Atkins v. Hancock County Sheriff's Merit Bd.

• Decision Date: 07 August 1990
• Docket Number: No. 88-2585,88-2585
• Citation: 910 F.2d 403
• Parties: Robert C. ATKINS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. HANCOCK COUNTY SHERIFF'S MERIT BOARD, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 403

910 F.2d 403

Robert C. ATKINS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. HANCOCK COUNTY SHERIFF'S MERIT BOARD, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 88-2585.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Submitted June 28, 1990.

Decided Aug. 7, 1990.

Robert C. Atkins, Greenfield, Ind., pro se.

Richard L. Poynter, Brown & Poynter, Indianapolis, Ind., for defendants-appellees.

Before POSNER, MANION, and KANNE, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

The plaintiff, an employee in the office of the sheriff of Hancock County, Indiana, was discharged for insubordination, after a hearing before the sheriff's merit board. Pursuant to section 36-8-10-11 of the Indiana Code, Atkins sought review of his termination in a circuit court of Indiana, which, after first remanding the matter to the board for a further hearing on the ground that Atkins had not been given sufficient notice of the first hearing, upheld his discharge. Atkins then brought this federal civil rights suit, in which he contends that he was in fact discharged on political grounds, in violation of his rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal Constitution. The district court dismissed the suit as barred by res judicata, and we must determine whether this was a correct application of Indiana law, the law applicable to this suit by virtue of 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1738. Migra v. Warren City School District, 465 U.S. 75, 104 S.Ct. 892, 79 L.Ed.2d 56 (1984).

It was a correct determination if Indiana law required Atkins, when he filed his petition for review in the circuit court, to join with it his civil rights suit; and Indiana law would require this if otherwise Atkins would be attempting to "split" a single claim into two or more separate suits. The point is not that Atkins should have sought to introduce in the review proceeding evidence bearing on his civil rights claim; we may assume that this would have been barred, that the only evidence conceivably admissible in the review proceeding itself would be evidence bearing on the adequacy of the procedures employed by the administrative agency whose decision was being reviewed. (Although even the admission of that evidence is questionable, Bolerjack v. Forsythe, 461 N.E.2d 1126, 1131 (Ind.App.1984), some of it was, rightly or wrongly, admitted by the circuit court in Atkins's review proceeding.) The point is that, since the review proceeding had to be filed in a court of general trial jurisdiction, as the Indiana circuit court is, Atkins could have joined with his petition to review the action of the merit board a complaint for violation of his federal civil rights, a type of complaint that can be brought in state court as well as federal court. Maine v. Thiboutot, 448 U.S. 1, 100 S.Ct. 2502, 65 L.Ed.2d 555 (1980).

He could have; did he have to? The answer would clearly be "yes" if Indiana defined as a single claim for purposes of res judicata all claims arising out of the same transaction or occurrence. The occurrence here was the dispute that led to Atkins's discharge, and the claim that he was fired for his political activities arises out of that dispute just like his claim before the merit board, that he was not insubordinate. Indiana does not follow the "same transaction or occurrence" approach, however, but instead the "identity of evidence" approach. Biggs v. Marsh, 446 N.E.2d 977, 982 (Ind.App.1983). Understood literally, that approach would confine a plea of res judicata to cases in which the claim in the plaintiff's second suit was identical to the claim in his first, and would invite piecemeal litigation with a vengeance. We have not thought that Indiana intended to confine res judicata so narrowly, and so in Leal v. Krajewski, 803 F.2d 332 (7th Cir.1986), we upheld the defense of res judicata in a case indistinguishable from this one. We are given no reason to reexamine Leal.

Atkins was fired, ostensibly for...