Alexander v. Bostic

• Citation: 613 F.3d 1035
• Decision Date: 02 August 2010
• Docket Number: No. 08-15152,08-15152
• Parties: Laquarius GRAY, a minor, by and through her mother and next friend, Toniko L. ALEXANDER, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Antonio BOSTIC, individually and in his official capacity as Deputy Sheriff for Tuscaloosa County, AL, Defendant-Appellant, Edmund Sexton, etc., et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

613 F.3d 1035

Laquarius GRAY, a minor, by and through her mother and next friend, Toniko L. ALEXANDER, Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
Antonio BOSTIC, individually and in his official capacity as Deputy Sheriff for Tuscaloosa County, AL, Defendant-Appellant,
Edmund Sexton, etc., et al., Defendants.

No. 08-15152
Non-Argument Calendar.

United States Court of Appeals,Eleventh Circuit.

Aug. 2, 2010.

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Travis Russell Wisdom, Auburn, AL, for Defendant-Appellant.

H. Arthur Edge, III, Arthur Edge, III, P.S., Birmingham, AL, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.

Before BLACK, CARNES and FAY, Circuit Judges.

CARNES, Circuit Judge:

Neither party has filed a petition for rehearing, but on our own motion we rescind our earlier opinion in this case, see Gray ex rel. Alexander v. Bostic, 570 F.3d 1321 (11th Cir.2009), and replace it with this one.

This appeal marks the fourth time that this case, which stems from a deputy's arrest of a nine-year-old child, has been before us since it began in 2003. The first time we reversed the district court's dismissal of Laquarius Gray's 42 U.S.C. § 1983 complaint on qualified immunity grounds. Gray v. Bostic, 127 Fed.Appx. 472 (11th Cir.2004) ( Gray I). The second time we affirmed the district court's denial of defendant Antonio Bostic's motion for summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds. Gray ex rel. Alexander v. Bostic, 458 F.3d 1295, 1307 (11th Cir.2006) ( Gray II). The third time we affirmed the district court's grant of judgment as a matter of law against Bostic, because “he lacked even arguable probable cause to arrest Gray.” Gray ex rel. Alexander v. Bostic, 264 Fed.Appx. 856, 856 (11th Cir.2008) ( Gray III). This time, the issue is whether the district court abused its discretion under 42 U.S.C. § 1988 by awarding Gray attorney's fees even though the jury awarded her only $1.00 in nominal damages for Bostic's violation of her Fourth Amendment right to be free from illegal seizure.

I.

Because our opinions in the earlier appeals in this case set out the facts more

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fully, we offer only a distilled version here. After Gray was reprimanded by her gym teacher for failing to finish an assigned set of jumping jacks, she made a physical threat toward him. Gray II, 458 F.3d at 1300-01. Although a nearby female gym teacher stepped in to handle the situation, Antonio Bostic, who was then a Tuscaloosa County Sheriff's Deputy acting as the school resource officer, intervened. Id. at 1301. He took Gray into an adjacent lobby, where he pulled her arms behind her back and handcuffed her. Id. At the time of the incident the age of Laquarius was nine, and she was in the fourth grade. Gray I, No. 04-12240, slip op. at 2, 2004 WL 3112657.

Following the district court's entry of judgment as a matter of law against Bostic, which we affirmed, Gray III, Fed.Appx. at 256, a jury awarded Gray $1.00 in damages. Gray then filed a motion for attorney's fees and expenses seeking $78,390. Bostic did not file a response to that motion. ¹ The district court awarded Gray $70,532.93. Bostic appealed.

II.

“We review a district court's order awarding attorney fees for an abuse of discretion,” which occurs if the court “fails to apply the proper legal standard or to follow proper procedures in making the determination, or bases an award upon findings of fact that are clearly erroneous.” ACLU v. Barnes, 168 F.3d 423, 427 (11th Cir.1999). An abuse of discretion also occurs when a district court commits a clear error of judgment. United States v. Frazier, 387 F.3d 1244, 1259 (11th Cir.2004) (en banc). The abuse of discretion standard usually implies a range of choices, instead of only one right choice, and often we will affirm even though we would have decided the other way if it had been our choice. See id.; Blasland, Bouck & Lee, Inc. v. City of N. Miami, 283 F.3d 1286, 1298 (11th Cir.2002); McMahan v. Toto, 256 F.3d 1120, 1128 (11th Cir.2001); Rasbury v. IRS, 24 F.3d 159, 168 (11th Cir.1994). Still, even though determining a “reasonable attorney's fee” is a matter “committed to the sound discretion of a trial judge ... the judge's discretion is not unlimited.” Perdue v. Kenny A. ex rel. Winn, --- U.S. ----, 130 S.Ct. 1662, 1676, 176 L.Ed.2d 494 (2010); see also Hardt v. Reliance Standard Life Ins. Co., ---U.S. ----, 130 S.Ct. 2149, 2158, 176 L.Ed.2d 998 (2010) (“Statutes vesting judges with such broad discretion are well known in the law, particularly in the attorney's fees context. Equally well known, however, is the fact that a judge's discretion is not unlimited.”) (citation and quotation marks omitted). For that reason and to enable appellate review, the district court must “provide a concise but clear explanation of its reasons for the fee award.” Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424, 437, 103 S.Ct. 1933, 1941, 76 L.Ed.2d 40 (1983); see also

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Perdue, 130 S.Ct. at 1676 (“It is essential that the judge provide a reasonably specific explanation for all aspects of a fee determination....”).

