Smith v. Commissioner of Mental Retardation

• Decision Date: 14 March 1991
• Citation: 567 N.E.2d 924,409 Mass. 545
• Parties: Anne Marie SMITH v. COMMISSIONER OF MENTAL RETARDATION et al. 1
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

Page 924

567 N.E.2d 924

409 Mass. 545

Anne Marie SMITH v. COMMISSIONER OF MENTAL RETARDATION et al. ¹

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts,

Hampden.

Argued Oct. 4, 1990.

Decided March 14, 1991.

Stephen R. Kaplan, Northampton, for plaintiff.

Richard M. Brunell, Asst. Atty. Gen., for defendants.

Before LIACOS, C.J., and WILKINS, ABRAMS, NOLAN and O'CONNOR, JJ.

O'CONNOR, Justice.

The Department of Mental Retardation (department) employed the plaintiff as supervisor of individual service planning and coordination at the Monson Developmental Center (Monson) under a provisional appointment. The defendant Fletcher, superintendent of Monson, demoted Smith to day care services specialist as a result of an investigative report that the plaintiff had lied to William Gauthier, the president of Parents and Friends of Monson Developmental Center, Inc., a support group for Monson and its residents, and to the Commissioner of Mental Retardation. The lie was said to be a claim by the plaintiff that confidential information had been "leaked" from the plaintiff's personnel file. Fletcher's reason for demoting the plaintiff, namely, her dishonesty, was recorded in the plaintiff's personnel file.

After considerable sparring between the plaintiff, assisted to a large extent by counsel, and the administration at Monson, the plaintiff brought this action. The plaintiff's complaint, as once amended, contained prayers for preliminary and permanent injunctive relief and damages. The defendants moved for summary judgment on the complaint as once amended. The plaintiff then filed a motion for leave to file a second amended complaint. That motion was never expressly allowed or denied. However, soon after the motion for leave to file a second amended complaint was filed, a judge of the Superior Court conducted a hearing that resulted in the ruling giving rise to this appeal, and the judge's memorandum of decision makes clear that he treated the second amended complaint as having been filed by leave of court and as being operative. So do we.

The second amended complaint consists of ten printed single-spaced pages of detailed factual and legal assertions, one page containing prayers for relief, and forty-five pages of attachments. The essential facts are those we have recited above together with the further fact that, although the plaintiff appeared before an investigator and offered her version of events in answer to questions put to her, she was denied the right, a right which she asserted, to a formal trial-type hearing as a precondition to demotion. A more extensive statement of facts may be found at 28 Mass.App.Ct. 628, 628-632, 554 N.E.2d 1215 (1990). The relief sought in the plaintiff's second amended complaint is as follows: preliminary and permanent injunctions "forbidding the defendants ... to take further steps to demote [the] plaintiff except upon notice and hearing, and reserving to her the right to confront and cross-examine all witnesses against her, and to summon witnesses in her defense, in proceedings held in conformity with 104 CMR 24," a judgment annulling the demotion, a declaration that all investigations are governed by 104 Code Mass. Regs. § 24.00 (1986), and that damages be assessed against the defendant Fletcher pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §§ 1983 and 1988 (1988) and G.L. c. 12, § 11I (1988 ed.).

The judge denied the plaintiff's request for preliminary injunctive relief and granted summary judgment to the defendants dismissing the complaint. The plaintiff appealed, and the Appeals Court reversed and ordered the entry of a judgment "declaring that the plaintiff shall be afforded a hearing before a hearing officer who is not in the chain of command at Monson and before whom the plaintiff may examine witnesses material to whether she made any deliberately false charges." 28 Mass.App.Ct. at 637-638, 554 N.E.2d 1215. We allowed the defendants' application for further appellate review, and we now affirm the judgment entered in the Superior Court.

We note that the defendants filed no affidavits and submitted no discovery materials to support their motion for summary judgment. Nevertheless, when a complaint sets out a detailed statement of the facts on which the plaintiff relies, as the plaintiff's second amended complaint does, and those facts do not support any claim entitling the plaintiff to relief, see Spence v. Boston Edison Co., 390 Mass. 604, 615, 459 N.E.2d 80 (1983); Fabrizio v. Quincy, 9 Mass.App.Ct. 733, 734, 404 N.E.2d 675 (1980); 5A C.A. Wright & A.R. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 1357 (1990), it is appropriate to allow a defendant's motion for summary judgment because, in those circumstances, there can be no genuine issue of material fact. Thus, the question before the judge was, and before us is, whether, assuming the facts to be as alleged in the complaint, the plaintiff is entitled to any of the relief that she seeks. We conclude that she is not so entitled.

