Peralta v. U.S. Attorney's Office

• Citation: 136 F.3d 169
• Decision Date: 24 February 1998
• Docket Number: No. 96-5068,96-5068
• Parties: Rolando PERALTA, Appellant, v. U.S. ATTORNEY'S OFFICE, Central District of California, Appellee.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (District of Columbia)

Page 169

136 F.3d 169

329 U.S.App.D.C. 26

Rolando PERALTA, Appellant, v. U.S. ATTORNEY'S OFFICE, Central District of California, Appellee.

No. 96-5068.

United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit.

Argued Jan. 12, 1998.

Decided Feb. 24, 1998.

Maja D. Hazell, student counsel, New York City, argued the cause as amicus curiae, with whom Steven H. Goldblatt, appointed by the court, Catherine E. Lhamon, Washington, DC, and Laura E. Mascheroni, student counsel, Washington, DC, were on the briefs.

Rolando Peralta, appearing pro se, was on the brief for appellant.

Cynthia A. Schnedar, Assistant United States Attorney, Washington, DC, argued the cause for appellee, with whom Mary Lou Leary, United States Attorney at the time the brief was filed, Washington, DC, and R. Craig Lawrence, Assistant United States Attorney, Washington, DC, were on the brief. Darya Geetter, Assistant United States Attorney, entered an appearance.

Before: SILBERMAN, WILLIAMS and SENTELLE, Circuit Judges.

Opinion for the court filed by Circuit Judge SENTELLE.

SENTELLE, Circuit Judge:

Seeking records relating to his criminal conviction, Rolando Peralta filed a pro se complaint under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552 ("FOIA"), and named a local United States Attorney's Office as the sole defendant. The Executive Office for United States Attorneys ("Executive Office"), the entity responsible for responding to FOIA requests directed to local United States Attorneys' Offices, participated in the case on behalf of the named defendant, releasing some documents to Peralta and referring the processing of others to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The district court ordered the Executive Office dismissed from the case, concluding that it had complied with its obligations under the FOIA. The district court also granted a motion for a stay that the defendant had filed on behalf of the FBI, granting the FBI additional time to process the documents the Executive Office had referred to it. The district court took these actions even though the Executive Office and the FBI were not named in the complaint as parties and had not been joined as parties to the case.

Peralta appealed from the district court's dismissal of the Executive Office. Peralta asserts that we have jurisdiction over the district court's order because it is "final" and appealable under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. The government, on the other hand, challenges our jurisdiction to hear this appeal. It urges us to treat the Department of Justice--not the local United States Attorney's Office sued by Peralta, the Executive Office or the FBI--as the sole defendant before the district court. Under this approach, the district court's order left loose ends relating to (would-be) sole defendant Department of Justice, which would mean that the order could not be "final" under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. This argument would have considerably greater force if the government had successfully moved below to substitute the Department of Justice as defendant. But it did not. Rejecting the government's attempt to rewrite the history of this case, we conclude that the district court's order was final because it dismissed the Executive Office--an entity all parties treated as if it stood in the shoes of the sole named defendant--from the case. Accordingly, we assert jurisdiction over the district court's order, vacate that order, and remand the case to the district court.

I. Background

In order to make sense of this case, we note preliminarily that the parties and the district court lost track of the identity of the "defendant" in this litigation. Rolando Peralta named one defendant in his FOIA complaint: the United States Attorney's Office for the Central District of California ("the Central District"). Before the district court, the government's filings occasionally referred to the Central District as the defendant, but they also referred to the Executive Office and the FBI as defendants, even though those entities were never formally added as parties to the case. In response to the government's motions, the district court dismissed the Executive Office from the case and stayed the case on behalf of the FBI. The district court took no formal action with respect to the Central District. To further complicate matters, the government argues on appeal that still another entity, the United States Department of Justice, was the sole defendant before the district court. We provide this abbreviated overview as a prelude to the following confusing tale.

