Mcclendon v. City of Albuquerque

Citation630 F.3d 1288
Decision Date12 January 2011
Docket NumberNo. 09–2095.,09–2095.
PartiesJimmy McCLENDON, a/k/a Billy McClendon; Harold Lund; Peter Sumatkaku; David Michael Bauer; Carl Ray Lopez; Bruce David Morawe; Thomas Young; Ruthie Duran; Deborah Lavera; Janelle Roybal; Danette Difiori; Maria Sisneros; Larry Green; Bartel Haley; Michael Cote; Joe Ray Herrera; Josie Kriena; Debbie Lucero; David Shawkin; Marc A. Gillette; George Chavez; Eliseo Baca; Clint Barras; Francisco Melendez; Samual Herrod; Vincent Padilla; Carl Duckworth; Joseph W. Anderson; Paul Johnson; Fred Mall; Hector Lopez; Ricky Rose; Herbert King, Sr.; James Parks; Michael A. Johnson; Johnny Vallejos; Joe Newberry; Darryl Craft; Albert Willy; William P. Jimmy; Augustine Tapia; Richard A. Smith; Robert Lovato; Roy Whatley; Marty Begay; Martin Valdivia; Tallie Thomas; Augustine Jackson; Donald Hall; Carl Sur; Steve Esquibel; Lonnie Whatley; James Saiz; Bryon Zamora; Allen M. Sawyer; Patrick Benny Romero; Richard C. Kopecky; Phillip Shumate; Nelson Romero; Steve Johnson; Bennie F. Garcia; Louie Chavez; Brian Salazar; Richard Gallegos; Larry Stroud; James Burks; Brad Fischer; Amihon Baca; Jeff Dillow; Pete McQueen; Manuel Martinez; Arnold Anthony Maestas; John Hewatt, Plaintiffs–Appellees,andE.M.; R.L.; W.A.; D.J.; P.S.; N.W., Plaintiff–Intervenors–Appellees,v.CITY OF ALBUQUERQUE; Martin Chavez, Mayor of Albuquerque; County of Bernalillo; Michael Sisneros, Director of Bernalillo County Detention Center, in his official capacity, Defendants,andBernalillo County Board of Commissioners; Ron Torres, Warden, Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center, Defendants–Appellants.
CourtUnited States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (10th Circuit)

OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE

Jeffrey L. Baker, The Baker Law Firm (Renni Zifferblatt, The Baker Law Firm, and Marcus J. Rael, Jr., Robles, Rael & Anaya, P.C., with him on the briefs), Albuquerque, NM, for DefendantsAppellants.Nancy L. Simmons, Law Offices of Nancy L. Simmons, P.C. (Zachary A. Ives and Molly Schmidt–Nowara, Freedman, Boyd, Hollander, Goldberg, Ives & Duncan P.A., and Peter Cubra and Lisa Y. Schatz–Vance, with her on the briefs), Albuquerque, NM, for PlaintiffsAppellees.Before LUCERO and GORSUCH, Circuit Judges, and ARGUELLO *, District Judge.GORSUCH, Circuit Judge.

This is the latest installment in a long running class action lawsuit about conditions inside Albuquerque's jails. In this iteration of the case, we must answer only a single question: Does an order withdrawing approval of a class action settlement agreement qualify as a “final decision” subject to appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1291? The answer is no. Like an order granting a new trial under Fed.R.Civ.P. 59, or an order granting relief from a judgment under Fed.R.Civ.P. 60(b), an order unraveling a class action settlement agreement is anything but a “final decision.” Such an order simply presses the reset button, vacates any prior final decision, and marks the case for renewed litigation. Without a final decision amenable to our review under § 1291, we must and do dismiss this appeal.

I

While the history of this dispute is long and complex, for purposes of this appeal a thumbnail sketch will do. In 1995, the plaintiffs sued the City of Albuquerque, Bernalillo County, and various individuals involved in operating the Bernalillo County Detention Center (BCDC). The plaintiffs sought to represent a class of “all prisoners who are presently, or will be confined in the” BCDC. Compl. ¶ 1. Soon, other members of the class intervened to form a sub-class seeking to represent “persons with mental and/or developmental disabilities who are now, or in the future will be, detained at” BCDC. Aplt.App. at 341. The plaintiffs alleged that the conditions at BCDC were constitutionally deficient due, in large part, to overcrowding.

