Howard v. United States Dist. Court For Southern Dist. Of Ohio
| Decision Date | 17 March 2011 |
| Docket Number | Case No. 2:10-cv-757 |
| Parties | Gregory T. Howard, Plaintiff, v. United States District Court for Southern District of Ohio, et al., Defendants.Z |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Southern District of Ohio |
OPINION AND ORDER
On December 16, 2010, the Magistrate Judge issued a Report and Recommendation which recommended that this case be dismissed pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §1915(e)(2) for failure to state a claim. During the next 30 days, plaintiff Gregory Howard filed no fewer than fourteen documents (plus two letters) in response. A number of the documents are objections to the Report and Recommendation. They were not all timely filed. However, Mr. Howard also filed an amended complaint in an effort to cure the deficiencies in his original complaint which led the Magistrate Judge to recommend dismissal. Under these circumstances, the Court will conduct its own review of the amended complaint to determine whether it can survive the initial screening mandated by 28 U.S.C. §1915(e)(2). For the following reasons, the Court finds that it is no more viable than the initial complaint, and the Court will therefore dismiss this action. Such dismissal renders all of Mr. Howard's other filings moot.
The Court begins by articulating the standard under which it conducts the initial screening which is statutorily required incases where the plaintiff seeks leave to proceed in forma pauperis.
28 U.S.C. §1915(e)(2) states that when the Court receives a complaint and an application to proceed in forma pauperis, " A complaint is frivolous if all of the claims made in the complaint lack an arguable or rational basis in either law or fact. Neitzke v. Williams, 490 U.S. 319, 325 (1989). A complaint must be dismissed for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted if the complaint does not plead "enough facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face." Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U. S. 544, 570 (2007). Further, the well-pleaded averments of the complaint (although not the conclusory ones) must be accepted as true for purposes of determining if a complaint would survive a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted, assuming such a motion were to be filed under Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6). See Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S.Ct. 1937 (2009). Finally, the Court keeps in mind the admonition that pro se complaints are to be construed liberally in favor of the pro se party. Haines v. Kerner, 404 U.S. 519 (1972).
As the Court will describe in greater detail below, this case was spawned by the Court's dismissal of one of Mr. Howard's prior cases, Case No. 2:07-cv-514. In this action, Mr. Howard seeks damages from the United States for what he asserts was the wrongful dismissal of the prior case. The Magistrate Judge began his analysis of Mr. Howard's complaint with this observation:
It should be apparent to even the most casual student of the American legal system that a dissatisfied litigant cannot, after having a case dismissed, turn around and sue the United States or thefederal judiciary for damages. There would be no end to that type of proceeding, and it would make a mockery of the orderly administration of justice, which depends on the finality of judgments rendered in prior proceedings, and which protects both the United States and individual judges from being sued by unhappy litigants (and there are many of them-usually at least one in each case) so long as the court system properly, or even arguably, has functioned like a court when it dealt with the case.
Report and Recommendation, Doc. #13, at 1-2. The Court agrees fully with this observation, and explains in this Opinion and Order why Mr. Howard's amended complaint represents a clever, but ineffectual, attempt to circumvent this fundamental principle.
Mr. Howard's prior case, Case No. 2:07-cv-514, captioned "Howard v. Supreme Court of Ohio et al., " was filed on June 4, 2007. The named defendants in that case included the Supreme Court of Ohio, the Franklin County, Ohio Court of Common Pleas, the Franklin County, Ohio Court of Appeals, the Industrial Commission of Ohio, the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation, and the private law firm of Eastman & Smith, Ltd. The case was dismissed on January 14, 2008. That dismissal was affirmed on appeal.
