Trial News

The U.S. Supreme Court has issued rulings in two cases involving allegations of law enforcement brutality—one discussing the application of the Federal Tort Claims Act’s (FTCA) “judgment bar” and the second remanding a case to be reconsidered in light of the Court’s ruling last year against qualified immunity in Taylor v. Riojas. (Brownback v. King, 141 S. Ct. 740 (2021); McCoy v. Alamu, 2021 WL 666347 (U.S. Feb. 22, 2021).)

In Brownback v. King, James King sued the United States under the FTCA after a violent encounter with officers who misidentified him as a fugitive they were seeking as part of their work with a federal task force. The officers were in plainclothes, and when they approached King, a college student, he believed that they were attempting to mug him. He tried to run, and the officers beat him; he was hospitalized for his injuries. King also brought Fourth Amendment claims against the individual officers, relying on the implied cause of action provided through Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents (403 U.S. 388 (1971)).

The FTCA waives sovereign immunity for the federal government when federal employees commit certain torts while acting within the scope of their employment. Under §1346(b) of the act, a claim for monetary damages can be brought against the United States for an injury caused by a federal employee’s negligence or wrongful act or omission while acting within the scope of employment.

But the FTCA also includes a “judgment bar” that makes it more difficult to sue individual federal employees—a judgment on a §1346(b) action “constitute[s] a complete bar to any action by the claimant, by reason of the same subject matter, against the employee of the government whose act or omission gave rise to the claim.” Once a judgment is entered on the FTCA claims, a plaintiff cannot pursue claims against individual federal employees for acts arising out of the same underlying facts. To trigger the bar, the judgment entered must be a final judgment on the merits.

In Brownback, the district court granted summary judgment to the United States on the FTCA claims, finding that the officers would have been entitled to qualified immunity under Michigan state law for the tort claims alleged against them and that this immunity extended to the federal government for its employees’ actions. The court also dismissed the Bivens claims, holding that federal qualified immunity applied.

The plaintiff appealed only his Bivens claims to the Sixth Circuit, which held that the district court’s ruling on the FTCA claims did not create a judgment bar on the Bivens claims because the FTCA claims were dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction and not on the merits. The Sixth Circuit determined that the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity and reversed the district court.

The defendants appealed to the Supreme Court, which unanimously held that the judgment bar applied because the district court had entered a final judgment on the FTCA claims. However, the court focused on the technical issue of whether the lower court’s ruling qualified as a final judgment, not on whether the judgment bar precluded the plaintiff’s non-FTCA claims.

The Court explained that to trigger the judgment bar, the decision must be “on the substance of a particular claim before the court.” The Court concluded that the district court’s grant of summary judgment rested on whether the plaintiff had established all six elements of an FTCA claim—the district court found that the undisputed facts did not support the element that the government employees would be liable under state law because in Michigan, government employees who commit intentional torts while acting in “subjective good faith” are entitled to qualified immunity. Because the district court concluded that the officers had not acted with malice and would be entitled to qualified immunity under state law, that qualified immunity also extended to the United States.

The Court also held that the district court’s alternative ruling—that the plaintiff’s claims did not satisfy Rule 12(b)(6)—was a merits-based decision because it was based “on rules of substantive law” about whether the facts alleged in the complaint could satisfy the requirements for a Fourth Amendment violation to establish a valid cause of action.

The plaintiff argued that as the Sixth Circuit had determined, the district court’s dismissal of the claims was based on a lack of subject matter jurisdiction, meaning that it could not have reached a merits ruling. The Court disagreed, stating that while this is normally true, when “pleading a claim and pleading jurisdiction entirely overlap, a ruling that the court lacks subject-matter jurisdiction may simultaneously be a judgment on the merits that triggers the judgment bar.” The Court explained that a federal court always can determine its own jurisdiction and therefore can decide the merits of an element of a claim “if that element is also jurisdictional.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred in the ruling but also wrote separately to question whether the “FTCA’s judgment bar applies to claims brought in the same action”—an issue that the majority left to the Sixth Circuit to address on remand. Sotomayor noted that accepting the principle that any order in a case that resolves FTCA claims automatically precludes all other claims brought in the same action that arise from the same set of facts “is a significant departure from the normal operation of common-law preclusion.” This interpretation of the judgment bar, she wrote, “produces seemingly unfair results by precluding potentially meritorious claims when a plaintiff’s FTCA claims fail for unrelated reasons.” She continued that because King’s constitutional claims require a different evidentiary showing than the FTCA claims, precluding them as judgment barred would mean that “King’s failure to show bad faith, which is irrelevant to his constitutional claims, means a jury will never decide whether the officers violated [his] constitutional rights.”

The plaintiff’s attorneys agreed with Sotomayor’s assessment. “Although the decision appears at first glance to deal a blow to constitutional accountability, in reality, the Supreme Court teed up the central issue in this case for the federal appeals court to reconsider, whether centuries of common law practice should apply—or be abandoned—when the issue involves constitutional violations committed by federal police,” said Arlington, Va., attorney Patrick Jaicomo. “When it does, our client will be able to persuasively argue why he deserves a day in court. And that’s what we have been fighting for since day one. If Americans must follow the law, government employees must follow the Constitution.”

In another case, McCoy v. Alamu, the Court granted a petition for certiorari and remanded the case to the Fifth Circuit. While the Court did not expound on its decision, it directed the lower court to reevalaute the petitioner’s allegations in light of its 2020 ruling in Taylor v. Riojas, which reversed a finding of qualified immunity for correctional officers who forced an inmate to endure horrible conditions, as Trial News previously reported. AAJ signed on to a joint amicus brief with a coalition of ideologically diverse groups in support of the petitioner in Taylor.

Prince McCoy brought a §1983 claim for violating his Eighth Amendment rights against a correctional facility officer who sprayed him in the face with mace. McCoy alleged that the attack was unprovoked and that the officer was taking out his anger at another prisoner on McCoy. The Fifth Circuit held, however, that the officer was entitled to qualified immunity and that McCoy had not demonstrated all of the factors required to show cruel and unusual punishment under the test set forth in Hudson v. McMillian (50 U.S. 1 (1992)). The questions presented to the Court in the cert petition—which noted a circuit split—included whether an officer who “gratuitously assaults a prisoner” is entitled to qualified immunity because not every Hudson factor is met, and whether “precedent concerning unprovoked assaults by one weapon clearly establish the unconstitutionality of unprovoked assaults by other weapons.”

In Taylor, the Fifth Circuit held that the conditions Taylor endured violated the Eighth Amendment, but it also granted qualified immunity to the correctional officers involved because they did not have “fair warning” of the unconstitutional nature of their actions. The qualified immunity doctrine requires that a constitutional violation be “clearly established” for a public or law enforcement officer to be held liable. In a per curiam opinion, the Supreme Court held that “no reasonable correctional officer could have concluded that, under the extreme circumstances of this case, it was constitutionally permissible to house Taylor in such deplorably unsanitary conditions for such an extended period of time.”