Helton v. Clements

• Decision Date: 18 November 1987
• Docket Number: No. 86-1813,86-1813
• Citation: 832 F.2d 332
• Parties: John J. HELTON, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. William P. CLEMENTS, Governor, State of Texas, et al., Defendants-Appellees. Summary Calendar.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

Page 332

832 F.2d 332

John J. HELTON, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. William P. CLEMENTS, Governor, State of Texas, et al.,

Defendants-Appellees.

No. 86-1813

Summary Calendar.

United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

Nov. 18, 1987.

Rehearing Denied Jan. 14, 1988.

John J. Helton, pro se.

James C. Todd and Olivia B. Ruiz, Asst. Attys. Gen., Jim Mattox, Atty. Gen., Austin, Tex., for State and Short.

William J. Wade, Cecil C. Kuhne, Crenshaw, Dupree & Milam, Lubbock, Tex., for Tom Nivens.

McWhorter, Cobb & Johnson, Lubbock, Tex., for Southwestern Newspapers.

David E. Hudson, George R. Hall, Hull, Towill, Norman & Barrett, Augusta, Ga., D. Thomas Johnson, Lubbock, Tex., for Southwestern Newspapers, May and Marshall.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

Before RUBIN, REAVLEY, and WILLIAMS, Circuit Judges.

ALVIN B. RUBIN, Circuit Judge:

A discharged state employee seeks redress against 42 state defendants and damages for defamation against various private persons. The district court rendered summary judgment rejecting all claims. We find that the judgment was correct in all respects except that summary judgment in favor of two of the state employees was not warranted on the present record, and we remand the case for further proceedings as to those two only.

I.

John J. Helton was terminated on March 30, 1982, from his position as a psychologist at the Lubbock State School, an institution operated by the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation. He filed suit pro se on June 11, 1984, against 42 state officials and organizations, contending that they had conspired to deprive him of, and by discharging him and by taking various other actions against him had deprived him of, his constitutional rights to freedom of speech, to petition for redress of grievances, and to due process. The defendants named in his group of charges were the State of Texas; the Governor of Texas; the Attorney General of Texas; the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation; fourteen members of the Texas House of Representatives serving on a committee entitled "Special Committee to Study Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation"; Senator E.L. Short; J.S. Barkley-Booher, Manager of Human Services for the Governor's budget office; the chairman and eight members of the Texas Board of Mental Health and Mental Retardation; the commissioner, acting commissioner, deputy commissioner, and assistant deputy commissioner of the Department of Mental Health; John Gladden, the Superintendent of Lubbock State School; seven employees of Lubbock State School; Sue Dillard, Chief of Quality Control for the Department; and Don E. Foster, Grievance Hearing Officer.

Helton also joined claims for defamation against several private individuals: Tom Nivens, the President of the Lubbock State School Parents Association; the publisher of the Lubbock Avalanche Journal newspaper; the associate editor of that paper; and Philip Marshall, who had written a letter that was published in the newspaper. The district judge dismissed the claim against Nivens on the ground that the complaint failed to state a claim for which relief could be granted. Various state officials filed a motion to dismiss invoking, among other defenses, qualified official immunity. The district judge ruled that these motions would be carried with the case. These defendants appealed, and this court held that the claims of immunity should be determined before the case proceeded to trial. ¹ Upon remand, the district court dismissed the claims against 16 state officials, the State of Texas, and the Department of Mental Health on the grounds of qualified immunity, Eleventh Amendment immunity, and legislative immunity.

Thereafter, the 18 state officials who remained in the case filed a motion to dismiss or for summary judgment on the grounds that the complaint failed to state a claim for which relief could be granted and was barred by the statute of limitations. The district court first decided to defer judgment on the motion until the trial had been completed, but after hearing four hours of testimony, it granted the motion on the ground that all of Helton's claims were barred by the Texas two-year statute of limitations, except for a claim that he had been unjustly denied unemployment benefits on October 6, 1982.

Helton claimed that the actions of two of the state-official defendants, Landers and Rollins, had caused the illegal and unjust denial of his unemployment benefits, and that this was an overt act of the conspiracy against him. The district court held that this did not constitute a constitutional deprivation, because Helton had no constitutional right to receive such benefits that would be cognizable in a civil rights action in federal court. The court advanced an additional reason to dismiss the charges against Landers and Rollins. Helton had not alleged that their acts had caused him to be denied unemployment benefits because of his exercise of his rights to free speech but had charged only that their acts constituted an overt act in the conspiracy, and this did not form a basis for a civil rights recovery.

