Torres v. Commonwealth of PR

United States Court of Appeals

For the First Circuit

No. 06-1771

DIGNO E. TORRES ET AL.,

Plaintiffs, Appellees,

v.

COMMONWEALTH OF PUERTO RICO ET AL.,

Defendants, Appellants.

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO

[Hon. Jay A. García-Gregory, U.S. District Judge]

Before

Lynch, Circuit Judge,

Selya, Senior Circuit Judge,

and Lipez, Circuit Judge.

Julio Cesar Alejandro Serrano, with whom Roberto Sanchez

Ramos, Secretary of Justice, Salvador Antonetti Stutts, Solicitor

General, Leticia Casalduc, Auxiliary Solicitor General, Landrón &

Vera, LLP, Eileen Landrón Guardiola, Eduardo Vera Ramírez, and Luis

A. Rodríguez Muñoz were on brief, for appellants.

Jenyfer García-Soto, with whom Delgado & Fernandez, L.L.P. was

on brief, for appellees.

April 4, 2007

SELYA, Senior Circuit Judge. In this case, the district

court eschewed any evaluation of the merits of a potentially

dispositive pretrial motion asserting sovereign and qualified

immunity, instead denying the motion because it had been filed

beyond a clearly communicated deadline. This interlocutory appeal

ensued. After careful consideration, we conclude that we have

jurisdiction to entertain this appeal but that the district court

acted within the encincture of its discretion in denying the

belated motion on temporal grounds. The tale follows.

I. BACKGROUND

In December of 2002, the plaintiffs (Digno E. Torres, his

wife Betzaida Flores, and their daughter Joelly Torres-Flores)

filed a civil action in the United States District Court for the

District of Puerto Rico, in which they alleged that Torres-Flores,

while attending high school, had been sexually harassed by the head

of the school, Reynaldo Burgos. Because the high school operates

under the aegis of the Puerto Rico Department of Education (the

Department), the plaintiffs couched their claims against Burgos in

terms of 42 U.S.C. § 1983. They also named the Commonwealth of

Puerto Rico as a defendant. Building on the fact that the high

school receives federal funds, they couched their claims against

the Commonwealth in terms of Title IX of the Education Amendments

of 1972. See 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681-1688. In that regard, they alleged

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that the Department had not taken appropriate action to rectify the

situation following its receipt of an administrative complaint.1

The litigation has proceeded in fits and starts,

primarily because the parties have waged a number of pitched

battles on a wide variety of procedural fronts. We recount here

only as much of this chiaroscuro history as is needed to put this

appeal into perspective.

In May of 2004, the district court denied the defendants'

motions for dismissal of the section 1983 claims and for summary

judgment on the Title IX claims. Torres v. Puerto Rico, No. 02-

2769, slip op. at 13 (D.P.R. May 5, 2004) (unpublished). Because

this ukase rejected the defendants' asserted qualified immunity and

Eleventh Amendment defenses, the defendants prosecuted an

interlocutory appeal. They simultaneously requested a stay of the

district court proceedings pending resolution of the appeal.

Neither the appeal nor the related stay request fared

well in this court. Insofar as the Eleventh Amendment defense was

concerned, we dismissed the appeal without prejudice because the

issue required further factual development and, thus, was not ripe

for interim appellate review. See, e.g., Diaz v. Martinez, 112

F.3d 1, 3 (1st Cir. 1997); Stella v. Kelley, 63 F.3d 71, 74 (1st

1

The plaintiffs initially identified Burgos's supervisor and

the Puerto Rico Secretary of Education as additional defendants.

Neither of these parties remains in the case, and we make no

further mention of them.

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Cir. 1995). We allowed Burgos's appeal to proceed on the qualified

immunity issue but refused to stay the district court proceedings

since his appeal seemed unlikely to succeed. Shortly thereafter,

Burgos dropped what remained of the appeal.

Meanwhile, the district court was struggling to keep the

case on track. The court certified the defendants' appeal as "a

frivolous one which is interposed solely for the purpose of delay"

and sanctioned the defendants for their dilatory tactics.2 These

tactics rendered the original discovery deadline impracticable and

forced the district court to vacate the trial date. The court

proceeded to set new deadlines: September 10, 2004, for completion

of discovery and October 8 of the same year for the filing of

dispositive motions. The court unequivocally warned the parties

that "[a]ny further delays or refusals to engage in discovery will

result in the imposition of further sanctions."

