Mulero-Abreu v. Puerto Rico Police Dep't

• Decision Date: 29 March 2012
• Docket Number: No. 11–1501.,11–1501.
• Parties: Leyda MULERO–ABREU et al., Plaintiffs, Appellants, v. PUERTO RICO POLICE DEPARTMENT et al., Defendants, Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

675 F.3d 88

82 Fed.R.Serv.3d 239

95 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 44,456

Leyda MULERO–ABREU et al., Plaintiffs, Appellants,

v.PUERTO RICO POLICE DEPARTMENT et al., Defendants, Appellees.

No. 11–1501.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Heard March 5, 2012.Decided March 29, 2012.

Frank D. Inserni Milam, for appellants.

Susana I. Peñagaricano–Brown, Assistant Solicitor General, Puerto Rico Department of Justice, with whom Luis R. Román–Negrón, Solicitor General, and Jeanette Collazo Ortiz, Deputy Solicitor General, were on brief, for appellees.

Before LYNCH, Chief Judge, TORRUELLA and SELYA, Circuit Judges.

SELYA, Circuit Judge.

This appeal illustrates the folly of treating case-management orders as polite suggestions rather than firm directives. The tale follows.

After the district court ordered the plaintiffs to answer interrogatories and produce documents by a date certain, the plaintiffs—despite receiving several extensions of the due date and two warnings about the consequences of not meeting it—failed to comply. True to its word, the court dismissed the action as a sanction for noncompliance. It thereafter refused to reconsider. The plaintiffs appeal. We affirm.

I. BACKGROUND

The plaintiffs, appellants here, are Leyda Mulero–Abreu (Mulero), her husband Victor Reyes–Raspaldo, and their conjugal partnership. Invoking federal question and supplemental jurisdiction, see 28 U.S.C. §§ 1331, 1367, the plaintiffs brought suit in the federal district court against the Puerto Rico Police Department (the Department), sundry departmental employees, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

In their complaint, the plaintiffs alleged violations of their constitutional and statutory rights. Because this appeal turns on the procedural history of the case, we eschew any detailed inventory of either the plaintiffs' claims or the underlying facts. It suffices to say that the plaintiffs' complaint relates to Mulero's allegations of sexual harassment and emotional abuse arising out of her employment by the Department.

The district court issued an initial scheduling order, see Fed.R.Civ.P. 16(b), closing discovery as of November 18, 2010. When the defendants' lead trial attorney encountered a serious emergency, the district court, without objection, reset the close of discovery to January 28, 2011.

In November, the defendants served the plaintiffs with interrogatories and requests for production of documents. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 33, 34. Although sent that month both by facsimile and certified mail, the mailed copy was not received by the plaintiffs until December 20.¹

As the new discovery closure date approached, all of the parties sought to extend the deadline. These requests were driven primarily by the involvement of the plaintiffs' counsel in a criminal trial (a circumstance that made it difficult to take depositions during the month of January). The district court obliged, extending the discovery closure date to February 28, 2011.

On February 24, the plaintiffs moved to extend this deadline for an additional thirty days. They represented that their lawyer had been busy and had no free time to devote to their case. They attached to their motion a letter from defense counsel stating that the defendants did not object to the requested extension. The final paragraph of this letter caught the court's attention. It noted that the plaintiffs had yet to respond “to the interrogatories and request for production of documents that were sent ... several months ago” even though the response period prescribed by the Civil Rules had long since passed. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 33(b)(2), 34(b)(2)(A).

Alerted to a delay in the discovery process, the court entered a pointed order that pushed back the discovery closure date to March 25. However, the court embellished the extension with an aposematic warning:

Plaintiffs will provide the answers to all outstanding interrogatories and requests for production of documents no later than February 28, 2011. Plaintiffs are precluded from raising any objection to any question in any interrogatory or any request for production of documents.... [P]laintiffs' [failure] to answer the interrogatories and requests for production of documents by, February 28, 2011, will result in the dismissal of the suit, with prejudice.

February 28 came and went without any discernible progress on the discovery front. On March 1, the defendants filed an informative motion, apprising the district court that the plaintiffs had neither answered the interrogatories nor produced the documents. Two days later, the plaintiffs filed an opposition, which accused the defendants of discovery misconduct and represented that the interrogatory answers and requested documents would be supplied within the next ten days. The opposition indicated that the reason for the delay was Mulero's need to “rest for [a] few days” after her “excruciating” February 28 deposition.

