Burge v. St. Tammany Parish

• Decision Date: 25 June 2003
• Docket Number: No. 01-31017.,01-31017.
• Citation: 336 F.3d 363
• Parties: Gerald BURGE, Plaintiff-Appellee-Cross-Appellant, v. ST. TAMMANY PARISH; et al., Defendants, Rodney Jack Strain, Sheriff of St. Tammany Parish, Defendant-Appellant-Cross-Appellee. Gerald Burge, Plaintiff-Appellee-Cross-Appellant, v. Patrick Canulette, etc.; et al., Defendants, Debra McCormick, Defendant-Cross-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

336 F.3d 363

Gerald BURGE, Plaintiff-Appellee-Cross-Appellant, v. ST. TAMMANY PARISH; et al., Defendants Rodney Jack Strain, Sheriff of St. Tammany Parish, Defendant-Appellant-Cross-Appellee.

Gerald Burge, Plaintiff-Appellee-Cross-Appellant, v. Patrick Canulette, etc.; et al., Defendants Debra McCormick, Defendant-Cross-Appellee.

No. 01-31017.

United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

June 25, 2003.

Rehearing Denied August 8, 2003.

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Mark William Smith (argued), Metairie, LA, for Burge.

Margaret H. Kern (argued), Jones, Fussell, Buras, Schoen, Kern & Crain, Covington, LA, Franz L. Zibilich, Martiny & Caracci, Metairie, LA, for Strain.

Appeals from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

Before GARWOOD, JONES and STEWART, Circuit Judges.

GARWOOD, Circuit Judge:

Appellant Rodney Jack Strain, the Sheriff of St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, appeals the entry of judgment against him in his official capacity, under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, for depriving the appellee, Gerald Burge, of his right to a fair trial. Burge cross-appeals the dismissal of his state-law tort claim against Sheriff Strain for spoliation of evidence. We reverse the entry of judgment against Sheriff Strain and affirm the dismissal of Burge's state tort claim.

Facts and Proceedings Below

In June of 1991, the appellee, Gerald Burge, brought suit under section 1983 against a litany of defendants, including the then sheriff of St. Tammany Parish, Patrick Canulette, for the deprivation of his constitutional rights to due process and a fair trial. Since its filing in 1991, Gerald Burge's section 1983 claim has come before this court on appeal on three separate occasions. It is before us now for the fourth.

A. Factual Background

The general origins of the present appeal lie in a bizarre concatenation of circumstances beginning, over twenty years ago, with the discovery of the body of Douglas Frierson under a bridge in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana. The details of those circumstances, however, are described at length in two prior published opinions, Burge v. Parish of St. Tammany, 996 F.2d 786 (5th Cir.1993) (Burge I), and Burge v. Parish of St. Tammany, 187 F.3d 452 (5th Cir.1999) (Burge III), and for brevity's sake we set forth here only an abbreviated version of the factual history narrated at length in Burge III.

Sometime between midnight and four o'clock a.m. on October 17, 1980, Douglas Frierson was shot to death and his body abandoned beneath a bridge in St. Tammany Parish. That same day, the Chief of Detectives of the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office, Lieutenant E.L. Hermann Jr., assigned two Sheriff's Office detectives, Gary Hale and Clark Thomas, to investigate Frierson's murder.

In the course of the ensuing investigation, Detective Hale took a number of statements from various individuals, the most important of which for the purposes of the present appeal was a statement taken from Douglas Frierson's mother, Jean Frierson. In her first statement to Hale, taken on October 17, 1980, Jean Frierson reported that at midnight on the night of his murder, Douglas Frierson came to her home where she served him a meal of pancakes. She told Hale that after he had finished eating, Douglas Frierson had been picked up at her house by someone in a car, but that she saw neither the vehicle nor the person or persons who came to pick up her son.

Gerald Burge and Joe Pearson were eventually indicted for the murder of Douglas Frierson. In April of 1984, Burge's counsel filed a Brady motion requesting that the St. Tammany Parish District Attorney's Office, then headed by District Attorney Marion Farmer, deliver to him all exculpatory evidence in the state's possession. The District Attorney's Office responded, and certain documents were delivered to Burge's counsel; those documents, however, did not include the October 17th statement of Jean Frierson to Gary Hale in which she reported that she could not identify the person or persons with whom her son departed on the night of his murder.

In January of 1985, and before Burge's murder charge went to trial, Walter Reed replaced Marion Farmer as District Attorney for St. Tammany Parish. In preparing to bring Burge's case to trial, however, the new administration discovered that its copy of the Sheriff's investigatory file was missing. Accordingly, the District Attorney began the process of reconstructing its file and requested that a second copy of the Sheriff's original investigatory file be delivered for use at trial. A copy of that file was delivered to the District Attorney's Office. However, according to the testimony of the prosecuting attorney in the case, Paul Katz, the copy of the file delivered by the Sheriff's Office in 1985 also did not contain Jean Frierson's October 17th statement.

