Richard E. Maul v. Dr. Evan Constan, Anthony A. Metzcus and Richard Gore

23 F.3d 143

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
• Decided: May 5, 1994
• Docket: 93-2266
• Status: Published

Opinions

CUMMINGS, Circuit Judge.

Defendants are officials of Indiana’s West-ville Correctional Center. They appeal from the district court’s denial of their Rule 60(b)(5) motion for relief from that court’s earlier award to plaintiff of $18,542.93 attorney’s fees. We reverse.

Background

Plaintiff Richard E. Maul is an inmate at Westville and filed this civil rights suit in 1985 under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that the forced administration of psychotropic medication violated his constitutional rights and requesting $100,000 in damages and an injunction. In September 1989 the district court held that defendants denied Maul’s right to due process by failing to provide him with a hearing prior to his forced medication. An award of $7,500 damages was entered against each of the three defendants. On appeal, we affirmed the finding of liability but reversed the award of damages for clarification of their basis. Maul v. Constan, 928 F.2d 784 (7th Cir.1991).

In June 1991 on remand, the district court concluded that $22,500 damages should be awarded against defendants jointly and severally instead of $7,500 apiece. Prior to this determination, Maul filed a motion for attorney’s fees, claiming that he was a “prevailing party” entitled to fees under 42 U.S.C. § 1988. Defendants opposed this request because we had denied costs for the appeal. In August 1991 the district court rejected defendants’ objections and granted plaintiff $18,542.93 in attorney’s fees, which were paid to Maul’s attorney.

In December 1992 this Court reversed the district court’s award of $22,500 in compensatory damages in favor of Maul because he failed to demonstrate that he was actually injured by the denial of his right to procedural due process, and the case was remanded to the district court to assess $1 in nominal damages against the defendants. Maul v. Constan, 983 F.2d 1072 (unpublished), 1992 WL 382375 (7th Cir. Dec. 16, 1992). The award of attorney’s fees was not part of that appeal and thus was not addressed by this Court.

In February 1993 after the $1 judgment was entered on remand, defendants moved pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. 60(b)(5) for a refund of the $18,542.93 attorney’s fees paid to Maul’s attorney before the merits judgment was reversed. Rule 60(b)(5) provides that the district court may relieve a party from a legal judgment if, among other things, the “prior judgment upon which [the judgment in question] is based has been reversed or otherwise vacated * * *.’!¹ The district court denied defendants’ motion, resulting in this appeal.

This Court reviews a trial court’s Rule 60(b)(5) determination under an abuse of discretion standard. McKnight v. United States Steel Corp., 726 F.2d 333, 335 (7th Cir.1984).

Analysis

The assessment — or as here, the reassessment — of attorney’s fees in Section 1983 actions in which the prevailing party has received only nominal damages is controlled by Farrar v. Hobby, — U.S. -, 113 S.Ct. 566, 121 L.Ed.2d 494 (1992). There Farrar had sued certain officials for $17 million under 42 U.S.C. §§ 1983 and 1985, alleging deprivation of liberty and property without due process. Although the jury found that Farrar was entitled to a nominal award of $1, the district court awarded plaintiffs $280,000 in legal fees. The Fifth Circuit held that plaintiffs were not prevailing parties and were therefore not entitled to fees under Section 1988. Estate of Farrar v. Cain, 941 F.2d 1311 (5th Cir.1991).

The Supreme Court held that while petitioners were prevailing parties because they had obtained a nominal damages award, they were not entitled to attorney’s fees since they had only received $1 in damages. The Far-rar Court stated: “In a civil rights suit for damages * * * the award[ ] of nominal damages * * * highlights the plaintiffs’ failure to prove actual, compensable injury.” The Court added that where plaintiff recovers only nominal damages, “the only reasonable fee is usually no fee at all.” — U.S. at-, 113 S.Ct. at 575. Consequently the Fifth Circuit’s reversal of the fee award was upheld.

