Henry v. Connolly

• Decision Date: 03 August 1990
• Docket Number: No. 90-1699,90-1699
• Citation: 910 F.2d 1000
• Parties: Constance Sherbill HENRY, et al., Plaintiffs, Appellants, v. Michael J. CONNOLLY, etc., et al., Defendants, Appellees. . Heard
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 1000

910 F.2d 1000

Constance Sherbill HENRY, et al., Plaintiffs, Appellants, v. Michael J. CONNOLLY, etc., et al., Defendants, Appellees.

No. 90-1699.

United States Court of Appeals First Circuit.

Heard Aug. 3, 1990.

Decided Aug. 8, 1990.

Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc Denied Sept. 6, 1990.

David J. Fine, Boston, Mass., with whom Kenneth L. Kimmell, Watertown, Mass., Charles C. Caldart, Public Interest Litigation Project, and David J. Fine and Associates, Boston, Mass., were on brief, for plaintiffs, appellants.

Eric J. Mogilnicki, Asst. Atty. Gen., with whom James M. Shannon, Boston, Mass., Atty. Gen., was on brief, for Michael J. Connolly, defendant, appellee.

Gerald J. Caruso, with whom Robert P. Rodophele, Ann Ryan-Small, and Ferriter, Scobbo, Sikora, Caruso & Rodophele, P.C., Boston, Mass., were on brief, for intervenor defendants Loretta A. Capezzuto, et al., appellees.

Before SELYA and CYR, Circuit Judges, and RE, ^* Judge.

SELYA, Circuit Judge.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) recently ruled that Initiative Petition No. 89-39 (the "Recycling Initiative") was not subscribed to by 10 qualified voters as required by the Massachusetts Constitution ¹, and therefore should not be placed on the ballot at the forthcoming November 1990 general election. See Capezzuto v. State Ballot Law Comm'n, 407 Mass. 949, 556 N.E.2d 366 (1990). After the Secretary of State indicated that he would comply with the SJC's directive, plaintiffs, signers and supporters of the Recycling Initiative, sought injunctive relief in federal district court. Mindful of the temporal exigencies, the district court placed the case on a fast track and, after compiling a record satisfactory to the parties, refused the injunction and dismissed the plaintiffs' complaint. Henry v. Connolly, 743 F.Supp. 922 (D.Mass.1990). This appeal followed.

We, too, expedited the proceedings. Having heard oral argument on August 3, 1990, digested the litigants' briefs, scrutinized the record, and considered the parties' contentions in light of applicable law, we affirm the judgment below.

I

Despite the salience of the subject matter, we need not linger long over the appeal. The SJC's opinion rested, in the main, on its determination that the state constitutional requirement, quoted supra note 1, meant that the signers, at or before the time they subscribed their names to the petition, must have had "before them" a copy of the full text of the actual petition. ² 407 Mass. at 954, 556 N.E.2d 366. As a matter of Massachusetts law, that determination is not open to question. See, e.g., Commissioner v. Bosch, 387 U.S. 456, 465, 87 S.Ct. 1776, 1782, 18 L.Ed.2d 886 (1967) (a "State's highest court is the best authority on its own law"); Jackson v. Liquid Carbonic Corp., 863 F.2d 111, 115-16 (1st Cir.1988) (federal court of appeals is "bound ... by the actual expression of the state's highest court" on a point of state law), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 109 S.Ct. 3158, 104 L.Ed.2d 1021 (1989); Gibson v. Firestone, 741 F.2d 1268, 1273 (11th Cir.1984) (state court decisions resting on adequate and independent state grounds "must be honored"), cert. denied, 469 U.S. 1229, 105 S.Ct. 1230, 84 L.Ed.2d 367 (1985). As a matter of comity, the determination is equally unimpugnable; a federal court cannot presume to sit in direct appellate review of final state court determinations in judicial proceedings. See, e.g., District of Columbia Court of Appeals v. Feldman, 460 U.S. 462, 476, 103 S.Ct. 1303, 1311, 75 L.Ed.2d 206 (1983); Atlantic Coast Line R.R. Co. v. Brotherhood of Locomotive Eng'rs, 398 U.S. 281, 296, 90 S.Ct. 1739, 1747, 26 L.Ed.2d 234 (1970); Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co., 263 U.S. 413, 415-16, 44 S.Ct. 149, 68 L.Ed. 362 (1923); Lancellotti v. Fay, 909 F.2d 15, 17 (1st Cir.1990).

Appellants' federal case, then, depends on their argument that the physical custody requirement contravenes the federal Constitution, in particular, the Due Process Clause or the Equal Protection Clause. ³ The district court addressed these assertions squarely and in detail, see 743 F.Supp. at 928-29 (finding no due process violation); id. at 931 (finding no equal protection violation), and no useful purpose would be served by attempting today to reinvent the constitutional wheel. We believe that the district court's reasoning on these points is compelling and we adopt it.