Rolando Peralta, an inmate at the Federal Correctional Institution in Terminal Island, California, sought records relating to his criminal conviction pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. Peralta initially requested the documents by writing to Assistant United States Attorney Carol Gilliam ¹ of the Central District of California. When he received no response to his request within the statutory ten-day period, Peralta filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Central District, asserting that the Central District possessed the documents he wanted. See Complaint at p 4. Peralta's complaint further alleged that "Defendant, U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California, is an agency in the U.S. Department of Justice, a department within the Executive Branch of the United Stated [sic] Government." Id.

The "defendant" moved the district court to dismiss Peralta's case, claiming it had never received Peralta's FOIA request. Litigating that motion, the movant referred to itself as "Defendant" or "Defendant in the above-captioned case." The case caption in some of its filings identified the "defendant" as "U.S. Attorney's Office"; in other filings, the caption identified the "defendant" as "United States Attorney's Office, Central District of California." After that motion was briefed, the "defendant" discovered that AUSA Gilliam had received Peralta's request, but apparently did not understand its significance, and had subsequently lost it. In light of this development, the district court denied the motion to dismiss and granted the "defendant's" motion for a ninety-day stay to "permit the defendant to submit the relevant documents to the Executive Office of United States Attorneys for processing." The Executive Office is the entity responsible for fielding FOIA requests sent to individual U.S. Attorney's Offices throughout the country. See U.S. Attys. Man.1-9.130.

After the ninety-day stay had expired, the "defendant"--still calling itself simply the "[d]efendant in the above-captioned case"--informed the district court that it had furnished Peralta with 414 pages of responsive documents in their entirety and 28 pages in part, and that it had withheld 396 pages in their entirety pursuant to FOIA exemptions. It also noted that some 290 pages "were referred to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for review and direct response to plaintiff." Id. We shall refer to these documents as the "FBI Documents."

The "defendant" subsequently filed a motion captioned "The Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys' Motion to Dismiss or, in the Alternative, For Summary Judgment." The motion asked the district court to dismiss the Executive Office from the case on the ground that it had fully complied with its FOIA obligations. On the same date, the "defendant" filed another motion captioned "Defendant's Motion for a Stay on Behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation." That motion said that due to a backlog in processing FOIA requests, "plaintiff's request [for the FBI Documents] will not reach its turn in the queue until March, 2002." Accordingly, the movant requested the district court to enter a stay on behalf of the FBI to give the FBI time to process Peralta's request for the FBI Documents.

The district court granted both motions. Agreeing that the Executive Office had lived up to its FOIA obligations, the district court granted "defendant's motion for summary judgment" and dismissed the case "as to Defendant Executive Office of the U.S. Attorneys." In its Memorandum Order, the district court assumed that the Executive Office need not respond to Peralta's request for the FBI Documents, stating that "approximately 200 [sic] pages of documents ... [were] referred ... to the FBI for processing and direct response to plaintiff."

On the same day, and in a separate order, the district court granted the "defendant's" motion for a stay. In its order, the court said it was ruling on "the motion of defendant Federal Bureau of Investigation for a stay in this case until March 2002," and ordered the case to be stayed until February 1, 1998 (emphasis added). By doing so, the district court purported to elevate the FBI to the status of a party to the case, even though (1) the FBI was not named in the original case caption; (2) the FBI had never been served with a summons, complaint, or any other pleading; (3) Peralta never amended his complaint to add the FBI as a party; (4) the FBI had not been added as a party through joinder or intervention; (5) the FBI had never filed a pleading on its own behalf; (6) the district court docket did not show the FBI as a party to the case; and (7) Peralta, opposing the motion for a stay, had correctly reminded the district court that "there are no proceedings before the courts [sic] against the F.B.I."

Peralta filed a timely notice of appeal from the district court's order dismissing the Executive Office from the case. ²

II. Discussion

Our jurisdiction to review judgments of the district court is confined to "appeals from all final decisions," 28 U.S.C. § 1291, and to interlocutory appeals meeting the criteria stated in 28 U.S.C. § 1292. Put another way, we have no power to hear an appeal from the district court unless the district court's decision is "final" or one of the section 1292 exceptions applies. See Everett v. U.S. Airways Group, Inc., 132 F.3d 770, 772 (D.C.Cir.1998). A district court's decision is "fin...