Williams v. Rensch
| Decision Date | 06 May 2015 |
| Docket Number | 8:11-CV-446 |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Nebraska |
| Parties | SHANNON WILLIAMS, Plaintiff, v. RAYNOR RENSCH & PFIEFFER, et al., Defendants. |
This matter is before the Court on the motions for dismissal or for summary judgment filed by defendants (filings 194, 196, 198, 200, 202, and 204) and the motion for summary judgment filed by plaintiff Shannon Williams (filing 214), who is proceeding before the Court pro se. Williams has also requested an evidentiary hearing (filing 246) and requested leave to conduct discovery (filing 248). All three of Williams' motions will be denied. The motions of defendants John Brazda, Dave Bruck, and John Stuck (filing 194); the City of Bellevue (and its Police Department) (filing 196); Douglas County, Mark Foxall, and Jeffrey Newton (filing 198); and the City of Omaha and Omaha Police Department (filing 204) will be granted, and all claims against these defendants will be dismissed. The remaining defendants' motions (filings 200 and 202) will be granted in part and denied in part. The handful of claims remaining against those defendants rest solely on state law and do not satisfy the amount in controversy requirement for diversity jurisdiction. The Court will decline to exercise its supplemental jurisdiction over those claims, which will be remanded to the District Court for Douglas County, Nebraska.
This case arrives with a lengthy and complicated procedural history and detailed factual background. Before proceeding further, it will help to provide a broad outline of the circumstances leading up to this case and introduce the parties involved. The Court will then provide a more detailed accounting of this case's procedural background, as it is essential to understanding Williams' complaint. Further facts will be discussed below as they become relevant.
Starting no later than 2006, Williams was involved in a conspiracy to import marijuana into the Omaha, Nebraska area.1 In 2007, a warrant was issued for Williams' arrest for various violations of his term of supervised release imposed as part of his sentence for a previous federal drug conviction. Williams evaded arrest for some time. Meanwhile, in October 2008, defendant Terry Haddock, an attorney, began representing an associate of Williams, Richard Conway. Conway had been arrested following delivery of a controlled shipment of marijuana from another of Williams' associates. Conway, in turn, put Haddock in contact with Williams (who was still in hiding). Unbeknownst to Williams, Conway had agreed to cooperate with authorities, who were interested in Williams due to his ongoing drug activities and his violations of supervised release. Williams, and his continuing drug operations, became the target of an investigation by a joint task force directed by the FBI, and which included police officers from Omaha and Bellevue, Nebraska (including defendants Bruck, Brazda, and Stuck).
In late 2008, Williams began contacting Haddock by telephone. Haddock and Williams discussed, among other things, the marijuana charges pending against Conway. During one conversation, Williams suggested that he intended to kill two of the key witnesses against Conway, a threat which Haddock reported to law enforcement. (Haddock also passed other useful information to law enforcement, which ultimately helped the authorities locate Williams.) Williams and Haddock also discussed various legal matters. For example, Williams asked Haddock, on behalf of a friend, about the sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine under the federal sentencing guidelines. And they discussed the outstanding warrant for the supervised release violation. However, as the Eighth Circuit found, "[a]t all times, Williams was represented by either [Eric] Whitner or his cocounsel, attorney Steve Lefler—not Haddock." Williams, 720 F.3d at 683. In January 2009, Williams caused $15,000 to be paid to Haddock for legal services that Haddock had provided to Conway and another of Williams' friends.
When Williams was finally apprehended in February 2009, he was incarcerated at the Douglas County Correctional Center ("DCCC") in Omaha, Nebraska, where Conway was also being held. In early 2009, Haddock worked with law enforcement officers and officials at DCCC to place Conway in the same cell with Williams. Conway was fitted with a recording deviceand recorded several hours of conversation in which Williams made incriminating statements.
While he was in custody at the DCCC, Williams paid Whitner to sneak a cell phone in, which Williams used to continue managing his drug operations from inside the detention center. Eventually, Williams came to distrust Whitner, and he asked Conway if Haddock would be willing to smuggle a cell phone into the DCCC. Williams agreed to pay Haddock $1,000 a month for this service. Haddock passed this information onto the authorities, and they devised a plan to use Haddock to record Williams' phone conversations and acquire evidence regarding his ongoing drug and money-laundering operations.
