Ritchie v. U.S.

• Decision Date: 26 June 2006
• Docket Number: No. 05-16401.,05-16401.
• Parties: Wayne RITCHIE, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. UNITED STATES of America; Robert V. Lashbrook, in his individual and official capacities; Ira Feldman, in his individual and official capacities, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

Page 1019

451 F.3d 1019

Wayne RITCHIE, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. UNITED STATES of America; Robert V. Lashbrook, in his individual and official capacities;

Ira Feldman, in his individual and official capacities, Defendants-Appellees.

No. 05-16401.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted May 18, 2006.

Filed June 26, 2006.

Sidney Bender, Leventritt Lewittes & Bender, New York, NY, for the plaintiff-appellant.

Owen P. Martikan, Assistant United States Attorney, San Francisco, CA, for the defendants-appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of California; Marilyn H. Patel, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-00-03940-MHP.

Before BETTY B. FLETCHER, ALEX KOZINSKI and RAYMOND C. FISHER, Circuit Judges.

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge.

We consider what inferences a district judge may draw, during a bench trial, in deciding a motion for judgment based on partial findings under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 52(c).

Facts

On December 20, 1957, Wayne Ritchie, then a Deputy United States Marshal, attended a lunch-time Christmas party at the United States Post Office Building¹ in San Francisco. Ritchie drank a bourbon and soda, and then returned to his desk. Later that afternoon, with the party now in full swing, Ritchie took a break to down three or four more bourbon and sodas. When he returned to his office, he began to feel paranoid and worthless.

Ritchie left work early and went home. There, an unpleasant conversation with his live-in girlfriend from New York, who complained about living in San Francisco, drove him to leave the apartment in favor of the Vagabond Bar. He drank two more bourbon and sodas; his feelings of restlessness and paranoia continued. After about half an hour, he left the bar and began walking back to his office. As he walked, Ritchie hatched a plan to rob a bar so he could buy his unhappy girlfriend a plane ticket home to New York. According to Ritchie, he fully expected to get caught; in his paranoid state, he figured that the robbery would be an act of self-destruction.

Ritchie retrieved two guns from his storage locker at work and set out to put his plan into action. He decided to target the Shady Grove Bar. Once there, Ritchie ordered another bourbon and soda. After finishing his drink, Ritchie went up to the bartender, pulled out a gun and demanded money. A waitress came up behind him and asked Ritchie what he was doing. When Ritchie turned around, someone knocked him unconscious.

Ritchie awoke with two officers standing over him. As a result of his attempted robbery, he resigned from the Marshal's Office, pled guilty to attempted armed robbery, paid a $500 fine and was sentenced to five years probation. Obviously, these were the days before sentencing guidelines.

Fast forward forty-two years. In 1999, Ritchie read the newspaper obituary of Sidney Gottlieb, a doctor at the Central Intelligence Agency. See Obituary, S. Gottlieb, directed mind-control tests, San Jose Mercury News, Mar. 11, 1999, at 7B. From this article, Ritchie learned that the CIA had been administering LSD to unwitting subjects in the 1950s as part of a Cold War project to study its effects.² See generally Kronisch v. United States, 150 F.3d 112, 116-19 (2d Cir.1998) (describing the CIA's drug-testing project). Based on this article, as well as his own independent research into the CIA's drugging activity, Ritchie concluded that the CIA had drugged him as part of a mind-control experiment. Ritchie brought a timely suit under the Federal Tort Claims Act ("FTCA"), 28 U.S.C. §§ 2671-2680, against the United States and its agents, claiming that his attempted robbery was set in motion when someone surreptitiously slipped LSD into his drinks at the 1957 Christmas party.

After denying the government's motion to dismiss, Ritchie v. United States, 210 F.Supp.2d 1120, 1131 (N.D.Cal.2002), and for summary judgment, the district court held a four-day bench trial. Ritchie presented two live witnesses during his case-in-chief: himself and a doctor who testified that LSD was the cause of Ritchie's attempted robbery of the Shady Grove. Ritchie also relied heavily on the deposition testimony of Ira "Ike" Feldman, a former agent involved with both the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the CIA's surreptitious LSD-doping project, who made a series of incriminating,³ contradictory⁴ and combative⁵ statements about his role in the CIA's LSD project.

