Wagner v. Duffy

• Decision Date: 02 December 1988
• Docket Number: No. 86 C 20342.,86 C 20342.
• Citation: 700 F. Supp. 935
• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois
• Parties: Roland WAGNER, Marshall Kent, Juan Sanchez, Glen Stroud, Alvin Van Brocklin, Noel Hampton, Stanley Owens, Wayne Petters, Alan Smith, George L. Martin, Robert Robinson, Roy E. Gogins Arshell Dennis, and William Erickson, Plaintiffs, v. Edward T. DUFFY, Director, Illinois Department of Public Aid, Defendant. Joseph SERRANO, Rudolph Zamora, Henry Campbell, and Odell Brown, Intervenors, v. Gregory L. COLER, Director, Illinois Department of Public Aid, Defendant, Intervenor.

700 F. Supp. 935

Roland WAGNER, Marshall Kent, Juan Sanchez, Glen Stroud, Alvin Van Brocklin, Noel Hampton, Stanley Owens, Wayne Petters, Alan Smith, George L. Martin, Robert Robinson, Roy E. Gogins Arshell Dennis, and William Erickson, Plaintiffs, v. Edward T. DUFFY, Director, Illinois Department of Public Aid, Defendant.

Joseph SERRANO, Rudolph Zamora, Henry Campbell, and Odell Brown, Intervenors, v. Gregory L. COLER, Director, Illinois Department of Public Aid, Defendant, Intervenor.

No. 86 C 20342.

United States District Court, N.D. Illinois, W.D.

November 8, 1988.

As Amended December 2, 1988.

Barbara W. Smith, Philip H. Hart, David F. Black, UAW-Chrysler Legal Services Plan, Belvidere, Ill., for plaintiffs.

James C. O'Connell, Owen M. Field, James C. Stevens, Sp. Asst. Atty. Gen., Chicago, Ill., for defendant.

ORDER

ROSZKOWSKI, District Judge.

This action comes before the court on the parties' cross-motions for summary judgment. Each party contends that there is no genuine issue of material fact left to be decided and that their side is entitled to a judgment as a matter of law. The plaintiffs have filed memorandums and a Local Rule 12(e) statement in support of its motions. The defendant has filed memorandums and both 12(e) and 12(f) statements. For the reasons set forth below, the court grants the plaintiffs Wagner, Hampton, Owens, Petters, Dennis, and Brown prospective injunctive relief from future violations of the aforementioned plaintiff's due process right. The defendant is entitled to judgment on all other claims.

NATURE OF THE CASE

The eighteen plaintiffs are suing the Illinois State Director of the Illinois Department of Public Aid ("IDPA"), Edward T. Duffy, for violating their constitutional right to procedural due process. The plaintiffs contend that their Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated when the plaintiff authorized the interception of the defendants' 1984 and/or 1985 state and/or federal tax refunds pursuant to the "Child Support and Establishment of Paternity Program" in Title IV-D of the Social Security Act (Social Services Amendments of 1974, Pub.L. No. 93-647, 101(a) et seq. (1975)), 42 U.S.C. § 651 et seq. (1988 West Supp.).¹ The intercepted refunds were to be used to satisfy advances made by the Illinois Department of Public Aid ("IDPA") to families waiting for past due child support payments. In their prayer for relief, the plaintiffs seek declaratory, injunctive, and compensatory relief.

DISCUSSION

The parties have argued a number of issues through the course of briefing their cross-motions. Several of these issues are no longer contested. The plaintiffs first concede that the Eleventh Amendment prohibits the recovery of damages or any retroactive relief (e.g., declaratory, injunctive) from the defendant. The plaintiffs further concede in their briefs that their state law claims were prohibited by the Eleventh Amendment and additionally were duplicative of their federal causes of action. (See Plaintiff's Reply Brief in Opposition to Defendant's Cross motion for Summary Judgment, pp. 8-9).

The plaintiffs additionally admit that they have not met the technical requirements for pleading a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Social Security Act in counts I and II, respectively. The plaintiffs, however, insist that dismissing Counts I and II now would only serve to delay the ultimate resolution of the issues and ask that the counts conform to the proof. On this score, the court agrees with the plaintiffs and allows Counts I and II to stand.

I. THRESHOLD ISSUES

There are still critical threshold issues that must be entertained in order to determine whether any of the "core" due process issues even need be addressed.

