Rogers v. Okin

• Decision Date: 12 June 1987
• Docket Number: No. 86-1777,86-1777
• Citation: 821 F.2d 22
• Parties: Rubie ROGERS, et al., Plaintiffs, Appellees, v. Robert OKIN, et al., Defendants, Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 22

821 F.2d 22

Rubie ROGERS, et al., Plaintiffs, Appellees, v. Robert OKIN, et al., Defendants, Appellants.

No. 86-1777.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Argued April 7, 1987.

Decided June 12, 1987.

Suzanne E. Durrell, Asst. Atty. Gen., with whom Francis X. Bellotti, Atty. Gen., Boston, Mass., was on brief for defendants, appellants.

Marshall Simonds and Richard W. Cole with whom Stahlin and Bergstresser, Inc., Boston, Mass., was on brief for plaintiffs, appellees.

Before COFFIN, BOWNES and SELYA, Circuit Judges.

COFFIN, Circuit Judge.

This is the fee tail of a very long dachshund of civil rights litigation involving mental patients at a state hospital, which began in 1975 and in due course involved all three levels of federal courts as well as the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. ¹ The merits having at last been resolved the present issue is what fees and costs, if any at all, should be paid counsel for plaintiffs under the authority of 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1988.

The underlying lawsuit was brought by seven patients against the Massachusetts Commissioner of Mental Health, directors of separate mental health units of Boston State Hospital, and various psychiatrists and psychologists, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief against the forcible administration of anti-psychotic drugs to and the involuntary seclusion of both voluntarily and involuntarily committed mental patients in non-emergencies. Compensatory and punitive damages were also sought. A class was certified--all patients who have been or will be secluded or medicated without their consent at the two units of the hospital.

The stages of the litigation began with a temporary restraining order preventing then existing non-emergency seclusion and medication practices. It continued with settlement efforts, summary judgment motions, an interlocutory appeal, and a 74-day trial followed by a district court decision granting injunctive relief but denying damage claims. An appeal only from relief as to medication led to an appellate decision affirming in most respects the district court's decision. There was then a grant of certiorari by the Supreme Court followed by a remand to us and our eventual certification of some nine questions to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts concerning the applicability of a recent decision involving the right of a non-institutionalized mental patient to refuse anti-psychotic drugs. Subsequently that court provided a set of rules governing the administering of anti-psychotic drugs, a decision which we recognized created federally protected liberty interests and also provided adequate state law process making unnecessary the continuation of a federal court injunction. The district court's order dissolving the injunction was entered in June, 1984, some nine years after the filing of the complaint.

The present proceedings, relating to plaintiffs' request for attorney's fees and costs, have encompassed multiple depositions, interrogatories, one non-evidentiary hearing, a three-day trial, dozens of exhibits, and some 260 pages of proposed findings of fact. The district court made the following six findings: (1) plaintiffs were the "prevailing party" within the meaning of 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1988, their claims concerning forced medication and seclusion being "essentially vindicated" and the rejected damages claims sharing a common core of facts and related legal theories with the claims for injunctive relief; (2) the time spent by plaintiffs' attorneys in the trial, appellate, and fee phases was reasonable and involved no unnecessary duplication; (3) time records since mid-1977 were detailed and contemporaneous and, prior to this time, the reconstructed estimates of undocumented time were sufficiently reliable; (4) in the case of one of plaintiffs' attorneys, preclusion from other employment is a relevant factor; (5) the customary community hourly rate testimony of plaintiffs' expert, Barshak, was adopted and that of defendants' expert rejected, the court further accepting present legal rates as an "appropriate means to compensate counsel for the delay in fee payment"; and (6) other factors--the results obtained, skill of counsel, unattractiveness and contingent nature of the litigation--do not require an upward adjustment in the lodestar. The court accordingly made a total award of fees and costs in the amount of $1,467,242.43. 638 F.Supp. 934 (D.Mass.1986).

There are three issues that merit discussion: (I) whether the district court's finding that plaintiffs were "prevailing parties" is supportable under the teaching of Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424, 103 S.Ct. 1933, 76 L.Ed.2d 40 (1983); (II) whether the Commonwealth enjoys an Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity precluding adoption of current legal hourly rates to compensate for delay in payment of the fee award under the teaching of Library of Congress v. Shaw, --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 2957, 92 L.Ed.2d 950 (1986); (III) whether the district court's lodestar findings as to time spent and hourly rates are supportable.

