The opinion
Case: 10-60226 Document: 00511404488 Page: 1 Date Filed: 03/09/2011
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT United States Court of Appeals
Fifth Circuit
FILED
March 9, 2011
No. 10-60226 Lyle W. Cayce
Clerk
JAMES E. JENNINGS, JR.,
Plaintiff - Appellee
v.
HOUSTON PATTON, In his individual capacity,
Defendant - Appellant
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Southern District of Mississippi
Before KING, STEWART, and OWEN, Circuit Judges.
CARL E. STEWART, Circuit Judge:
In this action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, James Jennings sued Judge
Houston Patton, a county judge in Mississippi, for allegedly causing Jennings to
be prosecuted without probable cause. Judge Patton moved to dismiss, or in the
alternative for summary judgment, arguing in part that he was entitled to
judicial immunity and qualified immunity. The district court denied Judge
Patton’s motion, concluding that genuine issues of material fact precluded
summary judgment. This interlocutory appeal followed. Because we conclude
that Judge Patton is entitled to qualified immunity, we REVERSE.
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No. 10-60226
I
Judge Patton has at all relevant times been a judge of the County Court
of Hinds County in Mississippi. In the early 1990s, Judge Patton presided over
a series of disputes between Jennings and Jennings’s ex-wife in which he
initially awarded Jennings a default judgment of $35,000. When Jennings was
later jailed for contempt by the Justice Court of Hinds County, Judge Patton
authorized his release. According to Jennings, however, Judge Patton
impermissibly conditioned that release on Jennings’s agreement to surrender the
$35,000 judgment. On the basis of this allegation, in January 1997, Jennings
filed a complaint against Judge Patton with the Mississippi Commission on
Judicial Performance. Jennings also hired an attorney, J. Keith Shelton, to help
him bring a civil rights suit against the judge that raised the same claim.
In March 1997, Shelton contacted Judge Patton to offer the possibility of
settling Jennings’s as-yet-unfiled suit. After several weeks of negotiation, the
parties agreed to the following terms: Jennings would release Judge Patton from
any civil claims and inform the judicial commission that his claims had been
satisfied, in exchange for Judge Patton’s $25,000 payment and reinstatement of
the $35,000 award.1 Unbeknownst to Jennings or Shelton, however, Judge
Patton had contacted the district attorney’s office to report Shelton’s offer, which
he considered to be a bribery attempt by the two men. As a result, the district
attorney’s office had opened an investigation and hired an investigator from the
county sheriff’s department, Larry Iles, to assist with its efforts. Iles recorded
or overheard several negotiation discussions between Judge Patton, Shelton, and
Jennings, including an April 1997 discussion where the three men signed a
purported settlement agreement reflecting the above terms. Jennings and
Shelton were arrested after they had signed this agreement.
1
Jennings and Judge Patton dispute the content of these negotiation discussions but
that dispute, being immaterial to the legal question presented, is not recounted here.
2
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In August 1997, a Mississippi grand jury returned indictments against
both Jennings and Shelton for bribery of a judge. Iles testified before the grand
jury that Jennings and Shelton had offered to dismiss their complaint against
Judge Patton in exchange for his $25,000 payment and reinstatement of the
prior $35,000 judgment.2 Jennings and Shelton were never tried, however, and
in 2005 the district attorney’s office moved to remand the cases to the file for
lack of prosecutive merit. The Circuit Court of Hinds County granted the motion
and remanded the criminal cases with prejudice, effectively dismissing the
charges.
Jennings thereafter filed the present action against Judge Patton and the
former Hinds County District Attorney, Ed Peters. He claimed that the
defendants had violated, and conspired to violate, his rights under the Fourth
and Fourteenth Amendments to be free from prosecution without probable
cause. Against Judge Patton, he claimed that the defendant
ha[d] [Jennings] prosecuted without probable cause in that he
subjectively knew that he was fabricating the charge against
him for the purpose of maliciously prosecuting him.
Jennings explained in additional allegations that Judge Patton had
misrepresented the settlement discussions to the district attorney’s
office—specifically, that Judge Patton had failed to disclose that the
reinstatement of the $35,000 judgment was a settlement term that Judge
Patton, not Jennings, had insisted upon. Jennings argued that Judge Patton’s
misrepresentations to the district attorney’s office amounted to the initiation of
criminal charges without probable cause.
Judge Patton and Peters moved to dismiss the action, or in the alternative,
for summary judgment, arguing in part that they were entitled to absolute
immunity and qualified immunity. The district court granted Peters’s motion
2
It appears that Judge Patton did not testify at the grand jury proceedings.
