Sledd v. Linsday

• Decision Date: 11 December 1996
• Docket Number: No. 95-2360,95-2360
• Citation: 102 F.3d 282
• Parties: Andrew SLEDD, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Guy LINSDAY, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 282

102 F.3d 282

Andrew SLEDD, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Guy LINSDAY, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 95-2360.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued April 15, 1996.

Decided Dec. 11, 1996.

G. Flint Taylor (argued), Jeffrey H. Haas, Erica Thompson, People's Law Office, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

Lawrence Rosenthal, Timothy Joranko (argued), Benna R. Solomon, Susan S. Sher, Office of the Corporation Counsel, Appeals Division, Chicago, IL, for Defendants-Appellees.

Before COFFEY, RIPPLE, and DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judges.

DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge.

Late in the evening of March 31, 1989, several Chicago police officers used a battering ram to break into the home of Andrew Sledd, in the course of executing a search warrant they had obtained the day before. In the ensuing melee, one of the officers shot Sledd. Two years later (on March 29, 1991), Sledd brought this action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against the officers and the City of Chicago, claiming that the police defendants had used excessive and unjustifiable force against him, falsely arrested and imprisoned him, and maliciously prosecuted him, and that they had acted pursuant to unconstitutional policies and customs of the City of Chicago. The district court granted the motion for summary judgment filed by the individual defendants on the basis of qualified immunity from suit, dismissed the action against the City under Rule 12(b)(6), and dismissed the remainder of Sledd's claims with prejudice. We conclude that the district court should not have dismissed the claims against the City at such an early stage and that it overlooked genuine issues of material fact that require a trial on Sledd's claims against the officers.

I

Andrew Sledd was, at the time of the incident, 23 years old, a 5 feet 9 inches African-American man with a light complexion. He lived in a townhouse at 1408 E. 55th Street in Chicago, along with his parents, Yvonne and Jesse Greene, and his younger brother, Jesse Jr., who was then six years old. He was attending St. Xavier College on a basketball scholarship. Officers Guy Lindsay, Elroy Baker, Ernest Brown, and Herman Cross, all of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), were the individual defendants. What happened on the evening of March 31, 1989, is the subject of dispute between the parties, but even more importantly, they dispute which facts are even properly before this court on our review of the district court's decision to grant summary judgment. Before turning to the relevant background facts, we therefore begin with the proceedings that led up to the decision on summary judgment.

As required by Northern District of Illinois Local Rule 12(M), the individual defendants filed their "Local Rule 12(m) Statement of Undisputed Facts," which set forth their account of the evening's events with pertinent citations to the record. Sledd responded by filing both his "Plaintiff's Answer to Defendants' 12(m)," as required by Rule 12(N)(3)(a), and his "Plaintiff's Rule 12(n) Statement of Facts," as required by Rule 12(N)(3)(b). As permitted by the final paragraph of Rule 12(M), the defendants then filed their Rule 12(M) Reply, which they later presented as a Consolidated Rule 12(M) statement. The district court acknowledged that all these materials were before it, but it found Sledd's Rule 12(N)(3)(a) denials defective in that "the referenced materials do not support the denials and disagreements." Sledd v. Lindsay, 864 F.Supp. 819, 826 (N.D.Ill.1994). It criticized Sledd for "inundating the court with superfluous and extraneous facts and references to immaterial records." Consequently, the court decided to "accept[ ] defendant officers' 12(M) statement of facts, which Sledd either admits or insufficiently denies, as admitted, and consider only those facts that are both material and properly alleged in Sledd's 12(N)(3)(b) statement as additional facts requiring a denial of the motion."

In his opening brief in this court, Sledd did not specifically discuss the way in which the district court handled the Rule 12(M) and (N) filings; instead, he argued directly that there are disputed issues of material fact that require reversal of the summary judgment in favor of the individual defendants. The City responded with the argument that a district court's decisions with respect to Local Rule 12 are entitled to considerable deference by this court, and that Sledd, by failing to address this point in his initial brief, was required to argue the case solely on the basis of the facts accepted by the district court. Sledd replied that the district court neither struck his Rule 12 submissions nor did it adopt the City's version wholesale; to the contrary, it plainly considered at least some of his evidence but found it unpersuasive. Thus, he asserts, he forfeited nothing by arguing in his opening brief that the materials filed in opposition to the defendants' motion raised genuine issues of fact, without mentioning the Rule 12 exchanges in particular.