Eventually, after the class and subclass sought and received certification, the parties negotiated a pair of settlement agreements—one for the class and another for the sub-class—which the court approved in 1997 and over which it retained continuing jurisdiction. The parties operated under these agreements until 2003 when the County built a new jail, the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), and transferred all the prisoners from BCDC to MDC. But this transfer only prompted a new dispute. The plaintiffs argued that the 1997 settlement agreements should, in effect, transfer with all of the County's prisoners to the new MDC and govern the defendants' conduct there. For their part, the County and the other defendants opposed extending the agreements to MDC. After much wrangling, the parties eventually reached a new pair of settlement agreements that superseded the 1997 deals. By their express terms, the new agreements governed conditions only at MDC. Pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. 23(e), the district court gave its approval to these new agreements in June 2005 and, as before, retained continuing jurisdiction over their implementation.

The 2005 agreements soon ran into trouble of their own. After moving all its prisoners from BCDC to MDC, the County signed an Inter–Governmental Agreement (“IGA”) with the federal government that allowed federal detainees to be housed at BCDC. Under the terms of the IGA, the County bore certain contractual responsibilities concerning the care and treatment of federal detainees. At the same time, however, the County wasn't required to operate BCDC but was allowed instead to contract out operational obligations to a private company, Cornell Corporation. According to the plaintiffs, however, the County misrepresented this arrangement to them by suggesting that Cornell alone bore contractual duties to the federal government. And it was only because of this alleged misrepresentation, the plaintiffs say, that they agreed to restrict the coverage of the 2005 settlement agreements to the MDC facility rather than to insist on a deal that continued to address the treatment of prisoners in the BCDC facility.

After the plaintiffs claimed they learned the true nature of the County's role in the IGA, they brought the issue to the district court's attention. Many motions and responses and arguments followed, all of which culminated in the district court's March 31, 2009 order finding that the County had misrepresented to the plaintiffs its IGA interactions with the federal government. Based on this finding, the district court withdrew its Rule 23(e) approval of the 2005 settlement agreements and gave the plaintiffs permission to rescind those agreements, which the plaintiffs proceeded to do. Shortly after issuing its decision, the district court judge found that she needed to recuse from the case and the matter was assigned to a new judge.

II

The defendants now seek to appeal the district court's March 31, 2009 order. In their appeal, the defendants raise a host of arguments for reversal, including a contention that the district court judge should have recused herself before issuing the March 31, 2009 order and so allowed another judge to consider the plaintiffs' complaint that they had been misled. But before the defendants can get to any of that, they bear the burden of establishing this court's authority to hear their appeal. This burden, the defendants say, they can carry for a variety of reasons: the March 31, 2009 order they seek to challenge came after a final judgment; the order is appealable under the collateral order doctrine; and the order implicates the jurisdictional authority of the district court. We address each of these theories in turn.

A

The courts of appeals are creations of Congress and the boundaries of their jurisdiction are staked by statute. When it comes to when federal appellate courts may take a case, Congress has said that we may usually hear appeals only from “final decisions of the district courts of the United States.” 28 U.S.C. § 1291. And a final decision does not normally occur “until there has been a decision by the District Court that ‘ends the litigation on the merits and leaves nothing for the court to do but execute the judgment.’ Van Cauwenberghe v. Biard, 486 U.S. 517, 521–22, 108 S.Ct. 1945, 100 L.Ed.2d 517 (1988) (quoting Catlin v. United States, 324 U.S. 229, 233, 65 S.Ct. 631, 89 L.Ed. 911 (1945)). A final decision is, put differently, one by which the district court “disassociates itself from a case.” Swint v. Chambers Cnty. Comm'n, 514 U.S. 35, 42, 115 S.Ct. 1203, 131 L.Ed.2d 60 (1995); Mohawk Indus., Inc. v. Carpenter, ––– U.S. ––––, 130 S.Ct. 599, 604–05, 175 L.Ed.2d 458 (2009).

Undergirding the final decision rule is Congress's implicit judgment that the district judge is best positioned to bear primary responsibility for policing the tactics and maneuvers of the litigants in ongoing litigation—and that the district judge can better exercise this responsibility if appellate courts do not regularly intervene and second-guess the district judge's rulings before he or she has reached a final decision on a particular matter. Better to wait until the district judge has made up his or her mind than to intervene when things remain in flux and the district court could still reverse course and provide the very relief a complaining party might seek to achieve in an appeal. See Richardson–Merrell, Inc. v. Koller, 472 U.S. 424, 436, 105 S.Ct. 2757, 86 L.Ed.2d 340 (1985); United States v. Wampler, 624 F.3d 1330, 1334–35 (10th Cir.2010).

The defendants say their appeal satisfies the final decision rule because the district court's 1997 order (and perhaps its 2005 order) approving the parties' settlement agreements were final judgments for purposes of Fed.R.Civ.P. 58. In the defendants' view, because an appealable final decision (or decisions) preceded the March 31, 2009 order, this makes the March 31, 2009 order a final decision, too. Put simply, in the defendants' estimation, any post-judgment order is automatically subject to appellate review.

This is mistaken. While the defendants are correct that a final judgment is the paradigmatic “final...

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