García-Feliciano v. United States
| Decision Date | 23 April 2014 |
| Docket Number | CIV. NO.: 12-1959(SCC) |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Puerto Rico |
| Parties | JOSÉ GARCÍA-FELICIANO, Plaintiff, v. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ET AL., Defendants. |
The facts in this Federal Tort Claims Act case are straightforward. On March 24, 2011, Plaintiff José García-Feliciano was brought to the Clemente Ruíz Nazario Federal Courthouse in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to be sentenced in a criminal case. While at the courthouse, he was in the custody of the United States Marshals Service ("USMS"). After his sentencing, García, along with ten other detainees, was led by one or more deputyMarshals1 to the loading dock, from which they would be transported back to the Metropolitan Detention Center—Guaynabo. While moving through the courthouse, García and the other detainees were, in compliance with standard USMS operating procedure, in "full restraints" consisting of "handcuffs, waist chain and leg irons." Docket No. 28, ¶ 8. The detainees traveled to the loading dock on "the route [the USMS] normally used to transport detainees through court-house[] . . . ." Id. ¶ 10. Specifically, they were taken down an emergency staircase.
We have viewed a video of the detainees walking down the stairs. In that video, a deputy Marshal can be seen leading a single-file line of shackled detainees down the stairwell. As he nears the bottom of a flight, García, third in line, loses his footing and tumbles to his left, bounces off the wall, and then falls forward into another wall and onto the stairs' landing.García indisputably suffered injuries as a result of this fall.2
The Government has filed a motion for summary judgment that pursues several avenues of relief, chief among them the discretionary function exception to the FTCA. That exception provides that the FTCA's waiver of sovereign immunity does not extend to actions "based upon the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a federal agency or an employee of the Government, whether or not the discretion involved be abused." 28 U.S.C. § 2680(a). Where this exception applies, the federal district courts lack subject matter jurisdiction over the lawsuit. See Wood v. United States, 290 F.3d 29, 35 (1st Cir. 2007). A "well-established framework governs" application of the discretionary function exception. Carroll v. United States, 661 F.3d 87, 99 (1st Cir. 2011). A court is charged with first"identify[ing] the conduct that is alleged to have caused the harm." Fothergill v. United States, 566 F.3d 248, 252 (1st Cir. 2009). Second, the court "determines whether that conduct can fairly be described as discretionary." Id. And third, the court asks "whether the exercise or non-exercise of the granted discretion is actually or potentially influenced by policy considerations." Id.
We note that while the discretionary function framework may be "well-established," the practical application of that framework is far from clear cut. See Shansky v. United States, 164 F.3d 688, 693 (1st Cir. 1999) (); Johnson v. Sawyer, 980 F.2d 1490, 1502 (5th Cir. 1992) (), vacated on other grounds, 47 F.3d 716 (5th Cir. 1995) (en banc); see also 14 WRIGHT & MILLER, FEDERAL PRACTICE & PROCEDURE § 3658.1 (4th ed.) (). Below, we explain why some of these difficultiesrequire denial of the Government's motion.