The City is correct that this court has frequently noted that we give the district judge's interpretation of the local rules considerable weight. See, e.g., Midwest Imports, Ltd. v. Coval, 71 F.3d 1311, 1316 (7th Cir.1995); Waldridge v. American Hoechst Corp., 24 F.3d 918, 923 n. 4 (7th Cir.1994); Bell, Boyd & Lloyd v. Tapy, 896 F.2d 1101, 1103 (7th Cir.1990). Local Rule 12 and its counterparts elsewhere are of considerable help to busy district judges who must determine which cases present genuine issues requiring a trial and which do not. Furthermore, the City is correct to note that arguments for reversal cannot be withheld until a reply brief, because the appellee then has no chance to respond to them. See, e.g., Arch of Illinois v. District 12, UMW of America, 85 F.3d 1289, 1294 (7th Cir.1996); Maher v. Harris Trust & Sav. Bank, 75 F.3d 1182, 1191 (7th Cir.1996); Wilson v. O'Leary, 895 F.2d 378, 384 (7th Cir.1990), citing 7th Cir.R. 28(f). Nevertheless, we agree here with Sledd that the application of those clear principles to his case does not require us to disregard the materials he submitted. The district judge's comment was simply that he did not find most of the materials referenced in Sledd's Rule 12(N) submissions to be responsive to the City's filing on behalf of the police officers. This was just another way of saying that he thought Sledd's submissions had not succeeded in raising a genuine issue of fact; as Sledd noted, the judge did not reject the Rule 12(N) filing for procedural insufficiency. The fact that the judge took into consideration those parts of the Rule 12(N) filing that he found to be useful indicates that he was simply evaluating the response on the merits.

This case is therefore distinguishable from the many cases cited by the City in which parties simply did not file responses or statements in the form required by the local rule. See Flaherty v. Gas Research Inst., 31 F.3d 451, 453 (7th Cir.1994) (statement included no pertinent affidavits or portions of transcript); Waldridge, 24 F.3d at 923-24 (statement failed to identify factual issues or cite to record); Maksym v. Loesch, 937 F.2d 1237, 1240-41 (7th Cir.1991); Appley v. West, 929 F.2d 1176, 1179-80 (7th Cir.1991) (per curiam) (no statement); Bell, Boyd, 896 F.2d at 1102-03 (statement included no references to supporting materials). Sledd was entitled to argue in his opening brief that the materials in the record showed that summary judgment was wrong; the City in turn had every right to respond that the record included less than Sledd thought it did, but this is a defensive point, not an opening gambit. We note that it is unclear in any event which parts of the Rule 12(N) statements the district court chose to credit and which it disregarded. No matter; on this review from the summary judgment for defendants, we both can and must make an independent review of the record, as reflected in the Rule 12(M) and 12(N) filings, to see if the decision was correct. See Wolf v. Buss (America) Inc., 77 F.3d 914, 922 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 519 U.S. ----, 117 S.Ct. 175, 136 L.Ed.2d 116 (1996); Midwest Imports, 71 F.3d at 1313; Highlands Ins. Co. v. Lewis Rail Serv. Co., 10 F.3d 1247, 1249 (7th Cir.1993).

As we did in Bell, Boyd, we have reviewed Sledd's responses under Rule 12(N)(3)(a) and (b) independently, to see if he indeed made appropriate references to the record in his responses to the Rule 12(M) statement. In our view, he did. The key factual disputes that he wished to raise are apparent when one looks at all the materials taken together. Our review here therefore proceeds on the usual ground for an appeal from summary judgment: we review the district court's decision de novo, taking the facts in the light most favorable to the non-moving party.

II

From that point of view, the events of March 31, 1989, unfolded as follows. The day before, Officer Brown had obtained a search warrant for the premises at 1408 E. 55th Street and a male African-American known as Jessie Greene, approximately 22 years old, six feet tall, of a slender build and dark complexion. The house at that address had either light curtains or open windows, through which persons on the street could observe activity within the house. The parties dispute whether 55th Street was busy or quiet on the night in question, but according to Sledd, "on March 31, 1989, prior to the incident, the street was empty and quiet." (The police officers asserted (not quite responsively) that it was "a well-trafficked street which might muffle the sound of voices.")

Around 10:30 p.m., seven members of the CPD, including the four defendants here, began their execution of the search warrant. It is undisputed that none of the officers was in full uniform. Furthermore, according to Sledd, none was wearing any visible insignia that would have led a person to believe that they were police officers and not intruders. (The officers assert...