I. Prevailing Parties

In assessing whether the district court exercised its discretion appropriately, we look first to Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424, 434-435, 103 S.Ct. 1933, 1939-40, 76 L.Ed.2d 40 (1983):

Many civil rights cases will present only a single claim. In other cases the plaintiff's claims for relief will involve a common core of facts or will be based on related legal theories. Much of counsel's time will be devoted generally to the litigation as a whole, making it difficult to divide the hours expended on a claim-by-claim basis. Such a lawsuit cannot be viewed as a series of discrete claims. Instead the district court should focus on the significance of the overall relief obtained by the plaintiff in relation to the hours reasonably expended on the litigation.

Particularly pertinent to this case are the following comments by the Court:

We agree with the District Court's rejection of "a mathematical approach comparing the total number of issues in the case with those actually prevailed upon." Such a ratio provides little aid in determining what is a reasonable fee in light of all the relevant factors. Nor is it necessarily significant that a prevailing plaintiff did not receive all the relief requested. For example, a plaintiff who failed to recover damages but obtained injunctive relief, or vice versa, may recover a fee award based on all hours reasonably expended if the relief obtained justified that expenditure of attorney time.

461 U.S. at 435-36 n. 11, 103 S.Ct. at 1940-41 n. 11 (citation omitted).

In this case plaintiffs' counsel coded all their time and deleted some 363 hours spent on damage issues wholly unrelated to claims for injunctive relief. Research of the law dealing with the good faith immunity defense to the federal damage claims was an example. Although defendants express amazement that out of more than 10,000 hours, so little a portion could so be spent, we have no basis for faulting the district court's finding in effect that most of the evidence relevant to damage claims was also necessary to justify injunctive relief. The district court's conclusion remarkably paralleled those of the district court that were upheld in Riverside v. Rivera, --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 2686, 91 L.Ed.2d 466 (1986). ²

That plaintiffs achieved success on the significant injunctive issues, medication and seclusion, "which achieve[d] some of the benefit the parties sought," Nadeau v. Helgemoe, 581 F.2d 275, 279 (1st Cir.1978), seems clear to us. Defendants have adopted the kind of "mathematical approach" criticized in the above-quoted footnote from Hensley by including their own twelve-page accounting of the extent of plaintiffs' success on all of the discernible issues. Defendants, for example, claim victory on no fewer than 224 federal and state damage issues. Their attack is reminiscent of the unsuccessful effort in Riverside v. Rivera, 106 S.Ct. at 2686, to overturn the award of the district court. In that case, as now Chief Justice Rehnquist noted in dissent, out of 256 separate claims against 32 defendants, plaintiffs finally won modest damages against only six defendants, claims for injunctive and declaratory relief having been dropped. Riverside, 106 S.Ct. at 2702 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting).

The Commonwealth further depreciates the results achieved by claiming that any real relief must be attributed to the Supreme Judicial Court's decision based on state law and a pre-existing state statute merely interpreted by the district court. Yet it concedes, as it must, not only that partial relief was achieved as to both the medication and seclusion claims for injunctive relief (Appellants' Brief at 25-26) but that there has been "an impact in the real world in terms of policies and practices regarding forcible medication of involuntary patients in state care facilities." (Id. at 33.)

We are not strangers to this case. For the Commonwealth to argue that the results of plaintiffs' lawsuit--their success in both the district court and before us, the significant rulings of the Supreme Judicial Court (which we have recognized as describing a federally protectible liberty interest), and the policy statements issued by the Department of Mental Health, with their impact on mental health facilities and Family and Probate Court procedures now in place in Massachusetts--do not qualify them as very substantially "prevailing parties" seems to us more the result of long entrenched partisan advocacy than of dispassionate analysis. The district court's ruling was well within its discretion.

II. Sovereign Immunity

The district court, very sensibly we think, adopted plaintiffs' expert's suggestion that in an attenuated case like this, where more than a decade of inflation has continually eroded the value of the dollar, current (1986) hourly rates should be awarded to compensate for the delay in payment of...