At Burge's trial, Jean Frierson testified in a manner contradictory to her original statement to Gary Hale. Specifically, Jean Frierson testified that she saw her son leave with Gerald Burge on the night of the murder. Without the benefit of her original statement to Detective Hale, Burge's counsel was unable to sufficiently impeach Jean Frierson's testimony, and in September, 1986, Burge was convicted for the murder of Douglas Frierson.

According to the record in the present case, the existence of the original Jean Frierson statement eventually came to the attention of Burge's counsel, in part, through the efforts of Lieutenant Hermann of the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office. According to Lt. Hermann's testimony in the present case, immediately after Burge's 1986 trial for Frierson's murder, Detective Hale approached Lt. Hermann to discuss the recent trial. Hermann testified that during the course of his conversation with Hale, Hale showed Lt. Hermann certain documents relating to the original murder investigation that Hale had stored in the trunk of his car, including certain original documents that Lt. Hermann believed should have been delivered to the District Attorney's Office. When Lt. Hermann asked Hale why the documents were in his car, Hale reportedly replied, "If I would have turned this in, it would have caused us to lose — it could have caused us to lose the case."

In 1990, after evidence of Jean Frierson's original statement came to light, and four years after his original conviction, Burge filed for and was granted state post-conviction relief on the grounds that Jean Frierson's original October 17th statement was exculpatory evidence that should have been produced for the defense under the rule of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963). Upon obtaining state post-conviction relief, Burge was tried a second time for Douglas Frierson's murder and in 1992 was acquitted of all charges.

B. Procedural History

The procedural history of the present appeal is even more anfractuous than its factual background. Burge filed this section 1983 action in 1991, claiming that members of the Sheriff's Office and the District Attorney's Office had conspired to deprive him of the right to a fair trial by suppressing Jean Frierson's October 17th statement. His initial complaint named as defendants Sheriff Patrick Canulette individually, the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office, Detective Gary Hale, the St. Tammany Parish District Attorney's Office, District Attorney Walter Reed individually, and special prosecutor Paul Katz. After three detours to this court, however, see Burge v. Parish of St. Tammany, 996 F.2d 786 (5th Cir.1993) (Burge I), Burge v. St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office, No. 97-00044 (5th Cir. Apr. 14, 1997) (Burge II) (unpublished), Burge v. Parish of St. Tammany, 187 F.3d 452 (5th Cir.1999) (Burge III), only Gary Hale and Sheriff Patrick Canulette, in his official capacity, remained as defendants in Burge's original action.¹

On January 1, 1996, Burge filed a second action against the Sheriff and Captain Debra McCormick asserting a state-law claim for spoliation of evidence. That suit was consolidated with Burge's original suit in February, 1996, and on June 22, 2000, the district court issued an order granting summary judgment on Burge's spoliation of evidence claim to the defendants, Captain McCormick and Sheriff Strain. Trial on Burge's remaining original claims from his 1991 civil rights suit began on May 7, 2001, and on May 21 a jury returned a verdict in favor of Burge on his section 1983 claim against both Sheriff Strain and Gary Hale. Sheriff Strain moved for judgment as a matter of law at the close of the plaintiff's case-in-chief, at the close of all the evidence, and again after the entry of judgment against him.

Sheriff Strain now appeals both the denial of his motions for judgment as a matter of law as well as two evidentiary rulings of the district court. Burge cross-appeals the grant of summary judgment on his spoliation of evidence claim.

Discussion

A. Section 1983

1. Deliberate Indifference: Pattern of Violations

We review de novo the district court's ruling on Sheriff Strain's motion for judgment as a matter of law. Judgment as a matter of law is proper where "there is no legally sufficient evidentiary basis for a reasonable jury to find for [a] party on [an] issue." FED.R.CIV.P. 50(a)(1). Reviewing all the evidence in the record, we draw "all reasonable inferences and resolv[e] all credibility determinations in the light most favorable to the non-moving party," Miss. Chemical Corp. v. Dresser-Rand Co., 287 F.3d 359, 365 (5th Cir.2002), and will reverse "only if no reasonable jury could have arrived at the verdict." Id.

Liability under section 1983 attaches where a deprivation of a right protected by the Constitution or by federal law is caused by an official policy. An official policy can be found in two forms:

"1. A policy statement, ordinance, regulation, or decision that is officially adopted and promulgated by the municipality's lawmaking officers or by an official to...