Jones-Louis v. Donahoe
| Decision Date | 03 September 2014 |
| Docket Number | No. 1:13-cv-00762-SEB-MJD,1:13-cv-00762-SEB-MJD |
| Parties | JACQUELYN S. JONES-LOUIS, Plaintiff, v. PATRICK R. DONAHOE, Defendant. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Southern District of Indiana |
This cause is before the Court on Defendant Patrick R. Donahoe's Motion to Dismiss for Lack of Jurisdiction [Docket No. 14], filed on September 30, 2013 pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(1). For the reasons set forth below, the motion is GRANTED.
Plaintiff Jacquelyn Jones-Louis, who is proceeding without the assistance of counsel, has not produced a clear account of the facts underlying her allegations. Cognizant of our responsibility to construe liberally the factual allegations of pro se plaintiffs, we attempt to give a fair reconstruction of the harm she claims to have suffered. See Wynn v. Southward, 251 F.3d 588, 592 (7th Cir. 2001); Hudson v. McHugh, 148 F.3d 859, 864 (7th Cir. 1998). Because of the extreme paucity of information contained in the Complaint, for these purposes we rely partly on the factual summary contained in the EEOC's notice of decision on Plaintiff's employment action before that body, which Plaintiff has attached here. See Pl.'s Ex. 2.
Plaintiff formerly worked as a mail processing clerk for a United States Postal Service ("USPS") facility in Indianapolis, Indiana.1 Pl.'s Ex. 2 at 1. In April 2007, she suffered a kneeinjury on the job. After an initial visit with a physician's assistant and with a doctor some days later, Plaintiff reports that she was seen by a knee surgeon in August 2007 and underwent a surgery on the knee in March 2008. Pl.'s Resp. 6. Plaintiff then suffered another on-the-job injury in October 2008. Id.2 After suffering these injuries, Plaintiff applied for and received—for a time—a "limited duty" work assignment. Pl.'s Ex. 2 at 1. She also applied for disability benefits from the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs (OWCP) for the period April to June 2007; this appears to have been the time when, in the aftermath of the initial injury, she was unable to work entirely.
In January 2009, Plaintiff received notice from OWCP that her disability application had been rejected; OWCP subsequently informed her in February 2009 that her limited duty assignment had expired, and that she would be required to return to her normal job. Id. Citing inadequate documentation of her injury by Plaintiff's treating doctor, USPS management asserted that it was unable to allow her to continue working on limited duty status. Plaintiff refused to return to her normal job duties, and she stopped reporting to work entirely after management sent her home in January 2010. Id. at 2. After she did not respond to requests to report for investigative interviews and provide further documentation of her injury, Plaintiff was terminated in May 2010 for failing to comply with leave-related "call in" procedures and failing to report to work for 70 consecutive days. Id; Pl.'s Ex. 1 at 1 ().
According to Plaintiff, she did not "call in" her absences from work because she understood such a notification to management to be necessary only for "non-job related accidentor illness"; since she regarded her knee injury as "work-related," she did not think the call-in requirement applied to her. Plaintiff also believes that the USPS terminated her for failing to appear at an "investigative interview" that was to have occurred as part of the inquiry into the justification for her prolonged absence from work. Pl.'s Ex. 1 at ¶ 4. She contends further that her termination occurred outside of the normal progressive discipline process, under which she should have received a "letter of warning" and "letter of intent" before her final dismissal. Id. at ¶ 2.3
Plaintiff filed an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint after her dismissal, alleging that the USPS harassed her on the bases of her African American race, her female sex, and her disability; she also alleged that her termination was a reprisal for having engaged in (unspecified) previous protected EEO activity. Pl.'s Ex. 2 at 2. She reported in this EEO complaint that "management refused to fill out paperwork and threw forms at her, placed her off the clock and ultimately removed her." Id. After initially submitting a request for a hearing before an EEOC Administrative Law Judge, Plaintiff withdrew the request; the USPS consequently issued a final decision reaffirming her dismissal pursuant to 29 C.F.R. § 1612.110(b). Id.
On August 31, 2010, Plaintiff filed an appeal from that final decision to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), alleging that her termination violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e et seq., and the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 791 et seq. After review, EEOC affirmed the USPS's decision on February 13, 2013. Pl.'s Ex. 2 at 2-3. As the Commission explained: "The record yields little insight into why Complainant did not tryto cooperate in an effort to save her job, but it also contains no evidence that her race, sex, disability or prior protected activity were factors in the management's actions." Id. at 3.