According to García (and, indeed, the Government's statement of uncontested facts, see Docket No. 28, ¶ 7), García fell because the chain connecting his ankles was too short, and as a result he tripped on his way down the stairs. Watching the video of the incident provided by the Government, this is a plausible account of the fall: in the video, you can see García's left foot suddenly jerk backwards before he falls against the wall. The caselaw directs us to "cut through the plaintiff's characterization of the Government's conduct[] and identify the 'nature and quality of the harm-producing conduct.'" Rios-Colon v. United States, 928 F. Supp. 2d 376, 383 (quoting Fothergill, 566 F.3d at 252-53). But where that instruction should take us here is not obvious, because there seem to be two discrete actions on the Government's part that caused García's injuries. First, there is the fact that he was walking unaided down a flight of stairs, his movements directed by the Government. For the moment, we will accept the Government's assertion that this was a discretionary function. But second, García was wearing full restraints, including leg irons,something that the Government admits was non-discretionary.3 Under a typical causation analysis, we would say that both the direction to walk down the stairs and the restraints were the but-for causes of García's fall, and both were probably also proximate causes. But the caselaw does little to illuminate how a court should proceed when two separate government actions concurrently cause a person's injury—especially when one but not the other is discretionary.4
The Government relies principally on MacCaffray v. UnitedStates, Civ. No. 97-403, 1998 WL 560047 (D. Vt. Aug. 27, 1998). In that case, a detainee brought suit against the United States for injuries he suffered as a result of not being seatbelted into the Marshal-driven car in which he was being transported when that car got in an accident. See id. at *1-2. The plaintiff's FTCA claim was dismissed because the Court held that the deputy Marshals had discretion regarding whether or not to seatbelt the plaintiff, and the discretion that they had exercised in deciding not to seatbelt the plaintiff was policy-driven. Id. at *3 (); see also Vinson v. United States, Civ. No. 10-79, 2011 WL 3903199, at *4 (D.S.C. Sept. 2, 2011), aff'd, 453 F. App'x 221 (4th Cir. 2011). The Government believes MacCaffray to be directly on point, but its position ignores the crucial distinction between the two cases: in MacCaffray, the use of seatbelts was found to be discretionary, but here, the use of restraints was not.
Furthermore, a later case relying on MacCaffray sheds light on the course we should take here, where two causes are alleged to have been responsible for García's injuries. InVinzant v. United States, the plaintiff, as in MacCaffray, complained of the Marshals' decision not to seatbelt him during transportation, but he also complained of their allegedly reckless driving. See Vinzant, Civ. No. 06-10561, 2010 WL 1856277, at *1 (E.D. La. May 7, 2010). With regard to the lack of seatbelts, the court followed MacCaffray, finding that the decision on whether to buckle-in detainees was "within the discretion of each United States Marshal." Id. However, the court concluded that while this fact barred the plaintiff's FTCA claim with regard to the seatbelts, it had no effect on his claims regarding the deputies' allegedly reckless driving. Id. at *6 (), aff'd, 458 F. App'x 329 (5th Cir. 2012) (per curiam); see also Dobrowski v. United States, Civ. No. 11-2835, 2013 WL 5954901, at *3-4 (E.D. Cal. Nov. 7, 2013) ().
Vinzant and Dobrowski, then, actually suggest that complete dismissal would be unwarranted here, but they do not answer the question completely. In those cases, the various alleged causes of the plaintiffs' injuries were more separable than thealleged causes are here. That is, the car crashes in Vinzant and Dobrowski may well have been necessary and sufficient causes for at least some portion of the plaintiffs' injuries in those cases, and it is not clear how either of those courts would have treated injuries "caused" by the crash but aggravated by the lack of seatbelts.5 In our case, by contrast, neither the stairs nor the restraints are likely to have been a sufficient cause of García's accident; instead, the two causes seem to have worked in concert, causing García's injuries concurrently. This presents complicated questions regarding how to proceed: if we follow Vinzant and only permit the restraint claim, substantial evidence regarding the route will be necessary at trial. Nonetheless, the fact of restraint seems to be at the heart of García's claims. After all, going down stairs is a trivial task in most cases; that it was dangerous in this case was because of the non-discretionary act of restraining García. For this reason, we conclude that the discretionary function exception should not apply where two causes—one discretionary and one not—aresaid to cause the plaintiff's injury, especially where the non-discretionary cause is primarily responsible for the plaintiff's injuries.
It is necessary next to give some attention to two related problems in applying the discretionary function exception: what is a policy?, and whose conduct are we concerned about? The Government argues that the mandatory policy requiring detainees to be restrained during transport was itself an action of discretion implicating the exception and removing this case from our subject matter jurisdiction. To be sure, the policy was enacted in...
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