Subsequently we applied Farrar v. Hobby in Cartwright v. Stamper, 7 F.3d 106 (7th Cir.1993). There we pointed out that the award of nominal damages of $1 on each successful claim was de minimis, so that no attorney’s fees should have been awarded instead of the $52,875 allowed by the district court. 7 F.3d at 109. In Cartwright the district court did not have the benefit of Farrar, which was decided before the Cartwright case reached us.

In Cartwright we observed that in Farrar the Supreme Court had set forth the following three factors to determine whether a plaintiff who has obtained only nominal damages is nonetheless entitled to receive attorney’s fees: “[1] the difference between the judgment recovered and the recovery sought, [2]the significance of the legal issue on which the plaintiff prevailed and finally, [3] the public purpose served by the litigation.” 7 F.3d at 109.

In the ease now before this Court, Maul sought substantial compensatory damages, but recovered only $1 in nominal damages, one one-hundred-thousandth of the amount he sought. This factor is the most important of the three, 7 F.3d at 110, and here clearly militates against an award of attorney’s fees.

The second factor considers the significance of the legal issue on which the plaintiff prevailed. According to Cartwright, this factor looks to the extent to which plaintiff succeeded on his theory of liability. 7 F.3d at 110. However, the degree of plaintiffs success — whether plaintiffs victory is significant or merely de minimis — is the ultimate question on which the reasonableness of an award of attorney’s fees turns. Thus we understand the second Farrar factor to address the legal import of the constitutional claim on which plaintiff prevailed. Here the plaintiff established that he was entitled “ ‘at a minimum, [to an] internal administrative review of [the] prison physician’s decision to administer antipsychotic drugs over [his] objection * * 928 F.2d at 785 (quoting district court order). The question of whether plaintiff is entitled to a hearing before antipsychotic drugs are administered against his wishes is clearly a significant constitutional question, one in fact addressed recently by the Supreme Court in Washington v. Harper, 494 U.S. 210, 110 S.Ct. 1028, 108 L.Ed.2d 178 (1990). This factor, however, is the least important of the three factors, 7 F.3d at 110, and therefore only minimally advances plaintiffs claim that he is entitled to attorney’s fees.

The third factor considers the public purpose served by plaintiffs suit, assessing principally whether plaintiffs “victory vindicated] important rights and deterr[ed] future violations.” 7 F.3d at 110. However, since all Section 1983 claims seek to redress “the deprivation of * * * rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws * * 42 U.S.C. § 1983, this factor is not satisfied merely because the plaintiff establishes, as he did here, that his constitutional rights have been infringed. Instead, this Court must scrutinize plaintiffs complaint to determine whether the allegations made and the relief sought evince a public purpose rather than merely attempt to redress a private injury.

An examination of the specific allegations made and the actual relief sought by Maul makes clear that this suit’s primary purpose was to remedy plaintiffs own injuries and not to establish the rights of inmates generally. Plaintiff brought suit only on his own behalf, alleging only violations of his own rights. He made no claim that he represented a class of inmates similarly victimized or that the defendants had engaged in a pattern or practice of violating fellow inmates’ right to a hearing prior to being involuntarily medicated. In fact plaintiff acknowledges that the “Indiana Department of Corrections had regulations in place at the time of [his] complaints which provided for due process hearings prior to involuntary medication” (Br. 9). Moreover, the relief requested by the plaintiff sought only to redress plaintiffs own injuries: he requested only compensatory damages for his own injuries and an injunction “ordering defendants, or their agents, to refrain from involuntary administration of antipsychotic drugs to plaintiff which have deleterious effect on his health.” (Amended complaint at 4) (emphasis added). And since plaintiff later withdrew his request for an injunction,² his claim here that his victory deterred future violations by the defendants or others is conjectural. Thus despite plaintiffs contention that his suit served to protect the constitutional rights of inmates generally, his complaint indicates a more limited objective, redressing his private injury.³

This is not to say that plaintiffs vindication of his own constitutional rights served no public purpose. However, since Section 1983 claims necessarily involve the violation of a right, privilege or immunity, attorney’s fees are appropriate after Farrar only when the plaintiffs victory entails something more than merely a determination that a constitutional guarantee was infringed. The public purpose prong of Farrar is, in other words, not satisfied simply because plaintiff successfully establishes that his constitutional rights have been violated. