Bennett v. City of Holyoke

• Citation: 362 F.3d 1
• Decision Date: 22 March 2004
• Docket Number: No. 03-1520.,03-1520.
• Parties: Gary A. BENNETT, Plaintiff, Appellee, v. CITY OF HOLYOKE, Defendant, Appellant.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (1st Circuit)

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362 F.3d 1

Gary A. BENNETT, Plaintiff, Appellee, v. CITY OF HOLYOKE, Defendant, Appellant.

No. 03-1520.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Heard January 6, 2004.

Decided March 22, 2004.

John H. Fitz-Gibbon, with whom Harry L. Miles and Green, Miles, Lipton, White & Fitz-Gibbon were on brief, for appellant.

Tani E. Sapirstein, with whom Sapirstein & Sapirstein was on brief, for appellee.

Before SELYA, Circuit Judge, COFFIN, Senior Circuit Judge, and SMITH,^* District Judge.

SELYA, Circuit Judge.

After a jury found for plaintiff-appellee Gary A. Bennett in a whistleblower action, his employer, the City of Holyoke (the City), sought to set aside the verdict by reason of the plaintiff's failure to comply with a statutory notice requirement. Alternatively, it asked the district court to defenestrate the ancillary award of prejudgment interest. The court rejected both of these overtures, and the City appealed. We affirm: the City has not properly preserved the first issue and the Massachusetts whistleblower statute broadly authorizes awards of prejudgment interest against municipal defendants.

I. BACKGROUND

The plaintiff served as a Holyoke police officer for twenty-one star-crossed years. The district court's opinion on summary judgment, Bennett v. City of Holyoke, 230 F.Supp.2d 207, 213-19 (D.Mass.2002), chronicles the long history of rancor between the plaintiff and the police department, and we need not rehearse that history here. For our purposes, it suffices to say that, during his tenure, the plaintiff became a self-appointed crusader against what he perceived as corruption at the highest levels of the police department. In time, he filed a complaint on behalf of a fellow officer with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) and shared the results of his internal investigations with the state Attorney General.

According to the plaintiff, these steps provoked immediate retaliation by those in power. They disciplined him for failing to comply with a departmental policy requiring officers to follow certain procedures before complaining to outside agencies. Then, they twice passed him over for promotion to lieutenant despite his outstanding test scores. The plaintiff responded by filing another MCAD complaint, this time on his own behalf. The relationship between the parties went steadily downhill from there.

In 1998, the plaintiff retired. In short order, he sued the City, the mayor, and several police department hierarchs. His complaint, filed in a Massachusetts state court, limned mainly state-law claims but included a claim brought pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Seizing upon this appendage, the defendants removed the action to the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. See 28 U.S.C. §§ 1331, 1441.

In due course, the district court disposed of several of the claims on summary judgment. Bennett, 230 F.Supp.2d at 231-32. It then embarked upon a six-day trial with respect to the remaining claims. The jury found for the defendants on most of those claims,¹ but returned a $90,000 verdict against the City on the whistleblower claim. The court subsequently added $41,278 in prejudgment interest and entered judgment accordingly.

The City responded with, inter alia, a motion to alter or amend the judgment, Fed.R.Civ.P. 59(e), by striking the award of prejudgment interest. The district court denied the motion. The City subsequently moved for relief from the judgment, Fed.R.Civ.P. 60(b), on the ground that the plaintiff had not complied with the notice provisions of the whistleblower statute. The court denied that motion as well. This appeal followed.

II. APPELLATE JURISDICTION

Before reaching the merits of the appeal, we must address a threshold matter. The plaintiff notes that the City filed its notice of appeal a day late and maintains that this court lacks jurisdiction to hear the appeal. The City parries this thrust by pointing to the district court's extension of the filing date. The plaintiff replies that the extension was improvidently granted (and, thus, impuissant).

We recount the background needed to resolve this impasse. The applicable rule requires the filing of a notice of appeal in a civil case, not involving the federal government, "within 30 days after the judgment or order appealed from is entered." Fed. R.App. P. 4(a)(1)(A). This thirty-day period does not begin to run until after the entry of the order disposing of a motion for attorneys' fees so long as "the district court extends the time to appeal under Rule 58." Fed. R.App. P. 4(a)(4)(A)(iii). The district court granted such an extension here, so that a notice of appeal would be considered timely if filed within thirty days of the court's adjudication of the plaintiff's application for attorneys' fees.

On March 6, 2003, the court issued a memorandum and order in which it awarded attorneys' fees to the plaintiff. That order started the running of the thirty-day period. See Fed. R.App. P. 4(a)(7)(A)(i) (providing that "entry" occurs at docketing for those orders the disposition of which does not require a separate document); see also Fed.R.Civ.P. 58(a)(1)(C) (stating that an order disposing of a motion for attorneys' fees does not require a separate document). Thus, the last day for filing a notice of appeal was Monday, April 7, 2003. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 6(a) (explaining how time periods are computed).

On March 18, however, the district court issued an amended judgment that, in effect, replicated its March 6 order. On April 8, 2003 — one day after the deadline — the City filed its notice of appeal and moved for a one-day extension. It asserted that it had been misled by the gratuitous entry of the amended judgment on March 18 and had assumed (erroneously, as matters turned out) that the appeal period would run from the date of that amended judgment.

The district court accepted this explanation and granted the one-day extension. In doing so, the court acknowledged that its own actions (in particular, the entry of the amended judgment) had created "confusion over the date of the [attorneys' fee] ruling." On this basis, the court determined that the City's neglect (i.e., not filing its notice of appeal on or before April 7) was excusable. The plaintiff challenges this determination.

Although the time parameters for filing notices of appeal usually are deemed "mandatory and jurisdictional," Browder v. Dir., Dep't of Corr., 434 U.S. 257, 264, 98 S.Ct. 556, 54 L.Ed.2d 521 (1978), those time parameters may be extended upon a showing of "excusable neglect or good cause." Fed. R.App. P. 4(a)(5)(A)(ii). That is precisely what the lower court found in this instance. We review a trial court's decision as to the existence vel non of excusable neglect for abuse of discretion. Mirpuri v. ACT Mfg., Inc., 212 F.3d 624, 627 (1st Cir.2000). We discern none here.

Under the excusable neglect rubric, courts are permitted, when appropriate, to accept late filings caused by inadvertence or mistake. See Pioneer Inv. Servs. Co. v. Brunswick Assocs. Ltd. P'ship, 507 U.S 380, 388, 113 S.Ct. 1489, 123 L.Ed.2d 74 (1993) (interpreting "excusable neglect" under the bankruptcy rules); see also Virella-Nieves v. Briggs & Stratton Corp., 53 F.3d 451, 454 n. 3 (1st Cir.1995) (holding that "Pioneer's exposition of excusable neglect ... applies equally to Fed. R.App. P. 4(a)(5)"). A trial court's determination as to whether an instance of neglect is (or is not) excusable has a significant equitable component and must give due regard to the totality of the relevant circumstances surrounding the movant's lapse. Pioneer, 507 U.S. at 395, 113 S.Ct. 1489.

Here, the circumstances plainly support the district court's ruling. The one-day delay in this case was very brief; the entry of an essentially duplicative order obfuscated matters, rendering the delay (as the district court put it) "understandable"; and there is no indication of either bad faith or undue prejudice. The lower court, which had the best coign of vantage, concluded that a one-day delay, in these circumstances, constituted excusable neglect — and there is no principled way that we can label that conclusion an abuse of discretion. Where, as here, a district court takes an unusual procedural step and then admits that its actions have caused confusion over the proper time for filing a notice of appeal, an appellate court should not deem the decision to grant a brief extension of the filing date an abuse of discretion without some compelling justification for doing so. See, e.g., Alpine State Bank v. Ohio Casualty Ins. Co., 941 F.2d 554, 556 n. 2 (7th Cir.1991); see also Mirpuri, 212 F.3d at 631 (noting that "a plausible misconstruction" of a court order sometimes may satisfy the requirements for excusable neglect). There is no such justification here.

For these reasons, we conclude that we have jurisdiction over the City's appeal.

III. THE WHISTLEBLOWER CLAIM

We turn next to the first of the City's two assignments of error. To recapitulate, after judgment had entered on the whistleblower claim, the City sought to set it aside on the ground that the plaintiff had failed to satisfy the notice requirement of the Massachusetts whistleblower statute, Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 149, § 185. The district court denied the motion, ruling that "[t]he notice issue, in the form now presented, was not raised with sufficient clarity before trial to justify disturbing the verdict." We review that ruling for abuse of discretion. See Farm Credit Bank v. Ferrera-Goitia, 316 F.3d 62, 65-66 (1st Cir.2003). "We will find an abuse of discretion when we are convinced that the district court has made an error of law or has reached a plainly erroneous decision." Id. at 66.

The Massachusetts whistleblower statute prohibits a public employer — including a municipality, Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 149 § 185(a)(2) — from taking any retaliatory action against an employee who engages in...