Stuart v. City of Scottsdale

• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Arizona
• Writing for the Court: James A. Teilborg Senior United States District Judge
• Decision Date: 03 August 2020
• Docket Number: No. CV-20-00755-PHX-JAT,CV-20-00755-PHX-JAT
• Citation: Stuart v. City of Scottsdale, No. CV-20-00755-PHX-JAT (D. Ariz. Aug 03, 2020)
• Parties: Mark E Stuart, et al., Plaintiffs, v. City of Scottsdale, et al., Defendants.

Mark E Stuart, et al., Plaintiffs, v. City of Scottsdale, et al., Defendants.

No. CV-20-00755-PHX-JAT

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF ARIZONA

August 3, 2020

ORDER

Pending before the Court is Defendants City of Scottsdale (the "City"), Mayor W.J. "Jim" Lane (the "Mayor"), City Councilmembers Guy Philips, Kathy Littlefied, Suzanne Klapp, Linda Milhaven, Virginia Korte, and Solange Whitehead (the "City Councilmembers"), City Attorneys Bruch Washburn¹ and Eric Anderson (the "City Attorneys"), and City Manager Caroline Jagger's (excluding the City, "Individual Defendants") Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs Mark E Stuart and Virginia G Stuart's ("Plaintiffs") Complaint. (Doc. 19). Plaintiffs have responded, (Doc. 24), and Defendants have replied, (Doc. 25). The Court now rules on the motion.²

I. BACKGROUND

This case arises out of Plaintiff Mark Stuart's litigiousness and the consequences thereof. Specifically, after bringing an action against the City and several of its officials in Maricopa County Superior Court, the superior court issued a judgment against him awarding the City and other defendants $3,908.28 in taxable costs and $26,207.08 as a litigation sanction against Stuart. (Doc. 19-1 at 5-6).³ Stuart, however, did not pay.

The City later sought to garnish funds from Mark Stuart to satisfy the unpaid judgment. Before the writs of garnishment issued, Mark Stuart informed Defendants that the marital community had not been a party to the underlying litigation and so defendants had no right to satisfy the superior court judgment using marital community assets (Doc. 1 at 29-30). In essence, Mark Stuart was maintaining that Defendants could never satisfy the judgment because it was valid only as against him, and he had no separate property.

Despite this, Defendants obtained the writs of garnishment resulting in, inter alia, a freeze of the Stuarts' Bank of America checking account and reducing the funds "to $250 from about $10,000" in one afternoon. (Doc. 1 at 5-6). As a result, Mark Stuart claims he had to declare bankruptcy and that Plaintiffs suffered a host of injuries, physical and otherwise. (Id. at 6-7).

In response, Plaintiffs filed a complaint in this Court bringing 11 "counts" for relief. Those counts are:

1. A 42 U.S.C. § 1983 claim against the Individual Defendants for retaliating against Plaintiffs in violation of the First Amendment.

2. A second § 1983 claim against the Individual Defendants for conspiring together to violate Plaintiffs' constitutional rights.

3. A third § 1983 claim against the City under the theory of Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978).

4. A claim against the Individual Defendants for damages for violating Plaintiffs'rights under Article 2, Section 6 of the Arizona State Constitution.

5. A state-law claim for wrongful garnishment against the Individual Defendants.

6. A state-law claim for abuse of process against only the City Attorneys.

7. A state-law intentional infliction of emotional distress ("IIED") claim against the Individual Defendants.

8. A "claim" for loss of enjoyment of life.

9. A claim for loss of consortium.

10.A defamation claim against only the City Attorneys.

11.A false light invasion of privacy claim against only the City Attorneys.⁴

(Doc. 1 at 8-23). The pending motion to dismiss under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure "Rules") 8, 12, 12(b)(1), and 12(b)(6) soon followed.

II. ANALYSIS

When a claim either lacks a cognizable legal theory or alleges insufficient facts under a cognizable legal theory, the Court must grant a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. Balistreri v. Pacifica Police Dep't, 901 F.2d 696, 699 (9th Cir. 1990). Only a complaint that satisfies Rule 8(a)(2)'s requirement of "a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief," will survive a Rule 12(b)(6) motion. Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 555 (2007). Although Rule 8 "does not require 'detailed factual allegations,'" it requires "more than an unadorned, the defendant-unlawfully-harmed-me accusation." Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009) (quoting Twombly, 550 U.S. at 555). In other words, the complaint must plead sufficient facts to "state a claim for relief that is plausible on its face." Id. (quoting Twombly, 550 U.S. at 570). A complaint shows facial plausibility when it pleads factual content that allows a court to draw reasonable inferences as to the defendant's liability. Id. But when "a complaint pleads facts that are 'merely consistent with' a defendant's liability, it 'stops short of the line between possibility and plausibility of 'entitlement to relief.'" Id. (quoting Twombly, 550 U.S. at 557). In sum, "the pleading must state 'enough fact[s] to raise a reasonable expectation that discovery will reveal evidence of [the misconduct alleged]." Cafasso v. Gen. Dynamics C4 Sys., Inc., 637 F.3d 1047, 1055 (9th Cir. 2011) (alterations in original) (quoting Twombly, 550 U.S. at 556).