II.

Civil rights actions brought under 42 U.S.C. Secs. 1981, 1983, 1985, and 1988 are deemed analogous to Texas tort actions, and therefore, the applicable limitations period is the two years fixed by Article 5526 of the Vernon's Texas Annotated Statutes, now recodified as Tex.Civ.Prac. & Remedies Code Ann. Sec. 16.003 (Vernon 1986). ²

Although state law controls which limitations period applies, federal law determines when a cause of action accrues. ³ Under federal law, a cause of action accrues the moment the plaintiff knows or has reason to know of the injury that is the basis of his complaint. ⁴ Thus, the statute of limitations begins to run from the moment the plaintiff becomes aware that he has suffered an injury or has sufficient information to know that he has been injured. ⁵

The statute of limitations governing Helton's claims against the state defendants, therefore, began to run March 30, 1982, the day he was terminated. In his First Amended Complaint, Helton states that he began to suspect as early as 1979 that his rights were being violated. He alleges that in 1979, he and his supervisor instituted new treatment programs, and that these were intentionally sabotaged by defendant Gladden, the superintendent of Lubbock State School. Helton admits he knew of the alleged sabotage and claims his supervisor resigned as a result of them.

Helton has made no claim that any of the state defendants except Landers and Rollins acted within the two-year period. He knew, or at least had reason to know, of all the acts except the denial of his unemployment benefits no later than May 1982, when he was given a grievance hearing. Yet he did not file suit until June 11, 1984, two and a half months after the limitation period had run.

In an effort to avert the statute of limitations bar, Helton asserts that the action by Landers and Rollins was the last overt act committed in furtherance of the conspiracy against him and that the statute of limitations did not begin to run until that time. His characterization of the events as occurring in the course of a conspiracy does not extend the time when the statute of limitations begins to run. While the statute of limitations for a federal criminal conspiracy charge does not begin to run until the last overt act pursuant to the conspiracy has been committed, ⁶ the actionable civil injury to a plaintiff results from the overt acts of the defendants, not from the mere continuation of a conspiracy. ⁷ The panel decision of this court in Slavin v. Curry, on which Helton relies, borrowed the time of accrual from state law, ⁸ and thus it has been implicitly disapproved by the Supreme Court and by numerous panels of this court. ⁹

As the Second Circuit held in Singleton v. City of New York:

Characterizing Defendants' separate wrongful acts as having been committed in furtherance of a conspiracy ... does not postpone the accrual of claims based on individual wrongful acts.... To permit [a plaintiff] to wait and toll the running of the statute simply by asserting that a series of separate wrongs were committed pursuant to a conspiracy would enable him to defeat the purpose of the time-bar, which is to preclude the resuscitation of stale claims. ¹⁰

Therefore, any cause of action against the defendants accrued as soon as plaintiff knew or should have known of the overt acts involved in the alleged conspiracy. Helton knew by March 30, 1982, of his termination, the alleged denial of due process, and the alleged deprivation of his property interest. Letters he wrote before that date alleging a conspiracy evidence his knowledge of the alleged conspiracy at that time.

In a further effort to avoid the death knell of the statute of limitations, Helton claims that the alleged conspiracy caused injury to his mental health and rendered him unable to assert his rights until July 1983. He asserts that the statute of limitations should therefore be tolled until July 1983, basing this contention on the "disability" tolling provisions of former V.A.T.S. Art. 5535, now recodified as Tex.Civ.Prac. & Remedies Code Ann. Sec. 16.001 (Vernon 1986). That statute provides that when a person is of unsound mind at the time his cause of action accrues, the applicable statute of limitations will be tolled until the disability is removed.

The district court, however, held that since Helton's mental disability did not arise until several months after his termination, his claim was barred as a result of sections (b) and (d) of the tolling statute. These sections provide that in order for a plaintiff to be entitled to a tolling of the statute of limitations, he must be "under a legal disability when the cause of action accrues," ¹¹ and that "[a] disability that arises after a limitations...