Despite this admonition, the parties sought a further

extension of the discovery deadline. Stating that its "patience

[was] at an end," the district court imposed monetary sanctions on

both sides. The record makes it perfectly plain, however, that the

court placed the primary onus on the defendants; it sanctioned them

"[f]or their recalcitrant, defiant, and stubborn attitude and their

repeated and blatant disregard" of court orders, and sanctioned the

2

The defendants filed a separate appeal from this order, which

we dismissed for lack of appellate jurisdiction.

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plaintiffs for having "stood idly by" while the defendants

lollygagged.3

Recognizing that discovery remained incomplete, the court

extended the discovery deadline to October 8, 2004, and the

deadline for filing dispositive motions to October 28, 2004. The

court admonished, with conspicuous clarity, that (i) no further

extensions of either deadline would be allowed and (ii) no

dispositive motions would be entertained after the designated date.

After vacating the original trial date, the district

court fixed December 13, 2004, as the new trial date. At a

pretrial conference held on November 30, 2004 — after the discovery

and dispositive motion deadlines had passed — the court informed

the parties that it had to vacate the anticipated trial date due to

its crowded criminal calendar. Withal, the court did not resurrect

or modify the expired discovery and dispositive motion deadlines.

Similarly, the court did not indicate any willingness to entertain

late-filed dispositive motions. And in all events, no one moved

for leave to file dispositive motions out of time.

Notwithstanding this state of affairs, the defendants, on

January 14, 2005, filed a dispositive motion — a motion for

judgment on the pleadings. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(c). That filing

occurred well beyond the court-appointed deadline for the filing of

3

Although the court eventually granted both parties' motions

for reconsideration of the monetary sanctions, its order

effectively conveys the tenor of the proceedings at the time.

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dispositive motions.4 The district court's response was curt and

to the point: the court denied the motion, noting "that the

deadline for the filing of dispositive motions ha[d] long passed."

The court also propounded a second basis for denying the motion,

observing that the defendants had "failed to include certified

translations of their exhibits" as required by the court's local

rules. This order forms the basis for the instant appeal — the

defendants' third interlocutory appeal in this case.

II. APPELLATE JURISDICTION

We start with an introspective look at our own

jurisdiction. As a general rule, interlocutory orders are not

immediately appealable because they lack the requisite finality.

See Domegan v. Fair, 859 F.2d 1059, 1061 (1st Cir. 1988); see also

28 U.S.C. § 1291. Like every general rule, however, this rule

admits of certain exceptions. The collateral order doctrine maps

the contours of one such exception.

4

While the district court labeled this deadline as a deadline

for the filing of summary judgment motions, the record makes

manifest both that the court intended the deadline to apply to all

dispositive motions and that the parties knew that to be the case.

To their credit, the defendants have never suggested that they

understood the deadline to be limited to summary judgment motions,

nor have they argued — either here or in the court below — that the

deadline was inapplicable to their motion for judgment on the

pleadings. At any rate, that motion, though captioned as a motion

for judgment on the pleadings, explicitly relied upon deposition

transcripts and other information procured during discovery. It

was, therefore, the functional equivalent of a motion for summary

judgment.

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Under that doctrine, a district court's law-based denial

of a pretrial motion that asserts a qualified immunity defense is

immediately appealable. See Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 530

(1985). This is so, in part, because the defense conveys "an

entitlement not to be forced to litigate." Id. at 527. By like

token — and for much the same reason — the law-based denial of a

pretrial motion that asserts a defense of Eleventh Amendment

immunity is immediately appealable. See P.R. Aqued. & Sewer Auth.

v. Metcalf & Eddy, Inc., 506 U.S. 139, 147 (1993). The defendants

contend that, under these principles, we have jurisdiction to

review the challenged order now.

There is, however, another way to look at the matter.

Here, the district court did not deny the defendants' motion on the

merits. Viewed in terms of the district court's rationale, the

order seems to be a routine case-management order — and,

ordinarily, case-management orders are not amenable to immediate

appellate review. See, e.g., In re Recticel Foam Corp., 859 F.2d

1000, 1003 (1st Cir. 1988).

