Van Harken v. City of Chicago

• Decision Date: 06 January 1997
• Docket Number: No. 95-3997,95-3997
• Citation: 103 F.3d 1346
• Parties: Ada VAN HARKEN, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CITY OF CHICAGO, Defendant-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 1346

103 F.3d 1346

65 USLW 2450

Ada VAN HARKEN, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CITY OF CHICAGO, Defendant-Appellee.

No. 95-3997.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued Oct. 28, 1996.

Decided Jan. 6, 1997.

Dana A. Alden (argued), Alden & Associates, Oak Brook, IL, for plaintiffs-appellants.

Lawrence Rosenthal, Thomas Bamonte (argued), Susan S. Sher, Office of Corp. Counsel, Appeals Division, Chicago, IL, for defendant-appellee.

Before POSNER, Chief Judge, and EASTERBROOK and RIPPLE, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Chief Judge.

In 1990 the City of Chicago adopted a new system for the adjudication of parking violations. Chi. Munic. Code ch. 9-100. That system is challenged in this class action on behalf of persons who, either having been adjudged liable for a parking violation in contested proceedings under the new procedures and paid their fines or having received a parking ticket and still having time to contest it, claim that the new procedures violate the due process clauses of the United States and Illinois constitutions. The district judge dismissed the suit for failure to state a claim under either constitution. 906 F.Supp. 1182 (N.D.Ill.1995). The City argues that we cannot even reach the merits of the appeal because the suit is a collateral attack on the judgments in the plaintiffs' parking cases, and thus violates the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, on which see, e.g., Young v. Murphy, 90 F.3d 1225, 1230 (7th Cir.1996). The argument depends upon the undefended assumption that the doctrine applies to administrative as well as judicial decisions. All the circuits to have considered the assumption in a published opinion have rejected it, Narey v. Dean, 32 F.3d 1521, 1525-26 (11th Cir.1994); Scott v. Flowers, 910 F.2d 201, 208 (5th Cir.1990); Ivy Club v. Edwards, 943 F.2d 270, 284 (3d Cir.1991), and we are not disposed to create an intercircuit conflict on the question.

The basis of the Rooker-Feldman doctrine (see Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co., 263 U.S. 413, 416, 44 S.Ct. 149, 150, 68 L.Ed. 362 (1923); District of Columbia Court of Appeals v. Feldman, 460 U.S. 462, 476, 103 S.Ct. 1303, 1311-12, 75 L.Ed.2d 206 (1983)) is that only the U.S. Supreme Court has been authorized by Congress to review decisions by state courts. 28 U.S.C. § 1257. The only decisions reviewable under this statute are final decisions "by the highest court of a State in which a decision could be had," 28 U.S.C. § 1257(a), but of course it does not follow that decisions by a lower state court are reviewable in federal courts. No statute authorizes such review, and it would be grotesque to allow a disappointed state court litigant to pursue his appeal in federal rather than state court. Worldwide Church of God v. McNair, 805 F.2d 888, 893 n. 3 (9th Cir.1986); Texaco Inc. v. Pennzoil Co., 784 F.2d 1133, 1142-43 (2d Cir.1986), rev'd on other grounds, 481 U.S. 1, 107 S.Ct. 1519, 95 L.Ed.2d 1 (1987); Hale v. Harney, 786 F.2d 688, 691 (5th Cir.1986). It might appear by parity of reasoning that a party to a state administrative proceeding is not authorized to bypass the appellate remedy that the state has provided in its own courts by filing an action in federal district court instead. Countless cases, however, allow people who lose in state administrative proceedings to seek relief in federal district court under civil rights legislation such as 42 U.S.C. § 1983; and Patsy v. Board of Regents, 457 U.S. 496, 102 S.Ct. 2557, 73 L.Ed.2d 172 (1982), expressly rejected a requirement of exhausting administrative remedies before suing under that section. We cannot believe that these cases were decided as they were simply because the defendants failed to argue Rooker-Feldman. If the Rooker-Feldman doctrine is to be extended to administrative judgments, it will have to be done by the Court that created it.

