Frank Douglas v. United States

814 F.3d 1268, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 3665, 2016 WL 791232
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
DecidedFebruary 29, 2016
Docket14-11444
StatusPublished
Cited by40 cases

This text of 814 F.3d 1268 (Frank Douglas v. United States) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Frank Douglas v. United States, 814 F.3d 1268, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 3665, 2016 WL 791232 (11th Cir. 2016).

Opinions

MARTIN, Circuit Judge:

Frank Douglas, a federal inmate, appeals the District Court’s dismissal of his Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) case. He claims that a Bureau of Prisons (BOP) official withheld wages he was owed for his work while incarcerated. The District Court held that this claim was barred by the FTCA’s discretionary function exception. Mr. Douglas also filed related claims of discrimination, retaliation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The District Court dismissed these other claims based on the FTCA’s exhaustion requirements. We reverse the District Court on the pay claim and affirm for the others.

I.

Mr. Douglas is a 56-year-old federal inmate. When he filed this lawsuit, he was incarcerated at FCC Coleman, a penitentiary in Florida, where he worked a trash shift multiple days a week. According to Mr. Douglas, this shift required him to “operate[ ] a very dangerous recycling] machine for card-board.” Mr. Douglas was one of two operators of this machine, the contents of which “weighed one or two tons” and had to be loaded into a semi-truck three or four times a week.

The BOP assigns inmate workers to one of four grades of “performance pay,” with Grade 1 workers paid the most. See 28 C.F.R. § 545.26(b). According to Mr. Douglas’s complaint, “[m]e and my supervisor went over my grade and pay numerous times.” Then, on March 15, 2012, Mr. Douglas and his supervisor both signed a “Work Performance Rating” form indicating that Mr. Douglas had worked 154 hours of “satisfactory work” in the past month. The form also indicated that Mr. Douglas’s “Performance Pay Grade Class” was 1 and that he would be paid $91.60. However, when Mr. Douglas was paid four days later, he received $7.20. The same thing happened the next month, when Mr. Douglas’s supervisor again approved $91.60 for 154 hours of Grade 1 work but Mr. Douglas was paid only $12.00. Mr. Douglas alleges that these changes to his pay were made by a prison official named Lieutenant Barker. According to the complaint, Lt. Barker’s role with respect to inmate pay is entering pay data into a computer system. Mr. Douglas also alleges that Lt. Barker said that he reduced the pay because “I don’t like Inmate Douglas black ass and I’m going to pay him what I want.”

Básed on these allegations, Mr. Douglas filed' a “Small Claims for Property Loss” form with the BOP on April 9, 2012. The BOP sent Mr. Douglas a final denial of this claim on June 21, 2012. Mr. Douglas then filed this lawsuit on June 27, 2012. By the time he sued, Mr. Douglas had also filed BOP complaints alleging retaliation, racial [1273]*1273discrimination, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, but these were not fully appealed until later. The government moved to dismiss the suit under Rule 12(b)(6), arguing that Mr. Douglas’s pay claim was barred by the FTCA’s discretionary function exception and that the other claims were barred by the FTCA’s exhaustion requirements. The motion was styled “alternatively” as a motion for summary judgment and included excerpts from various BOP documents, as well as a declaration by the prison’s Inmate Performance Pay Coordinator. The District Court granted the motion to dismiss on March 12, 2014.

II.

We first address whether Mr. Douglas’s pay claim was barred by the FTCA’s discretionary function exception. We review this question of law de novo. See Cohen v. United States, 151 F.3d 1338, 1340 (11th Cir.1998).

A.

The FTCA’s discretionary function exception provides that the United States does not waive sovereign immunity for claims “based upon the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a federal agency or employee of the Government.” 28 U.S.C. § 2680(a). We apply this exception by answering two questions. “First, we consider the nature of the conduct and determine whether it involves ‘an element of judgment or choice.’ ” Ochran v. United States, 117 F.3d 495, 499 (11th Cir.1997) (quoting United States v. Gaubert, 499 U.S. 315, 322, 111 S.Ct. 1267, 1273, 113 L.Ed.2d 335 (1991)). “[Cjonduct does not involve an element of judgment or choice, and thus is not discretionary, if ‘a federal statute, regulation, or policy specifically prescribes a course of action for an employee to follow, because the employee has no rightful option but to adhere to the directive.’ ” Id. (quoting Gaubert, 499 U.S. at 322, 111 S.Ct. at 1273). “Second, if the conduct at issue involves the exercise of judgment, we must determine whether that judgment is grounded in considerations of public policy.” Id.

When a plaintiff challenges the actions of an individual employee who is working within a broader administrative scheme, “a court must first consider whether the action is a matter of choice for the acting employee.” Berkovitz v. United States, 486 U.S. 531, 536, 108 S.Ct. 1954, 1958, 100 L.Ed.2d 531 (1988). “This inquiry is mandated by the language of the exception,” which “protects the discretion of the executive or the administrator to act according to one’s judgment of the best course.” Id. (quotation omitted).1 “For a complaint to survive a motion to dismiss, it [1274]*1274must allege facts which would support a finding that the challenged actions are not the kind of conduct that can be said to be grounded in the policy of the regulatory regime.” Gaubert, 499 U.S. at 324-25, 111 S.Ct. at 1274-75.

B.

Before getting to the details of the government’s discretionary function challenge, we must address a preliminary question: whether our review is limited to the allegations in Mr. Douglas’s complaint, or whether we should consider the extrinsic evidence that the government filed in the District Court. The government attached several documents to its motion to dismiss, which was styled “alternatively” as a summary judgment motion. The District Court dismissed the case without considering this evidence or allowing Mr. Douglas to conduct discovery to respond to it.

When reviewing a discretionary function decision “entered on a motion to dismiss,” the standard of review is usually straightforward: we “accept all of the factual allegations in [the] complaint as true and ask whether the allegations state a claim sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss.” Gaubert, 499 U.S. at 327, 111 S.Ct. at 1276 (quotation omitted); see also Mesa v. United States, 123 F.3d 1435, 1437 (11th Cir.1997). The government says this rule doesn’t apply here because “this Court has long treated a section 2680 bar as jurisdictional.” According to the government, this means its attack on Mr. Douglas’s complaint is based on Rule 12(b)(1), which deals with subject matter jurisdiction, rather than Rule 12(b)(6), which asks if the plaintiff properly stated a claim.

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814 F.3d 1268, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 3665, 2016 WL 791232, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/frank-douglas-v-united-states-ca11-2016.