The district court took the plaintiffs at their word and extended the deadline for compliance by ten days. Its order provided that:

Plaintiffs will answer any outstanding interrogatories and produce all documents requested no later than March 14, 2011. NO EXTENSIONS WILL BE ALLOWED. No objection to any interrogatory or request for production of documents will be allowed. Plaintiffs have waived any and all objections.

In addition, the court repeated its earlier admonition that noncompliance would lead to dismissal of the case.

This deadline, like the previous deadlines, passed without any sign of compliance by the plaintiffs. On March 16, the defendants filed a second informative motion, recounting that the interrogatories remained unanswered and that the documents had not been produced. The next day the court, exercising its authority under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 16(f)(1)(C), dismissed the action with prejudice. Mulero–Abreu v. P.R. Police Dep't, 272 F.R.D. 313, 315 (D.P.R.2011).

A week later, the plaintiffs moved for reconsideration. They attached to their motion some correspondence that their lawyer had sent to defense counsel, including two letters discussing the discovery materials. The first, sent in January, stated conclusorily that the interrogatory answers were contained in Mulero's deposition, thus rendering the interrogatories repetitive and onerous. The second, sent in February, reiterated that view and added that the requested documents were contained in more than 150 pages of materials already furnished as part of the plaintiffs' automatic disclosure obligations. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 26(a)(1). The answers to interrogatories and an index of the overdue documents were attached to this motion. The district court summarily denied the motion. A subsequent motion for reconsideration was likewise denied. This timely appeal followed.

II. ANALYSIS

Administering a bustling docket is hard work. In recognition of the difficulty of this task, “[t]he Civil Rules endow trial judges with formidable case-management authority.” Rosario–Diaz v. Gonzalez, 140 F.3d 312, 315 (1st Cir.1998). One source of this authority is Rule 16(f), which authorizes a district court to issue, sua sponte, “any just orders ... if a party or its attorney ... fails to obey a scheduling or other pretrial order.” Fed.R.Civ.P. 16(f)(1)(C). This provision incorporates by reference a menu of sanctions enumerated in Rule 37, including “dismissing the action ... in whole or in part.” Fed.R.Civ.P. 16(f)(1), 37(b)(2)(A)(v).

Of course, dismissal does not follow automatically from every failure to abide by a case-management order. When a party fails to obey such an order, the selection of an appropriate sanction is peculiarly within the province of the district court. In making this selection, a district judge “must work a complicated equation, balancing fairness to the parties with the need to manage crowded dockets.” Macaulay v. Anas, 321 F.3d 45, 51 (1st Cir.2003). Given the trial court's “intimate knowledge of the variables that enter into the equation, appellate review of sanctions orders is deferential.” Id. (citation omitted); see Jensen v. Frank, 912 F.2d 517, 524 (1st Cir.1990) (holding that a Rule 16(f) determination is reviewable for abuse of discretion). “[W]e focus our review particularly on whether a material factor deserving significant weight was ignored, whether an improper factor was relied upon, or whether when all proper and no improper factors were assessed the court made a serious mistake in weighing them.” United States v. One 1987 BMW 325, 985 F.2d 655, 657–58 (1st Cir.1993) (quoting Indep. Oil & Chem. Workers of Quincy, Inc. v. Procter & Gamble Mfg. Co., 864 F.2d 927, 929 (1st Cir.1988)) (alterations and internal quotation marks omitted). Absent an error of law—and we discern none here—the party challenging a sanction faces an uphill climb in persuading a reviewing court that the trial court abused its discretion. Id. at 657.

Against this backdrop, we take the measure of the plaintiffs' asseverational array. The common thread that runs throughout their claims is their strident criticism of the defendants' attorneys.

To begin, the plaintiffs point out that opposing counsel did not attach a certification of good-faith attempts at resolution to either of their informative motions. This is true as far as it goes—but it does not get the plaintiffs anywhere. Although both the Civil Rules and the district court's local rules require a party filing a motion to compel discovery to attach a certification that a good-faith effort has been made to resolve the discovery dispute without judicial intervention, see Fed.R.Civ.P. 37(a)(1); D.P.R. Civ. R. 26(b), the defendants did not file any motions to compel. Rather, the seminal filing was the plaintiffs' request for an extension, which contained a letter that prompted the court to act sua sponte. The defendants' subsequent filings simply notified the court that the plaintiffs had not met successive court-imposed deadlines. There is no...