The City's Rooker-Feldman argument fails on a second ground as well, though here we must be careful to distinguish between the different kinds of relief sought by the suit. Centifanti v. Nix, 865 F.2d 1422, 1429 (3d Cir.1989). Insofar as the plaintiffs merely seek a declaration that the procedures under which the parking charges against them were, or in the case of those members of the class whose cases have not yet been heard will be, adjudicated are constitutionally inadequate, they are not barred by Rooker-Feldman because they are not challenging the judgment in any parking case. Buckley v. Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board, 997 F.2d 224, 227 (7th Cir.1993); see also Nesses v. Shepard, 68 F.3d 1003, 1005 (7th Cir.1995); Dubinka v. Judges of Superior Court, 23 F.3d 218, 222 (9th Cir.1994); Centifanti v. Nix, supra, 865 F.2d at 1429. But insofar as they are seeking refunds of the parking fines imposed upon them, they are barred. The Feldman decision illustrates the distinction. It allowed the plaintiffs in that case to challenge the constitutionality of the rule under which they had been denied admission to the bar, 460 U.S. at 487-88, 103 S.Ct. at 1317-18, while refusing to allow them to challenge the denial itself. If they prevailed on their challenge to the rule, they might or might not be able to get a new hearing on the denial of their applications for admission, and to that extent the Rooker-Feldman doctrine does not prevent a form of collateral attack upon--or, better perhaps, an oblique swipe at--a state court judgment by a suit brought in a federal district court. Our case is the same so far as the declaratory relief sought by the plaintiffs is concerned, and no more is necessary to support jurisdiction.

We come then to the merits. In Illinois before 1987 and in a majority of the states to this day, parking violations were and are technically criminal violations even when the maximum punishment is a modest fine; and the violator was and in the other states is entitled to the usual safeguards of the criminal process. A number of states, however, have decriminalized parking violations and substituted a civil penalty system. See, e.g., Gardner v. City of Columbus, 841 F.2d 1272, 1274 (6th Cir.1988); 1992 Cal.Adv.Legis.Serv. see ch. 1244, § 1 (Deering). (Gardner upheld Ohio's system against a challenge similar to that mounted by the plaintiffs in the present case.) Illinois joined these states in 1987 by authorizing its municipalities to adopt such systems if they wanted. 625 ILCS p 5/11-208.3. Chicago took up the invitation, as we said, in 1990. Under the system, the parking ticket the police officer writes is prima facie evidence of a violation. The owner of the car can either pay the fine written on the ticket (which cannot exceed $100) or challenge the ticket either in writing or in person. These challenges are adjudicated not by regular judges or other employees of the City or State but by private lawyers whom the City hires as part-time hearing officers. The police officer who wrote the ticket is not expected to participate in the hearing, other than through the ticket itself, which is treated as the equivalent of an affidavit. Ordinarily, the only live participant in the hearing besides the hearing officer will be the respondent, that is, the recipient of the ticket. A manual that the City has issued to its hearing officers directs them to conduct a searching cross-examination of the respondent. The hearing officer can subpoena witnesses (including, of course, the police officer who wrote the ticket), and can consider any documentary evidence (photographs, for example) submitted by the respondent. The hearing is tape recorded. If the hearing officer finds a violation and imposes a fine, the respondent can seek judicial review in the Circuit Court of Cook County upon the payment of the normal fee for filing a case in that court, which is $200.

The plaintiffs make two main arguments for why the City's new system for the adjudication of parking violations denies due process. The first is that because such violations have traditionally been treated as criminal offenses, though of the lowest order--below misdemeanors--the state may not reclassify them as civil, and reduce the procedural safeguards required in criminal proceedings, unless it reduces the sanction. Before the new ordinance, the appellants tell us, the maximum fine for a parking violation was $100 and was a criminal punishment; under the new ordinance, the maximum fine is still $100, so it must be a criminal punishment still, and the violator must therefore be entitled to the full panoply of procedural safeguards. Both steps in this argument are wrong. The first also rests on an erroneous factual premise. The maximum fine before the new ordinance was not $100 but $200, People ex rel. Daley v. Datacom Systems Corp., 146 Ill.2d 1, 165 Ill.Dec. 655, 585 N.E.2d 51, 67-68 (1991), although apparently no fine above $100 was imposed. General Order No. 7 of Circuit Court of Cook County, reprinted in Sullivan's Law Directory 687c (1995). That is a detail. The important point is that nothing in the due process clause forbids the reclassification of criminal offenses as civil violations. Of course the state would not be permitted by reclassifying murder as a civil violation to impose the death penalty without the procedural protections that the courts have interpreted the Constitution as requiring in capital cases; but the reason would be the severity of the punishment. A criminal fine of $100 is much less severe than many incontestably civil penalties, so if the state decides to convert it to a civil penalty there is no reason to impose the safeguards of criminal procedure. It is extraordinarily common, moreover, for a statute to carry both civil and criminal penalties. If the legislature repeals the criminal penalties, does this mean that the civil penalties, which remain, are now criminal, because they are replacing criminal penalties in those cases in which, before the repeal, the criminal rather than the civil penalty would have been imposed? The implication...