Casillas-Diaz v. Palau

• Decision Date: 19 September 2006
• Docket Number: No. 04-1303.,04-1303.
• Citation: 463 F.3d 77
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit
• Parties: Pedro CASILLAS-DÍAZ et al., Plaintiffs, Appellees, v. Officer Romualdo PALAU et al., Defendants, Appellants.

463 F.3d 77

Pedro CASILLAS-DÍAZ et al., Plaintiffs, Appellees, v. Officer Romualdo PALAU et al., Defendants, Appellants.

No. 04-1303.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Submitted June 29, 2006.

Decided September 19, 2006.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Angel L. Rivera Colón, on brief, for appellants.

Daliah Lugo Auffant and Perez Vargas & Lugo Auffant Law Offices, P.S.C., on brief, for appellees.

Before SELYA, Circuit Judge, CYR and STAHL, Senior Circuit Judges.

SELYA, Circuit Judge.

This appeal follows a jury verdict awarding a grand total of $1,300,000 in compensatory and punitive damages to plaintiffs Pedro Casillas-Díaz (Casillas) and the Estate of Eliomar López-Claudio (López). In reaching this verdict, the jury found that four police officers, defendants Romualdo Palau, Juan Martínez, Liz Díaz, and Gabriel De León, had used excessive force in an encounter with Casillas and López. In this venue, the officers, as appellants, maintain that the lower court erred in denying their motion for judgment as a matter of law and their alternative motion for a new trial or a remittitur. Discerning no preserved error, we affirm the judgment below.

I. BACKGROUND

We rehearse the facts as the jury supportably could have found them, guided by the rule that "when the losing party protests the sufficiency of the evidence, the court of appeals must take both the facts and the reasonable inferences therefrom in the light most hospitable to the jury's verdict." Correa v. Hosp. San Francisco, 69 F.3d 1184, 1188 (1st Cir.1995).

On September 18, 2000, at approximately 4:30 a.m., the defendants encountered López, Casillas, and Casillas's bride-to-be, Barbara Lee Camacho, while the three civilians were making the rounds of San Juan's casinos. Officers Palau and Martínez stopped López's vehicle, in which the trio was riding, at the Ambassador Hotel. Without incident, they ticketed the operator, Casillas, for driving against traffic and failing to wear a seat belt.

Sometime later that morning, the plaintiffs and the defendants met again at the Condado Plaza Hotel. The defendants claim that they confronted Casillas and López after receiving information that the pair had been involved in a "hit-and-run" incident in the parking lot of the Ambassador Hotel. Although all parties agree that an altercation ensued, the testimony as to exactly what transpired is widely divergent.

The plaintiffs say that at the time of the confrontation Casillas was speaking to a cabdriver outside the lobby of the Condado Plaza, while López was asleep in the back seat of his parked car. According to their version of the events, the police berated the two men and then manhandled them for no apparent reason. The defendants tell a vastly different tale. They claim that they approached Casillas near the hotel lobby, that he pushed one of the officers, and that López physically interfered with the officers' attempt to subdue Casillas. In the officers' view, Casillas and López were the aggressors in the fracas that ensued; in the plaintiffs' view, the officers were the aggressors.

It is undisputed that, during the melee, Casillas and López sustained injuries, and that the defendants proceeded to take the two men into custody. They charged Casillas with eight misdemeanor traffic infractions. In addition, they swore out felony charges against both Casillas and López for alleged acts of violence aimed at public officials.

The criminal charges came to naught. The case against López was rendered moot when he committed suicide; the charges against Casillas were dropped. In the meantime, the battleground shifted from the criminal courts to the civil courts: on September 18, 2001, Casillas and López's parents, representing his estate, sued the officers under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and Puerto Rico law.¹

The plaintiffs' complaint alleged, variously, use of excessive force, false arrest, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution. The defendants denied the material allegations of the complaint, and, in due course, a jury trial commenced. At the close of the plaintiffs' case in chief, the defendants moved for judgment as a matter of law, see Fed.R.Civ.P. 50(a), citing an ostensible lack of evidence. The district court reserved decision. At the close of all the evidence, the court granted judgment as a matter of law in favor of the defendants on the claims of false arrest, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution but allowed the excessive force claims to go forward.

The jury found that the defendants had used excessive force against both Casillas and López. It awarded Casillas $50,000 in compensatory damages ($25,000 each against Palau and Martínez) and awarded López's estate $250,000 in compensatory damages ($125,000 each against Díaz and De León). As a coup de grace, the jury awarded a total of $1,000,000 in punitive damages ($250,000 against each of the four defendants).²

The defendants filed a timely post-trial motion for judgment as a matter of law or, in the alternative, for a new trial or a remittitur. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 50(b), 59(a). The district court denied the motion. This appeal ensued.