The Superior Court judge concluded, and the Appeals Court agreed, that 104 Code Mass. Regs. § 24.00 does not apply to the plaintiff's controversy with the defendants. We need not repeat here the provisions of the regulation which are quoted and discussed at some length in the Appeals Court's opinion at 28 Mass.App.Ct. at 632-634, 554 N.E.2d 1215. We agree with the Appeals Court that "the purpose of 104 Code Mass. Regs. § 24.00, Department Investigations, is directed to the interests of clients and to those of employees arising out of caretaking activity with clients.... The Superior Court judge correctly decided that the plaintiff was not entitled to insist that the proceedings involving her be conducted under 104 Code Mass. Regs. § 24.00." Id. at 633-634, 554 N.E.2d 1215.

The plaintiff contended before the judge and the Appeals Court, and contends here as well, that she had property and liberty interests protected by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which entitled her to procedural due process in the form of a trial-type hearing before her demotion could be effective. The judge agreed with the plaintiff's contention that she had a property interest in her position as supervisor of individual service planning and coordination, and that therefore she was entitled to predemotion notice "and an opportunity to present reasons, either in person or in writing, why the proposed action should not be taken." However, the judge concluded, presumably on the basis of the facts alleged in the second amended complaint, that the plaintiff had been given the notice and hearing to which she was entitled. The judge did not discuss the plaintiff's asserted liberty interest, perhaps because, as we shall conclude, the thrust of the second amended complaint was not to secure a name-clearing hearing for the purpose of protecting the plaintiff's general employability but instead was only to obtain such a hearing as a means of preventing her demotion to a less desirable position at Monson.

The Appeals Court decided, correctly we think, that the plaintiff did not have a constitutionally protected property interest in her provisional position at Monson. Id. at 634, 554 N.E.2d 1215. "The Fourteenth Amendment's procedural protection of property is a safeguard of the security of interests that a person has already acquired in specific benefits.... To have a property interest in a benefit, a person clearly must have more than an abstract need or desire for it. He must have more than a unilateral expectation of it. He must, instead, have a legitimate claim of entitlement to it.... Property interests, of course, are not created by the Constitution. Rather, they are created and their dimensions are defined by existing rules or understandings that stem from an independent source such as state law--rules or understandings that secure certain benefits and that support claims of entitlement to those benefits." Regents of State Colleges v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564, 576-577, 92 S.Ct. 2701, 2708-2709, 33 L.Ed.2d 548 (1972). See Paul v. Davis, 424 U.S. 693, 710, 96 S.Ct. 1155, 1164, 47 L.Ed.2d 405 (1976); Perry v. Sindermann, 408 U.S. 593, 599-603, 92 S.Ct. 2694, 2698-2700, 33 L.Ed.2d 570 (1972).

The plaintiff's only argument in support of her claim that she had a constitutionally protected property interest in her employment is that she was "a Manager (M-1), entitled as a provisional state employee with nine months' seniority to a predeprivation informal hearing. G.L. c. 31, § 41 [1988 ed.]. From this it follows that she had a Fourteenth Amendment property interest in the job...." The argument has no merit. A State statute that "merely condition[s] an employee's removal on compliance with certain specified procedures," does not establish a constitutionally protected property interest in the position. Bishop v. Wood, 426 U.S. 341, 345 & n. 8, 96 S.Ct. 2074, 2078 & n. 8, 48 L.Ed.2d 684 (1976). General Laws c. 31, § 41, does not create such an interest. Rafferty v. Commissioner of Pub. Welfare, 20 Mass.App.Ct. 718, 723, 482 N.E.2d 841 (1985). Our conclusion that the plaintiff did not have a constitutionally protected property interest in her employment as supervisor of individual planning and coordination at Monson leads us to the result, reached by different reasoning by the Superior Court judge, that the plaintiff received all the notice and hearing to which she was entitled as a precondition to her demotion.

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