. Santos asked the court to set aside its judgment dismissing her case and requested that she be given an opportunity to object to the report and recommendation.

The district court chose to view Santos's motion as a "request for reconsideration," but it responded by cautioning Santos as follows in an electronic docket order entered the following day:

[T]he fact that a formal referral was not entered in this case is immaterial, since the record confirms that (i) the Report and Recommendation was notified to [Santos's attorney's] email address of record; (ii) it included a warning that failure to file specific objections within fourteen days would constitute a waiver of the right to appellate review ... and (iii) as per [Santos's attorney's] admission, the lack of referral was not the reason behind his untimely request to "closely review, analyze and object" [to] the Report and Recommendation.... To the contrary, [Santos's attorney] admits that, due to numerous professional commitments, yesterday, for the first time, he saw the Report and Recommendation because he "never checked the docket until today when the CM/ECF e-mails [were] received." ... This contention cannot serve as [the] basis for reconsideration of the order. See[ ] Santiago – Diaz v. Laboratorio Clinico y de Referencia del Este and Sara L[ó]pez MD, 456 F.3d 272, 276 n.3 (1st Cir. 2006) (A party is "fully chargeable with knowledge of what the docket disclosed."). The Court, however, will consider the memorandum of law in support of her request for reconsideration it has authorized to be filed before making a final determination in this case.

Santos subsequently filed her memorandum in support of her motion for reconsideration on December 16, 2014, attaching an additional motion asking the district court to extend the original period for filing objections to the magistrate judge's report and recommendation.⁴ She argued that reconsideration was appropriate due to the excusable neglect of her attorney—claiming for the first time that notification of the magistrate judge's issuance of the report and recommendation had ended up in her attorney's email "spam folder."

The court accepted Santos's memorandum of law and permitted her to file the additional motion on December 17, 2014, but it advised her in an electronic docket order that it would treat the additional motion as part of her original motion for reconsideration. Defendants opposed Santos's motion, asserting that it was improper because it did not "seek[ ] to correct manifest errors of law, present newly discovered evidence, or [assert] an intervening change in law"—the recognized bases for a motion to alter or amend a judgment under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 59(e).⁵ See, e.g., Prescott v. Higgins, 538 F.3d 32, 45 (1st Cir. 2008). In a reply memorandum, Santos argued that her proposed objections to the magistrate judge's report and recommendation—describing an alleged manifest error of law or fact in the court's adoption of the magistrate judge's report and recommendation—and the excusable neglect of her attorney were sufficient to unwind the judgment. Defendants filed a final "Informative Motion," again urging the district court to reject Santos's argument on the ground that she failed to meet the standard for a motion to reconsider.

On June 10, 2015, the district court entered an electronic order denying Santos's motion for reconsideration:

The Court has carefully re-examined the arguments raised by plaintiff in support of her motion for reconsideration at Docket No. 160 and finds no reason to deviate from its prior ruling, after adopting the Report and Recommendation. In her motion, plaintiff does not direct to any newly discovered evidence or an intervening change in the law; and has not shown that the Court's order was clearly unjust or based on a manifest error of law. Rather, she insists and elaborates upon her previous arguments and even asks the court to reconsider an order entered more than two (2) years ago. The court declines plaintiff's invitation. As such, and absent a valid ground for reconsidering the previous disposition, plaintiff's motion for reconsideration at Docket No. 160 is DENIED.

Santos then timely filed a notice of appeal, asking this court to review "the...