3
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but denied Judge Patton’s motion. In the district court’s view, Jennings had
presented evidence that, if credited, suggested that Judge Patton had
misrepresented facts to the district attorney’s office and to Iles. Concluding that
this factual dispute was material to whether Judge Patton was entitled to either
judicial immunity or qualified immunity, the district court denied his motion.
II
A
As a threshold matter, we examine our jurisdiction to review Judge
Patton’s qualified immunity defense. Jennings challenges our jurisdiction,
arguing that Judge Patton appeals only the “genuineness” of the factual dispute
that the district court held precluded summary judgment.
In a § 1983 action, defendants can immediately appeal the district court’s
denial of a motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity, but only
“to the extent that it turns on an issue of law.” Hampton v. Oktibbeha Cnty.
Sheriff Dept., 480 F.3d 358, 363 (5th Cir. 2007). We “lack jurisdiction to review
the genuineness of those factual disputes that precluded summary judgment.”
Kinney v. Weaver, 367 F.3d 337, 341 (5th Cir. 2004). In this case, we consider
whether the factual dispute the district court identified is material for purposes
of summary judgment. Because our review turns only on this issue of law, we
are satisfied of our jurisdiction. We review de novo the materiality of that
factual dispute and the district court’s conclusions of law. Hampton, 480 F.3d
at 364.
B
The doctrine of qualified immunity protects public officials from liability
for civil damages “insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established
statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have
known.” Pearson v. Callahan, 129 S. Ct. 808, 815 (2009) (quoting Harlow v.
Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1982)). We undertake a two-pronged analysis to
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determine whether a government official is entitled to qualified immunity,
inquiring: (1) whether the facts that the plaintiff has alleged make out a
violation of a constitutional right; and (2) whether the right at issue was “clearly
established” at the time of the defendant’s alleged misconduct.3 Id. at 815–16
(citing Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S 194, 201 (2001)). Under the first prong, the
plaintiff must allege the deprivation of an actual constitutional or statutory
right. Hampton, 480 F.3d at 363. His failure to do so entitles the government
official to qualified immunity. Id.
Here, the district court found that Judge Patton’s alleged
misrepresentation of the settlement discussions, if true, directly affected the
district attorney’s decision to seek an indictment and the grand jury’s decision
to return the indictment. On the basis of this finding, the district court
concluded that Judge Patton’s alleged actions, if true, amounted to a
constitutional violation. But the court did not explain the constitutional rights
that Judge Patton had purportedly violated.
Indeed, even taking the facts in the light most favorable to Jennings, we
do not see how, based on our precedents, Jennings has alleged a cognizable
constitutional violation. To begin with, “there [i]s no Fourteenth Amendment
‘liberty interest’ or substantive due process right to be free from criminal
prosecution unsupported by probable cause.” Cuadra v. Houston Indep. Sch.
Dist., 626 F.3d 808, 814 (5th Cir. 2010) (citing Albright v. Oliver, 510 U.S. 266,
270–71 (1994)); see also Castellano v. Fragozo, 352 F.3d 939, 953 (5th Cir. 2003).
As the Supreme Court explained in Albright, “[w]here a particular Amendment
‘provides an explicit textual source of constitutional protection’ against a
particular sort of government behavior, ‘that Amendment, not the more
generalized notion of “substantive due process,” must be the guide for analyzing
3
Pearson established that we may consider these prongs in any order. See id. at 818.
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these claims.’” 510 U.S. at 273 (quoting Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 395
(1989)).
Nor has Jennings raised a claim actionable under the Fourth Amendment.
We have held that “causing charges to be filed without probable cause will not
without more violate the Constitution.” Castellano, 352 F.3d at 953. Thus, to
the extent that Jennings’s allegation against Judge Patton is a freestanding
malicious prosecution claim, it must fail as a matter of law. See id. at 942 (claim
of malicious prosecution “standing alone is no violation of the United States
Constitution”); Cuadra v. Houston Indep. Sch. Dist., 626 F.3d 808, 812 (5th Cir.
2010) (dismissing claim in § 1983 action for malicious prosecution); Boyd v.
Driver, 579 F.3d 513, 515 (5th Cir. 2009) (dismissing claim in Bivens action for
malicious prosecution). Additionally, Jennings has not alleged any other Fourth
Amendment violation against Judge Patton, let alone raised a genuine issue of
material fact as to such.
Because Jennings has failed to allege the deprivation of an actual
constitutional right, Judge Patton is entitled to qualified immunity. See
Hampton, 480 F.3d at 363. As we resolve this appeal on grounds of qualified
immunity, we do not address whether Judge Patton is entitled to judicial
immunity.
III
For the reasons stated above, we conclude that Judge Patton is entitled to
qualified immunity and REVERSE the district court’s denial of summary
judgment.
6