Plaintiff timely filed her Complaint in this Court on May 9, 2013.4 Docket No. 1.
Defendant seeks dismissal of this suit pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(1), on the grounds that the Court lacks jurisdiction. As we shall explain, however, Defendant raises—and we address—the possibility that Plaintiff may be attempting to advance other legal theories. To the extent that Defendant seeks dismissal of such theories on the basis of the complaint's insufficiency, we construe Defendant's motion as seeking dismissal for failure to state a claim under Rule 12(b)(6) as well.
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure command that courts dismiss any suit over which they lack subject matter jurisdiction—whether acting on the motion of a party or sua sponte. See Fed. R. Civ. Pro. 12(b)(1). In ruling on a motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(1), we "must accept the complaint's well-pleaded factual allegations as true and draw reasonable inferences from those allegations in the plaintiff's favor." Franzoni v. Hartmax Corp., 300 F.3d 767, 771 (7th Cir. 2002); Transit Express, Inc. v. Ettinger, 246 F.3d 1018, 1023 (7th Cir. 2001). We may, however, "properly look beyond the jurisdictional allegations of the complaint and view whatever evidence has been submitted on the issue to determine whether in fact subject matterjurisdiction exists." See Capitol Leasing Co. v. F.D.I.C., 999 F.2d 188, 191 (7th Cir. 1993); Estate of Eiteljorg ex rel. Eiteljorg v. Eiteljorg, 813 F. Supp. 2d 1069, 1074 (S.D. Ind. 2011).
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) authorizes dismissal of claims for "failure to state a claim upon which relief may be granted." Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6). In determining the sufficiency of a claim, the court considers all allegations in the complaint to be true and draws such reasonable inferences as required in the plaintiff's favor. Jacobs v. City of Chi., 215 F.3d 758, 765 (7th Cir. 2000). Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 8(a) applies, with several enumerated exceptions, to all civil claims, and it establishes a liberal pleading regime in which a plaintiff must provide only a "short and plain statement of the claim showing that [he] is entitled to relief," Fed. R. Civ. Pro. 8(a)(2); this reflects the modern policy judgment that claims should be "determined on their merits rather than through missteps in pleading." E.E.O.C. v. Concentra Health Servs., Inc., 496 F.3d 773, 779 (7th Cir. 2007) (citing 2 James W. Moore, et al., Moore's Federal Practice § 8.04 (3d ed. 2006)). A pleading satisfies the core requirement of fairness to the defendant so long as it provides "enough detail to give the defendant fair notice of what the claim is and the grounds upon which it rests." Tamayo v. Blagojevich, 526 F.3d 1074, 1083 (7th Cir. 2008).
In its decisions in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009), the United States Supreme Court introduced a more stringent formulation of the pleading requirements under Rule 8. In addition to providing fair notice to a defendant, the Court clarified that a complaint must "contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to 'state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.'" Iqbal, 556 U.S. at 678 (quoting Twombly, 550 U.S. at 570). Plausibility requires more than labels and conclusions, and a"formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action will not do." Killingsworth v. HSBC Bank Nevada, N.A., 507 F.3d 614, 618 (7th Cir. 2007) (quoting Twombly, 550 U.S. at 555). Instead, the factual allegations in the complaint "must be enough to raise a right to relief above the speculative level." Id. The plausibility of a complaint depends upon the context in which the allegations are situated, and turns on more than the pleadings' level of factual specificity; the same factually sparse pleading could be fantastic and unrealistic in one setting and entirely plausible in another. See In re Pressure Sensitive Labelstock Antitrust Litig., 566 F. Supp. 2d 363, 370 (M.D. Pa. 2008).
Although Twombly and Iqbal represent a new gloss on the standards governing the sufficiency of pleadings, they do not overturn the fundamental principle of liberality embodied in Rule 8. As this Court has noted, "notice pleading is still all that is required, and 'a plaintiff still must provide only enough detail to give the defendant fair notice of what the claim is and the grounds upon which it rests, and, through his allegations, show that it is plausible, rather than merely speculative, that he is entitled to relief.'" United States v. City of...
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