The tension between these seemingly contradictory bodies

of authority is more apparent than real. We have held squarely

that because "an asserted right not to stand trial is lost no less

by a court's refusal to entertain a pre-trial immunity claim as by

an erroneous denial of it on the merits," a district court's

refusal to consider the merits of a pretrial motion raising an

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immunity defense — even a refusal couched as a case-management

order — is immediately appealable. Valiente v. Rivera, 966 F.2d

21, 23 (1st Cir. 1992). Since we are bound to adhere to prior

circuit precedent, see, e.g., United States v. Wogan, 938 F.2d

1446, 1449 (1st Cir. 1991), we hold that we have jurisdiction over

this interlocutory appeal to the extent the appeal raises immunity

defenses.5

III. ANALYSIS

Although the nature of the challenged order does not

deprive us of appellate jurisdiction, it does provide the prism

through which we must view the lower court's decision. Typically,

we would review the disposition of a motion for judgment on the

pleadings de novo. See, e.g., Mass. Nurses Ass'n v. N. Adams Reg'l

Hosp., 467 F.3d 27, 31 (1st Cir. 2006). Here, however, the

district court did not reach the merits but, rather, disposed of

the motion as a matter of case management. Thus, a different

5

To the extent that the motion for judgment on the pleadings

rested on other grounds, interlocutory review does not lie. See

Domegan, 859 F.2d at 1061-62. Beyond that, the record reveals one

further anomaly. Both in its brief and at oral argument in this

court, the Commonwealth conceded that, as a condition of receiving

federal funding, it has waived its sovereign immunity from valid

claims under Title IX. See 42 U.S.C. § 2000d-7(a)(1); see also

Pederson v. La. State Univ., 213 F.3d 858, 875-76 (5th Cir. 2000);

Litman v. George Mason Univ., 186 F.3d 544, 555 (4th Cir. 1999).

Thus, the Commonwealth does not appear to have a colorable legal

argument with respect to its sovereign immunity defense.

Nevertheless, our jurisdiction seems clear as to the rejection of

Burgos's qualified immunity defense to the section 1983 claims, see

Rosario-Diaz v. Gonzalez, 140 F.3d 312, 314-15 (1st Cir. 1998);

Valiente, 966 F.2d at 23, so we see no need to inquire further.

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standard of review obtains: we examine challenged case-management

orders solely for abuse of discretion. See Rosario-Diaz v.

Gonzalez, 140 F.3d 312, 315 (1st Cir. 1998). Accordingly, the

question we must answer is whether the district court abused its

discretion in denying the motion by reason of the defendants'

noncompliance with a court-ordered deadline.6 As we explain below,

that question demands a negative answer.

We begin with bedrock: trial judges have an abiding

responsibility for the efficient management of the cases on their

dockets. To that end, the Civil Rules require a district judge to

issue orders "as soon as practicable" fixing deadlines for the

completion of discovery and the filing of dispositive motions.

Fed. R. Civ. P. 16(b). To help ensure that cases stay on track,

district judges are given express authority to sanction parties who

do not comply with these deadlines. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 16(f).

"We have made it clear that district courts may punish such

dereliction in a variety of ways, including but not limited to the

preclusion of untimely motions . . . ." Rosario-Diaz, 140 F.3d at

315.

6

To be sure, the district court initially mentioned a second

ground for refusing to entertain the motion: the defendants'

failure to furnish translations of documents accompanying its

motion. That omission was rectified on a motion for

reconsideration, so we assume, favorably to the defendants, that

the challenged order must stand or fall on the ground of

untimeliness.

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Since the district court has first-line authority for

case-management decisions and is intimately familiar with the ebb

and flow of the cases on its docket, an appellate court should

"step softly" when it is asked to set aside a district court's

choice of sanctions for the violation of a case-management order.

United States v. One 1987 BMW 325, 985 F.2d 655, 657 (1st Cir.

1993). It follows inexorably that a party attempting to convince

us that the district court misgauged the situation faces a steep

uphill climb. See id.; see also Vélez v. Awning Windows, Inc., 375

F.3d 35, 42 (1st Cir. 2004).

These principles apply equally when the trial court's

sanctions intrude upon a defendant's ability to assert an immunity

defense before trial. See, e.g., Guzmán-Rivera v. Rivera-Cruz, 98

F.3d 664, 668 (1st Cir. 1996). Although state entities and public

officials enjoy special protection from the vagaries of civil

litigation, this protection is not unlimited. Because immunity

defenses may be raised at several different stages of a case, the

potential for abuse is substantial. For that reason, the right to

assert an immunity defense must be balanced with the district

court's obligation to ensure the "just, speedy, and inexpensive"

resolution of cases. Fed. R. Civ. P. 1. With these considerations

in mind, we have recognized that district courts may be justified

in rebuffing pretrial attempts to assert immunity defenses if those

attempts are not undertaken with a reasonable degree of diligence.

