Singletary v. Dist. of Columbia
| Decision Date | 17 July 2012 |
| Docket Number | Civil Action No. 09–0752 (ABJ). |
| Citation | 876 F.Supp.2d 106 |
| Parties | Charles SINGLETARY, Plaintiff, v. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, Defendant. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Columbia |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Stephen C. Leckar, Shanis & Peltzman, Neal Andrew Goldfarb, Butzel Long Tighe Patton, PLLC, Edward Charles Sussman, Steven Roy Kiersh, Washington, DC, for Plaintiff.
Dwayne C. Jefferson, Stephanie Litos, Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia, Washington, DC, for Defendant.
Plaintiff Charles Singletary brought this action against the District of Columbia under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, seeking money damages for what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit had already found was a violation of his constitutional rights by the D.C. Parole Board.
As is set out in more detail in the Court's opinion granting partial summary judgment, see Singletary v. District of Columbia, 800 F.Supp.2d 58, 59–61 (D.D.C.2011), [Dkt. # 41], plaintiff was released on parole in 1990, after serving more than seven years of a nine to twenty-seven year sentence for armed robbery. Id. at 60. Five years later, he was arrested as an alleged participant in a murder, but the charges were dropped at the preliminary hearing, and he was never indicted by a grand jury or tried. Id. Nonetheless, the District of Columbia Board of Parole revoked his parole, sending him back to prison for ten more years. Id.
No one with personal knowledge of the crime testified at the hearing. A police detective and a prosecutor relayed information provided by two individuals who reported that others involved in the murder had told them that Singletary was involved. Id. After plaintiff filed numerous habeas corpus petitions in both state and federal court, the Court of Appeals finally granted relief, holding that the Board's decision was based on such a “shoddy” record that it violated Singletary's constitutional right to due process. Id., citing Singletary v. Reilly, 452 F.3d 868, 869 (D.C.Cir.2006). The D.C. Circuit found that “the hearsay presented at the hearing was not demonstrated to be reliable,” and that “the Board's decision to revoke Singletary's parole was therefore ‘totally lacking in evidentiary support.’ ” Singletary v. Reilly, 452 F.3d at 873.
The court made it clear that it was not overturning the Board's decision just because it had been based on hearsay—hearsay is admissible in parole hearings. Rather, it held that “the government has not established that the hearsay deemed adequate by the Board was sufficient in ... reliability to ensure fundamental due process rights.” Id. at 874 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). The court ordered that a new hearing be convened,id. at 875, and by that time, the D.C. Board of Parole was no longer in existence. The U.S. Parole Commission held a hearing and found no parole violation, and plaintiff was released from prison in 2006. Singletary v. District of Columbia, 800 F.Supp.2d at 61. He filed the action before this Court for money damages on April 23, 2009, asserting one cause of action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. [Dkt. # 1].
The Court denied the District's motion to dismiss on February 18, 2010. 685 F.Supp.2d 81 (D.D.C.2010), [Dkt. # 17]. The District later moved for summary judgment, [Dkt. # 30], arguing that under the doctrine articulated in Monell v. Dep't of Soc. Serv. of the City of New York, 436 U.S. 658, 690, 98 S.Ct. 2018, 56 L.Ed.2d 611 (1978), the municipality could not be held liable for the Board's deprivation of plaintiff's constitutional rights. On August 1, 2011, the Court denied defendant's motion for summary judgment and granted summary judgment in favor of the plaintiff on the question of liability. [Dkt. # 40, # 41]. On October 7, 2011, the Court denied the District's motion for reconsideration. [Dkt. # 48, # 49]. With liability thus resolved, a jury trial was held on the question of damages only, and the jury returned a verdict of $2.3 million. [Dkt. # 73].1
Defendant has moved for a new trial, or in the alternative, for remittitur, arguing that certain errors in the conduct of the trial warrant a new trial, and that the jury verdict was excessive and not supported by the evidence. [Dkt. # 76]. While it is somewhat difficult to discern the precise grounds upon which the District is predicating its motion, it appears to be advancing the following contentions:
I. The $2.3 million verdict is excessive;
II. The Court erred when it excluded evidence that defendant sought to introduce for the purpose of persuading the jury that plaintiff had in fact committed the murder for which he was never indicted;
III. The Court erred when it excluded evidence concerning the facts underlying plaintiff's previous periods of incarceration;
IV. The Court erred in permitting plaintiff to introduce evidence concerning the conditions of his confinement, which consisted of his testimony describing what he experienced during that ten year period;
V. The Court erred when it indicated during voir dire and in preliminary instructions that plaintiff had been arrested as “an accomplice” to a murder; and