II

Our task is not yet completed, for appellants also assign error to various factual findings and supposed evidentiary bevues, which, they say, marred the proceedings below.

Appellants' attempt to vault the district judge's resolution of the facts runs up against too high a hurdle. Under the Civil Rules, we review the trial court's factfinding only for clear error. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 52(a). Thus, we "cannot undertake to decide factual issues afresh." Reliance Steel Prod. Co. v. National Fire Ins. Co., 880 F.2d 575, 576 (1st Cir.1989). Put another way, "[f]idelity to Rule 52(a) means that deference must be paid to the findings below...." Jackson v. Harvard Univ., 900 F.2d 464, 466 (1st Cir.1990), petition for cert. filed July 9, 1990 (No. 90-74). In the final analysis, "[w]here there are two permissible views of the evidence, the factfinder's choice between them cannot be clearly erroneous." Anderson v. City of Bessemer City, 470 U.S. 564, 574, 105 S.Ct. 1504, 1511, 84 L.Ed.2d 518 (1985).

The clear-error standard has a long reach in a case like this one: it governs findings of fact (1) anent the significance of documentary evidence, see id. at 573-76, 105 S.Ct. at 1511-12, and (2) about a particular actor's state of mind or subjective intent, see Keyes v. Secretary of the Navy, 853 F.2d 1016, 1019 (1st Cir.1988). Moreover, the same standard applies to the trial court's resolution of mixed questions of law and fact. See, e.g., RCI Northeast Servs. Div. v. Boston Edison Co., 822 F.2d 199, 202 (1st Cir.1987); Fortin v. Commissioner of Mass. Dept. of Public Welfare, 692 F.2d 790, 794 (1st Cir.1982).

Visualizing the record through the prism of Rule 52(a) leaves no doubt as to the result we must reach. While the district court may not have been compelled to find, for example, that Perry's ostensible reliance on the supposedly "misleading" advice she received from the Secretary of State was unreasonable, the district court, on this chiaroscuro record, certainly had the right to draw such an inference. The written material produced and disseminated by the Commonwealth, while perhaps not conspicuously enlightening, was not affirmatively deceptive. In the same vein, the remarks attributed to a state official, Sullivan, emerged so late in the day as to cast grave doubt on the credibility of the account set forth in Trial Exhibit 2, Perry's supplemental affidavit. ⁴ At any rate, the Sullivan comment, even if taken at face value, was easily subject to an innocuous interpretation.

In assessing detrimental reliance vel non, the test is one of objective reasonableness under the circumstances; and it is surpassingly difficult, on this record, to disturb the district court's essentially discretionary finding that the test was not satisfied. Cf., e.g., Rivera-Gomez v. de Castro, 900 F.2d 1, 3 (1st Cir.1990) (judge's finding of no detrimental reliance sustainable where judge "had the option of choosing between opposing inferences"); Clauson v. Smith, 823 F.2d 660, 663 (1st Cir.1987) (similar). Contrary to the implication of their argument, appellants were not entitled to have the court below draw every conceivable inference in their favor or to be relieved of the duty to act prudently in their effort to put the Recycling Initiative on the ballot.

The caselaw which appellants cite offers them little solace. Apart from other important distinctions (such as the nature of the affected right), those cases without exception involved instances where the government, by an established policy or course of conduct, actively misled interested parties. See, e.g., Griffin v. Burns, 570 F.2d 1065, 1074 (1st Cir.1978) (state "could not, constitutionally, invalidate ... ballots that state officials had [prepared], where the effect of the state's action had been to induce the voters to vote by this means"); Briscoe v. Kusper, 435 F.2d 1046, 1055 (7th Cir.1970) (Board of Election Commissioners could not apply "new ... rule to nullify previously acceptable signatures without prior notice"); Williams v. Sclafani, 444 F.Supp. 906, 912 (government's erroneous advice established "custom or practice, which induced justifiable reliance" on later occasions), aff'd mem., 580 F.2d 1046 (2d Cir.1978). Here, there was no clearly established practice, no contravening of a previously announced rule, no "sharp break from prior policy," see Gibson, 741 F.2d at 1272. Under the facts as supportably found by the district court, the Commonwealth, in the absence of suitably focused inquiry, was merely uninformative. The element of active inducement, present in Griffin, Briscoe, and Williams, is lacking in this situation. Hence, reliance becomes measurably harder to justify and the district court's disposition of the disputed point becomes impervious to clear-error attack.

No useful purpose would be served by exposition for exposition's sake. Without lengthy enumeration, we can state, broadly, that appellants' other "factfinding" objections are cast in a similar mold, and meritless. By the same token, the lower court did not commit reversible error in any evidentiary ruling.

III

In...