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See Guzmán-Rivera, 98 F.3d at 668; see also Ungar v. PLO, 402 F.3d

274, 293 (1st Cir. 2005).

In this instance, we discern no basis for faulting the

district court's calibration of the decisional scales. After all,

the defendants filed their motion a full eleven weeks after the

expiration of the court's extended deadline. In setting that

deadline, the court had stated explicitly that no further

extensions would be given. To make a bad situation worse, the

defendants did not even mention their planned course of action at

the pretrial conference, nor did they deign to seek leave of court

before filing a motion that clearly violated the scheduling order.

It is difficult to imagine any circumstances in which a

court should be expected to tolerate so brazen a flouting of its

case-management authority. The circumstances here are particularly

unattractive: the defendants' actions were taken against a backdrop

that included an earlier finding that they had engaged in "repeated

and blatant disregard" for the court's orders. Under the doctrine

of just desserts, a party who engages in a pattern of intransigent

conduct is hard-put to complain when the court enforces its orders

according to their tenor.

The defendants attempt to blunt the force of this

reasoning by noting the absence of a definite trial date (when it

vacated the December 2004 trial date, the district court did not

set a new one). We rejected a virtually identical argument in an

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earlier case where, as here, the district court did not predicate

its denial of the motion on the imminence of trial but, rather, on

the need to sanction noncompliance with court orders. See Rosario-

Diaz, 140 F.3d at 316 (explaining that "[l]itigants could

complicate exponentially the efficacious management of crowded

dockets if left free to engage in the kind of dilatory behavior

exhibited by the appellants as long as no firm trial date was in

prospect"). We see no reason to alter our stance today.7

The defendants also suggest that they were unable to meet

the deadline for filing dispositive motions because their path to

immunity was not clear until the parties reached certain

stipulations while preparing for the pretrial conference.8 This

argument is unsupported by the record. The district court denied

the defendants' earlier dispositive motions based primarily on the

need for the trier of fact to determine whether or not Burgos's

acts "were sufficiently severe to compromise the victim's

educational opportunities and create a hostile environment."

Torres, supra, slip op. at 10. There are no stipulations in the

record that can fairly be read to resolve this factual dispute. In

7

The defendants' reliance on Valiente, 966 F.2d at 23, is

misplaced. In Valiente, unlike in this case, the district court

predicated its refusal to consider the defendants' dispositive

motion specifically on the imminence of the impending trial. See

id.

8

The defendants make no persuasive explanation of why they

waited a full six weeks after the pretrial conference to file their

motion.

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all events, the defendants concede that the parties' contentions

about two of the incidents at issue — incidents involving Burgos

and Torres-Flores — "did differ substantially." Appellants' Br. at

12.

Even if the freshly minted stipulations were as important

as the defendants suggest, our conclusion would be the same. The

district court was in the best position to assess the validity of

the proffered excuse for the untimely filing. The defendants could

have, but did not, ask that court to validate their excuse and

extend the dispositive motion deadline on that basis. Their

failure to do so speaks loudly about the insubstantiality of the

excuse.

We add a coda. Whatever the merits of the excuse, trial

courts are not required to accept at face value litigants' reasons

for their failure to meet deadlines. See Cordero-Soto v. Island

Finance, Inc., 418 F.3d 114, 117-18 (1st Cir. 2005); Jones v.

Winnepesaukee Realty, 990 F.2d 1, 6 (1st Cir. 1993). That is

particularly true where, as here, the parties offering the

explanation have exhibited a pattern of dilatory conduct. Cf.

Spiller v. U.S.V. Labs., Inc., 842 F.2d 535, 537 (1st Cir. 1988)

(affirming sanctions when "the history of foot-dragging evident in

the record" made it "difficult to draw any other inference but that

[the sanctioned party] did not intend to comply unless absolutely

forced to do so").

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IV. CONCLUSION

We need go no further. Although we recognize the

importance of defendants' rights to assert immunity defenses before

trial, those rights are not sacrosanct. District courts have wide

discretion to set reasonable deadlines for asserting such defenses,

and they may impose condign sanctions on parties who do not comply.

The sanction imposed here — effectively, disregard of a belated

motion — was not an abuse of discretion. We therefore uphold the

district court's order. The defendants, of course, remain free to

assert their immunity defenses at trial.

Affirmed. Costs are to be taxed in favor of the appellees.

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