III.

Only the “prevailing party” is eligible for attorney's fees under 42 U.S.C. § 1988, and a plaintiff prevails “when actual relief on the merits of his claim materially alters the legal relationship between the parties by modifying the defendant's behavior in a way that directly benefits the plaintiff.” Farrar v. Hobby, 506 U.S. 103, 111-12, 113 S.Ct. 566, 573, 121 L.Ed.2d 494 (1992). A “plaintiff who wins nominal damages is a prevailing party under § 1988.” Id. at 112, 113 S.Ct. at 573. The fact that a plaintiff succeeds in only a limited way does not strip her of prevailing party status, but the degree of her success is “the most critical factor in determining the reasonableness of a fee award.” Id. at 114, 113 S.Ct. at 574 (quotation marks omitted); see also Hensley, 461 U.S. at 436, 103 S.Ct. at 1941.

“When a plaintiff recovers only nominal damages because of his failure to prove an essential element of his claim for monetary relief, the only reasonable fee is usually no fee at all.” Farrar, 506 U.S. at 115, 113 S.Ct. at 575 (citation omitted). The small amount of money involved in a nominal damage award does not, however, automatically indicate that a particular case is of little importance or that awarding attorney's fees would be an abuse of discretion. See id. at 121, 113 S.Ct. at 578 (O'Connor, J., concurring) (“Nominal relief does not necessarily a nominal victory make.”). Other factors, including “the significance of the legal issue on which the plaintiff prevailed” and “the public purpose served,” go into determining whether a plaintiff's victory is substantial enough to make it one of those unusual nominal damages cases where the defendant is required to pay the plaintiff's attorney's fees. Id. at 121-22, 113 S.Ct. at 578-79; see also City of Riverside v. Rivera, 477 U.S. 561, 574-75, 106 S.Ct. 2686, 2694, 91 L.Ed.2d 466 (1986) (plurality opinion); Duckworth v. Whisenant, 97 F.3d 1393, 1399 (11th Cir.1996); Cullens v. Ga. Dep't of Transp., 29 F.3d 1489, 1493 (11th Cir.1994). As the Supreme Court has explained, “a civil rights plaintiff seeks to vindicate important civil and constitutional rights that cannot be valued solely in monetary terms.... [T]he public as a whole has an interest in the vindication of the rights conferred by the statutes enumerated in § 1988, over and above the value of a civil rights remedy to a particular plaintiff.” Riverside, 477 U.S. at 574, 106 S.Ct. at 2694 (quotation marks omitted).

Relying on the statement in Farrar that when a plaintiff recovers only nominal damages “the only reasonable fee is usually no fee at all,” 506 U.S. at 115, 113 S.Ct. at 575, defendant Bostic contends that plaintiff Gray was not entitled to attorney's fees even though she was technically a prevailing party. He argues not only that the amount of money damages she recovered was de minimis but also that the legal issue on which the plaintiff prevailed had “virtually no significance.” He asserts that she “accomplished no public purpose or goal” with this extended litigation. Finally, the defendant argues that the total amount of fees ($68,790) and expenses ($1,742.93) the court awarded the plaintiff “is not proportional” to the $1.00 in nominal damages that the jury awarded her.

In response, the plaintiff contends that at most Farrar supports the proposition that a district court may exercise its discretion to conclude that no attorney's fee award is appropriate where the plaintiff has recovered only nominal damages; it does not stand for the proposition that a

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court is required to reach that conclusion. She asserts that the district court was within its discretion to award her attorney's fees and that it “devoted considerable judicial effort” to arriving at a reasonable fee. The plaintiff argues that the district court used the proper method to calculate the lodestar amount, then followed this Court's case law when it reduced the lodestar to offset the claims on which she did not prevail and when it enhanced the lodestar to account for the delayed payment of the fees. She maintains that the outcome of this case sends a “clear and unmistakable signal” that society will not tolerate an authority figure violating a child's constitutional rights, which makes this litigation's significance extend “far beyond the jury's award of nominal damages.”

IV.

The district court, in deciding that an award of fees and expenses was warranted notwithstanding the nominal amount of damages, relied on the fact that the one published opinion to have come out of this litigation, our decision in Gray II, had been “cited in more than fifty other cases” during the two years between its issuance on August 7, 2006 and the district court's order awarding fees on July 29, 2008. In measuring “the significance of the legal issue on which...