VI. The Court erred in excluding evidence of a driving infraction in Virginia.
Since the properly instructed jury's verdict does not shock the conscience, and since defendant has failed to identify a substantial error that would support the grant of a new trial under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 59(a)(1)(A), the motion will be denied.
The District contends that the Court should order a new trial or remit the verdictbecause the jury's award of $2.3 million dollars was too high. Def.'s Mem. in Supp. of the District of Columbia's Mot. for New Trial or Remittitur (“Def.'s Mem. New Trial”) [Dkt. # 76] at 28–32. But the District cannot support its claim that the verdict—arrived at after due deliberation by a jury of nine—was unreasonable, and there is nothing to suggest that the verdict was the product of prejudice or passion.
Here, the jury had the unenviable task of quantifying something that is not easily quantifiable: what is a year of liberty worth? The Court is reminded of the well-known lyrics from Rent:
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife;
In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure a year in the life?
Jonathan Larson, Seasons of Love, on Rent (Verve 1996). To answer this question, the jury was given a number of factors that it could fairly consider, see Jury Instructions, Ex. A, at 33–34, and plaintiff's closing argument was based on the facts admitted in evidence and not any improper appeal. Ultimately, the jury concluded that Singletary was entitled to recover $230,000 per year—or about forty-four cents per minute—for each year that he was stripped of the privileges of individual choice and physical freedom and subjected to the indignity of incarceration, and there is nothing about that calculation that needs to be reduced. This is not an astronomical sum.
Indeed, the only thing that did shock the conscience in this case was the fact that the District of Columbia chose to argue that because the plaintiff was a convicted felon who had previously served time in jail, he was entitled to no damages at all. Apparently, according to the District's lawyers, someone with Mr. Singletary's background has no humanity, no entitlement to liberty, and did not suffer any harm, either when he was incarcerated without due process of law, or when he remained wrongly incarcerated for the next ten years. The jury had the chance to award a verdict of only one dollar, but it did not, and it certainly had sufficient cause to reject this insulting entreaty.2
Moreover, a review of the case law indicates that the verdict was not excessive, particularly given the size of other verdicts in cases where the duration of the wrongful incarceration was much shorter. As plaintiff points out, the amount the jury awarded to plaintiff is lower than judgments in similar cases that have been found to be reasonable. Pl.'s Opp. to Def.'s Mot. for a New Trial [Dkt. # 79] at 29, citing Smith v. City of Oakland, 538 F.Supp.2d 1217, 1241–43 (N.D.Cal.2008) (); Sarsfield v. City of Marlborough, Civil Action No. 03–10319–RWZ, 2007 WL 210389, at *1 (D.Mass.2007) (); Pitt v. District of Columbia, 404 F.Supp.2d 351, 356 (D.D.C.2005), aff'd in part and rev'd in part on other grounds,491 F.3d 494 (D.C.Cir.2007) (). While these cases present different facts than this case, they are helpful in putting the jury verdict awarded to plaintiff in context. When compared to these cases, it is clear that the jury's verdict here was far from excessive.
The District also argues that a federal statute, 28 U.S.C. § 2513, supports a finding that the verdict in this case was excessive. That law provides that in an action brought under 28 U.S.C. § 1495, the amount of damages awarded shall not exceed $50,000 for each twelve month period of wrongful incarceration. 28 U.S.C. § 2513. Although the District correctly notes that plaintiff's lawsuit does not arise under these statutes, it claims that the law's formulation of damages should be instructive. But what the legislature has determined that the government would be willing to pay to resolve a wrongful incarceration claim does not impose any sort of ceiling on what a jury can fairly decide. Here, the jury—which heard all the evidence in the case and assessed the credibility of the witnesses, including the plaintiff—determined that an amount of money greater...
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