Retroactive v. Prospective Relief

While the plaintiffs have conceded that the Eleventh Amendment bars retroactive relief and in particular any "refund with interest;" they still maintain that declaratory and injunctive relief is still available with regard to the 1985 tax intercepts. The plaintiffs cite the case of Brown v. Eichler, 664 F.Supp. 865, 875-76 (D.Del. 1987), for the proposition that injunctive "remedies sought for all the intercepts effected subsequent to the complaint's filing should be viewed as prospective relief." Thus, the plaintiffs reason that the court in the instant case could order the state to re-do the post-complaint administrative hearings to comply with due process, since "the original complaint was filed in October 1986 — well before the previously requested administrative reviews for the 1985 intercepts were completed." (Plaintiffs' Reply Brief in Opposition to Defendant's Cross Motion for Summary Judgment, p. 7).

The plaintiffs' conclusion, however, does not follow from Brown's holding. The key time reference in Brown was when the intercept was effected not when "administrative reviews were completed." The time an administrative review is completed is of no relevance to the determination of whether relief is prospective or retroactive. Simply, if a complaint requesting equitable relief is filed before the tax intercept — the deprivation,² then the plaintiff is seeking prospective relief, even if the court acts after the deprivation. If the complaint is filed after the deprivation, then curing the deprivation is retroactive relief.

In the instant case, the interception of the plaintiffs' 1984 and 1985 refunds were routinely performed sometime in the spring or summer of 1985 or 1986, respectively — well before the filing of the complaint in October of 1986. (Defendant Duffy's Statement of Material Facts as to Which There is No Genuine Issue, pp. 12-30). Thus, any injunctive or declaratory relief relating to the 1984 or 1985 tax intercepts or their corresponding administrative hearings would be retroactive and necessarily prohibited by the Eleventh Amendment. Accordingly, the court is unable to grant any retroactive declaratory or injunctive relief with regards to the interception of the plaintiffs' 1984 or 1985 tax refunds.

Prospective Relief ("Standing")

The defendant next argues that the plaintiffs are not entitled to any prospective relief since they lack the requisite "continuing harm" to invoke the Article III jurisdiction of the district court. The defendant continues that there is no "case" before the court since the plaintiffs' are no longer subject to an interception of their tax refunds.

It is well settled law that in requesting prospective relief a plaintiff must demonstrate that "he has sustained or is immediately in danger of sustaining some direct injury as the result of the challenged official conduct and the injury must be both real and immediate, not `conjectural' or `hypothetical'." City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95, 102, 103 S.Ct. 1660, 1665, 75 L.Ed.2d 675 (1983). Further, past violations do not, in themselves, amount to that real and immediate threat of injury necessary to make out a "case or controversy." O'Shea v. Littleton, 414 U.S. 488, 495-496, 94 S.Ct. 669, 675-76, 38 L.Ed.2d 674 (1974).

The Supreme Court's decision in, City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, supra, fleshes out the standing requirements for requesting prospective relief. In Lyons, the plaintiff requested prospective injunctive relief prohibiting the Los Angeles Police Department from employing a chokehold against suspects that were not trying to resist arrest or escape. The Court found that with regard to granting such injunctive relief the plaintiff failed to show the existence of a present "case or controversy" and therefore lacked standing to request prospective injunctive relief. In deciding, the Lyons court held the following:

Lyons has failed to demonstrate a case or controversy with the City that would justify the equitable relief sought. Lyons' standing to seek the injunction requested depended on whether he was likely to suffer future injury from use of the chokeholds by police officers.

* * * * * *

That Lyons may have been illegally choked by the police on October 6, 1976, while presumably affording Lyons standing to claim damages against the individual officers and perhaps against the City, does nothing to establish a real and immediate threat that he would again be stopped for a traffic violation or for any other offense, by an officer or officers' who would illegally choke him into unconsciousness without any provocation or resistance on his part.

* * * * * * In order to establish an actual controversy in this case, Lyons would have had not only to allege that he would have another encounter with the police but also to make the incredible assertion either (1) that all police officers in Los Angeles always choke any citizen with whom they happen to have an encounter, whether for the purpose of arrest, issuing a citation, or for questioning, or (2) that the City ordered or authorized police officers to act in such a manner.

Lyons, 461 U.S. at 105-06, 103 S.Ct. at 1667-68.

The Lyons court also made a critical distinction between the often confused issues of "standing" and "mootness."

The issue here is not whether that claim is moot but whether Lyons meets the preconditions for asserting an injunction claim in a federal forum .... for Lyon's lack of standing does not rest on the termination of the police practice but on the speculative nature of his claim that he will again experience injury as the result of that practice even if continued.

Lyons, 414 U.S. at 109, 103 S.Ct. at 1669.

In sum, the Lyons' court was not concerned with whether the police department had changed its previous policy on choke-holds potentially mooting Lyons' claim; rather, only with whether Lyons could make a showing that he is realistically threatened by a repetition of his experiences of October 1976.

In the instant case, however, the defendant contends both that the 1988 amendments to the intercept enforcement regulations moot the plaintiffs' claims and that a repetition of circumstances...