II. LIABILITY

We divide our discussion of the defendants' challenge to the liability verdict into three segments.

A. Standard of Review.

The district court's denial of a motion for judgment as a matter of law poses a question of law, engendering de novo review. See Colasanto v. Life Ins. Co. of N. Am., 100 F.3d 203, 208 (1st Cir.1996). Where, as here, such a motion contests the sufficiency of the proof, "the court of appeals must examine the evidence and the inferences reasonably to be extracted therefrom in the light most hospitable to the nonmovant." Sánchez v. P.R. Oil Co., 37 F.3d 712, 716 (1st Cir.1994). In performing this tamisage, "we may not consider the credibility of witnesses, resolve conflicts in testimony, or evaluate the weight of the evidence." Wagenmann v. Adams, 829 F.2d 196, 200 (1st Cir.1987).

Judgment as a matter of law should be approved, or the denial of such a judgment reversed, "only when the evidence, viewed from this perspective, is such that reasonable persons could reach but one conclusion." Id. It follows that we "may reverse the denial of such a motion only if reasonable persons could not have reached the conclusion that the jury embraced." Correa, 69 F.3d at 1191 (quoting Sánchez, 37 F.3d at 716).

Our review of the district court's disposition of a Rule 59(e) motion is also narrowly circumscribed. A district court may set aside the jury's verdict and order a new trial only if the verdict is against the law, against the weight of the credible evidence, or tantamount to a miscarriage of justice. See Sánchez, 37 F.3d at 717. A district court's disinclination to disturb a jury's verdict "can be reversed solely for abuse of discretion." Id.

B. Waiver.

As a threshold issue, the plaintiffs contend that the defendants have waived their sufficiency of the evidence challenge by not raising it until their post-trial motion for judgment as a matter of law. The premise on which this contention rests is impeccable: a renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law under Rule 50(b) cannot assert new grounds but, rather, is "bounded by the movant's earlier Rule 50(a) motion." Correa, 69 F.3d at 1196. In other words, a party cannot use a Rule 50(b) motion as an instrument for introducing a neoteric legal theory — one not distinctly articulated in his end-of-the-evidence motion for judgment as a matter of law — into the case. See id.; see also James W. Moore, 5A Moore's Federal Practice ¶ 50.08 (2d ed.1994) (explaining that "any argument omitted from the motion made at the close of the evidence is waived as a ground for judgment under Rule 50(b)").

Despite the correctness of the plaintiffs' premise, their conclusion is awry. The record here reflects that the defendants began the oral presentation of their Rule 50(a) motion at the close of the plaintiffs' case with the assertion that the plaintiffs had failed "to put forth sufficient admissible evidence" to allow a reasonable jury to "find in their favor on a variety of crucial factual issues." When the defendants renewed the Rule 50(a) motion at the close of all the evidence, they made transparently clear their belief "that plaintiffs have failed to provide any evidence of a use of excessive force." Based on these and other pertinent references contained in the record, we are satisfied that the defendants raised their sufficiency of the evidence challenge in a timely manner. Consequently, the issue has been preserved for appeal.

C. Use of Excessive Force.

Turning to the merits, we inquire first whether a reasonable juror could have reached a conclusion favorable to the plaintiffs concerning the use of excessive force. See Wagenmann, 829 F.2d at 200. The record here demands an affirmative answer to that inquiry.

At trial, Casillas and Camacho testified about the events of September 18, 2000. Their testimony, taken at face value, indicated that Casillas and López were attacked without any provocation and savagely beaten. The defendants presented a markedly different version of the events surrounding the arrests. They depicted Casillas and López as the aggressors, and characterized their own use of force as reasonably necessary under the circumstances.

In the last analysis, the issue boiled down to an assessment of the comparative credibility of the witnesses. When, as now, the credibility of witnesses comprises the crux of the matter, a reviewing court must take special care not to intrude upon the jury's domain. See Tennant v. Peoria & Pekin Union Ry. Co., 321 U.S. 29, 35, 64 S.Ct. 409, 88 L.Ed. 520 (1944); Wagenmann, 829 F.2d at 200. It is the proper province of the jury, not the court of appeals, to separate wheat from chaff, resolve inconsistencies in the witnesses's accounts, and determine what testimony is or is not worthy of credence. See Correa, 69 F.3d at 1194.

Here, the...