On April 22, 2009, Haddock made his first trip to the DCCC to bring Williams the phone. Between then and December 2009, he made a total of sixty-three visits to Williams. These meetings occurred in the DCCC's attorney-client meeting rooms. Haddock repeatedly told Williams that he was not acting as Williams' attorney, but merely facilitating his use of the (contraband) cell phone. As the Eighth Circuit explained, the ruse worked as follows:
During each of Haddock's visits to Williams, detention-center officials knew that Haddock was operating as an informant on Williams and was not Williams's actual attorney. Haddock, however, convinced Williams that the detention-center officials thought that he was Williams's attorney and that was why he was allowed to see Williams, even though Williams knew that Haddock was not his attorney.
Over the course of these sixty-three visits, Haddock recorded nearly 200 hours of conversations between himself and Williams and between Williams and various people he called. Many of these calls involved criminal activities. In December 2009, Williams and several others were indicted for conspiring to violate federal drug and money-laundering laws. Evidence gathered from Haddock's recordings was used to convict Williams, who is currently serving a 480-month sentence on those charges.
However, Williams also used the cell phone to make calls to Lefler, who was representing him on the supervised release violation. The recording, disclosure, and use of those calls forms the basis of much of Williams' operative complaint. Filing 188. Williams seeks compensatory and punitive damages, as well as injunctive relief, based on various claims arising under the United States Constitution (), federal and state wiretap and racketeering statutes,and state contract and tort law. Williams' operative complaint names 18 defendants, which may be divided into five groups. Filing 188 at 1.
The first group, the "Federal Defendants," consists of defendants Stuck, Brazda, and Bruck, who were law enforcement officers with the Bellevue and Omaha Police Departments. They participated in the joint state-FBI task force that investigated Williams and used Haddock as an informant. As the Court explains below, all three officers were acting under color of federal, rather than state, law.2
The second group, the "Municipal Defendants," consists of the City of Omaha and the City of Bellevue. Williams has also sued the cities' police departments. However, a police department is simply a department or subdivision of a city's government; it is not a juridical entity suable as such. Ketchum v. City of West Memphis, 974 F.2d 81, 82 (8th Cir. 1992); Meyer v. Lincoln Police Dept., 347 F. Supp. 2d 706 (D. Neb. 2004). So, the Court will dismiss all of Williams' claims against the Omaha and Bellevue Police Departments as separate entities.
The third group, the "Douglas County Defendants," consists of Douglas County; Jeffrey Newton, the director of the DCCC; and his assistant director, Mark Foxall. The fourth group, the "Law Firm Defendants," consists of the law firm of Raynor Rensch & Pfeiffer ("RR&P")—Haddock's former law firm—as well as its partners John P. Raynor, Richard J. Rensch, and William E. Pfeiffer; and various other attorneys who worked for the firm: Patrick M. Heng, John J. Kohl, and Sean P. Rensch. Last, there is defendant Haddock, who does not fit precisely into any of the groups above.
With this broad outline in hand, the Court turns to a more detailed examination of the proceedings leading up to this case. The Court will take a moment, however, to clarify what matters it has considered in ruling on the pending motions. The defendants have moved to dismiss Williams' complaint for failure to state a claim under Rule 12(b)(6), and alternatively, for summary judgment under Rule 56. The Federal Defendants have also moved to dismiss Williams' official-capacity claims against them—which are, in effect, claims against the United States—as barred by sovereign immunity. This presents a question of jurisdiction under Rule 12(d)(1).
The Court has resolved the non-jurisdictional aspects of the pending motions on the pleadings, under Rule 12(b)(6). Even assuming the truth of Williams' allegations, he has failed to plead a plausible claim for relief on each and every claim that the Court has considered. The prior proceedingsdiscussed in part III, infra, are judicially-noticeable public records that the Court may consider in reviewing a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss without converting the motion into one for summary judgment under Rule 12(d). See Levy v. Ohl, 477 F.3d 988 (8th Cir. 2007). More precisely, the Court takes notice of the documents and orders filed in these cases, not for the truth of their contents but only to...
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