In ruling on the motion, the Court must accept as true all well-pleaded factual allegations. Iqbal, 556 U.S. at 679. Pleadings that offer no more than legal conclusions, however, are not entitled that assumption. Id. Finally, in the event that the Court finds the motion to dismiss to be well taken, it should sua sponte grant leave to amend "unless it determines that the pleading could not possibly be cured by the allegation of other facts." Lacey v. Maricopa County, 693 F.3d 896, 926 (9th Cir. 2012) (en banc) (quoting Doe v. United States, 58 F.3d 494, 497 (9th Cir. 1995)).

A. Rule 8 and the Parties' Briefs

Defendants first ask the Court to dismiss the complaint in its entirety for failure to comply with Rule 8. After recounting over a page of generic legal rules, their argument does not extend beyond the following:

[A] basic review of the [c]omplaint reveals that [Plaintiffs] have simply leveled generic, conclusory allegations against a large group of Defendants. The only specific allegations in the [c]omplaint are that the City . . ., acting through the City Attorney's Office, sought a writ of garnishment to collect upon a valid State court judgment which Stuart refused to pay. These bare facts alone fail to state a cause of action.

(Doc. 19 at 5). The Court rejects this cursory argument.

Although the complaint is not a model of clarity, it is not "impossible" to answer, Stone v. Baum, 409 F. Supp. 2d 1164, 1173 (D. Ariz. 2005) (describing a complaint as "impossible" to answer where it liberally used "the Defendants" across "64 pages and 265 predicate acts alleged . . . to support its 9 counts"), nor is it too bereft of factual allegations to state any claims at all, Rizzo v. Goode, 423 U.S. 362, 371-72, 377 (1976) (explaining that a plaintiff must allege that he suffered a specific injury as a result of the conduct of a particular defendant and he must allege an affirmative link between the injury and the conduct of that defendant). It alleges that the City Attorneys, with the knowledge and approval (and, indeed, pursuant to an official policy and practice) of the Mayor and City Councilmembers, attempted to collect on a valid judgment by garnishing money from a bank account that apparently contained only community assets. In Plaintiffs' view, because the judgment did not name Virginia Stuart, it was only valid against Mark Stuart in his separate capacity and, thus, Defendants' garnishment of community funds that they were not entitled to amounted to retaliation for Mark Stuart's prior litigation efforts. Thus, it is not impossible to tell which Defendant did what and how those actions injured Plaintiffs.

Defendants' argument is itself conclusory. Defendants do not identify which allegations are so confusing and prolix that they cannot respond to whatever those allegations might be. Except for other arguments discussed later, neither do they identify what facts were missing under each claim that would have resulted in it being sufficiently pleaded. In the end, Defendants' Rule 8 argument simply and improperly seeks to dismiss the complaint essentially based on an argument that it could be clearer.

Although the Court rejects this argument, the Court notes that the briefing on the issues raised by both parties has been somewhat sparing. This has had consequences for the Court's resolution of the pending motion. For example, while Defendants mention that the defenses of absolute and qualified immunity entitle the Individual Defendants to "dismissal from this lawsuit," (e.g., Doc. 19 at 7), they did not raise any argument or cite any authority addressing whether they would enjoy immunity from Plaintiffs' state-law claims. Because federal qualified immunity is not available for state-law claims, Johnsonv. Bay Area Rapid Transit Dist., 724 F.3d 1159, 1171 (9th Cir. 2013), the Court has assumed that Defendants' immunity arguments address only Plaintiffs' § 1983 claims.

Most significantly, however, the parties' briefing has left unaddressed the issue that lies at the foundation of this lawsuit—the question whether the funds of Plaintiffs' marital community could be garnished to collect on a judgment that names only Mark Stuart. Somehow, that issue did not receive any attention until the reply. The Court does not address arguments made for the first time in reply. Surowiec v. Capital Title Agency, Inc., 790 F. Supp. 2d 997, 1002 (D. Ariz. 2011). Moreover, while Defendants begin by describing Plaintiffs' complaint as a "ruse," they later concede that there may be "a good faith legal debate over whether or not the judgment could be collected from the marital community." (Doc. 25 at 3). The propriety of the garnishment would seem quite critical to resolving several of the issues in this case. For example, lawfully collecting a valid litigation sanction obviously does not make for a First Amendment retaliation claim. But if Defendants garnished funds they knew they had no right to, that conclusion is less certain. Thus, for purposes...