In his amended complaint, Mr. Howard "seeks compensation in the amount of $27,519,203.43 against the United States of America." In support of that claim, he asserts that "[o]n January 14, 2008, Judge Marbley negligently and wrongfully granted motions to dismiss Plaintiff's viable claims in lawsuit No. 02:07-cv-514 and otherwise acted with malice, bad faith, in a wanton or reckless manner against plaintiff because he was acting without the assistance of legal counsel." He claims that these actions allow him to recover damages under the Federal Tort Claims Act, 28 U.S.C. §§2671 et seq. The complaint also attempts to set forth claims for conspiracy, invasion ofprivacy, and the infliction of emotional distress, alleging that the Court has supplemental jurisdiction over these claims. Although the amended complaint makes no reference to claims which may be asserted directly under the United States Constitution in accordance with the decision in on Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Fed. Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), in some of Mr. Howard's other filings, he also advances this theory in support of his claim. The questions which are fairly presented by Mr. Howard's amended complaint and his other filings are whether there is any legal basis-either those specifically identified by Mr. Howard, or any others which the facts he has pleaded bring to mind-for a clam against either the United States, or against judicial employees of the United States, for money damages based on the alleged wrongful dismissal of a prior lawsuit.
The Court will begin with a brief explanation of the primary basis for Mr. Howard's claim, which is the Federal Tort Claims Act. The jurisdictional grant for that statute, found in 28 U.S.C. §1346(b)(1), reads in part as follows:
[T]he district courts, together with the United States District Court for the District of the Canal Zone and the District Court of the Virgin Islands, shall have exclusive jurisdiction of civil actions on claims against the United States, for money damages, accruing on and after January 1, 1945, for injury or loss of property, or personal injury or death caused by the negligent or wrongful act or omission of any employee of the Government while acting within the scope of his office or employment, under circumstances where the United States, if a private person, would be liable to the claimant in accordance with the law of the place where the act or omission occurred.
This same substantive standard for liability is repeated in 28 U.S.C. §2674, which states that "[t]he United States shall beliable, respecting the provisions of this title relating to tort claims, in the same manner and to the same extent as a private individual under like circumstances." As the Supreme Court noted in Dalehite v. United States, 346 U.S. 15, 24 (1953), one of the first decisions to explain in depth the background and purpose of this statute, the Act resulted from nearly thirty years of Congressional debate about the "feeling that the Government should assume the obligation for the malfeasance of employees in carrying out its work." However, the Court noted that "[t]he legislative history indicates that while Congress desired to waive the Government's immunity from actions for injuries to person and property occasioned by the tortious conduct of its agents acting within their scope of business, it was not contemplated that the Government should be subject to liability arising from acts of a governmental nature or function." Id. at 27-28.
The primary limitation on this waiver of sovereign immunity for torts committed by governmental employees is the statutory restriction of liability to situations where the employee, if acting as a private person, could be held liable under the law of the place where the act occurred. The Supreme Court has also made clear that the substantive law to which the FTCA refers is state law, stating that "we have consistently held that §1346(b)'s reference to the 'law of the place' means law of the State-the source of substantive liability under the FTCA." F.D.I.C. v. Meyer, 510 U.S. 471, 478 (1994). Thus, the beginning point of review of a claim asserted under the FTCA is usually (although not always, because of the various exceptions to liability found in 28 U.S.C. §2680) whether the actions attributed to the governmental employee involved in the case are actions for which a private person could be held liable under the laws of the state (here, Ohio) where the actions occurred.
An obvious conceptual issue presents itself at the outset. Some governmental employees-for example, those who drive vehicles, build buildings, or maintain premises like public buildings or parks-clearly have private counterparts, because private individuals and organizations engage in the same types of activities. However, there are no private judges (except perhaps for arbitrators) who would be the counterparts of federal judges. The absence of a private person who would act in a manner similar to the federal employee whose actions form the basis for the claim asserted under the FTCA is often fatal to such suits.
An example of this issue was addressed in Figueroa v. United States, __F.Supp. 2d __, 2010 WL 3704187 (E.D.N.Y. 2010). There, the plaintiff sought damages for the issuance of a passport based on a forged passport application. The recipient of the passport was a minor child who, as a result of the alleged negligence of the issuing...
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