At the close of Ritchie's case, the government moved for judgment as a matter of law, which the district court construed as a motion under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 52(c) for judgment based on partial findings in a bench trial. The district court granted the government's motion, finding that (1) Ritchie had not proven that he was administered LSD by an agent of the federal government, or by anyone else, on December 20, 1957; and (2) Ritchie had therefore failed to prove that an LSD-induced⁶ psychotic disorder caused his attempted robbery of the Shady Grove. The district court rejected Ritchie's arguments that he was entitled to a favorable evidentiary inference because the government destroyed files related to the CIA's drugging activity and that he should be granted preclusive sanctions based on government misconduct during Feldman's depositions. Instead, the district court awarded Ritchie "reasonable costs and attorneys' fees" incurred in taking Feldman's second deposition.

Jurisdiction

The government argues that we lack jurisdiction over Ritchie's appeal because the district court has yet to fix the amount of its monetary sanctions award and the judgment below is therefore not final. See Kennedy v. Applause, Inc., 90 F.3d 1477, 1483 (9th Cir.1996); Jensen Elec. Co. v. Moore, Caldwell, Rowland & Dodd, Inc., 873 F.2d 1327, 1329 (9th Cir. 1989). But Ritchie has expressly waived his right to monetary sanctions based on the government's misconduct during Feldman's depositions, leaving nothing for the district court to decide. We have jurisdiction. See 28 U.S.C. § 1291.

Discussion

1. Ritchie argues that in ruling on a motion for judgment based on partial findings, see Fed.R.Civ.P. 52(c), the district court must draw all reasonable inferences in favor of the non-moving party. According to Ritchie, the standard for entering judgment on partial findings during a bench trial under Rule 52(c) is the same as for entering judgment as a matter of law during a jury trial under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 50(a).

Rules 50(a) and 52(c), however, assign very different functions to the district judge. Rule 50(a) provides that once a party has been fully heard on an issue during a jury trial, the court may grant a motion for judgment as a matter of law against the non-moving party only if "there is no legally sufficient evidentiary basis for a reasonable jury to find for that party on that issue." Fed.R.Civ.P. 50(a). The rationale is obvious: During a jury trial, the jury — not the judge — is the trier of fact. Because the district judge lacks the authority to resolve disputed issues of fact under those circumstances, judgment as a matter of law is appropriate only if no reasonable jury could find for a party on that claim. This necessarily means that the court must draw all reasonable evidentiary inferences in favor of the non-moving party. See Matsushita Elec. Indus. Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574, 587, 106 S.Ct. 1348, 89 L.Ed.2d 538 (1986) ("[O]n summary judgment the inferences to be drawn from the underlying facts . . . must be viewed in the light most favorable to the party opposing the motion." (ellipsis in original) (quoting United States v. Diebold, Inc., 369 U.S. 654, 655, 82 S.Ct. 993, 8 L.Ed.2d 176 (1962)) (internal quotation marks omitted)). When the jury is the trier of fact, judgment as a matter of law is appropriate only if no reasonable jury could find in favor of the non-moving party. See id.

By contrast, a motion for judgment on partial findings under Rule 52(c) may be made only during a bench trial. Under Rule 52(c), "the court may enter judgment as a matter of law . . . with respect to a claim or defense that cannot under the controlling law be maintained or defeated without a favorable finding on that issue." Fed.R.Civ.P. 52(c). Rule 52(c) expressly authorizes the district judge to resolve disputed issues of fact. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 52(a) ("Findings of fact, whether based on oral or documentary evidence, shall not be set aside unless clearly erroneous."). In deciding whether to enter judgment on partial findings under Rule 52(c), the district court is not required to draw any inferences in favor of the non-moving party; rather, the district court may make findings in accordance with its own view of the evidence.⁷

Although Ritchie's behavior on December 20, 1957, may have been consistent with an LSD-induced psychotic episode, the district court reasonably found that "there are other plausible explanations for the symptoms that Ritchie described, including mild intoxication or some undiagnosed organic condition." The court concluded that it was "likely[ ] that Ritchie's behavior was caused by some organic factor, either alone or in combination with a modest degree of alcohol intoxication. It is also possible that Ritchie's apparent lapse of judgment was exactly what it appears to be." Although the court acknowledged that Ritchie's behavior may well have been consistent with an LSD-induced psychotic episode, the court noted that "[t]o take [this] inference . . . to its logical conclusion" would compel the court "to find that LSD intoxication is the likely cause of almost any unexplained and superficially inexplicable behavior." The district court's finding that Ritchie did not carry his burden of proof is supported by the record.

Although Feldman made a number of comments in his depositions suggesting that he was involved in drugging Ritchie, the district court's determination that Ritchie did not...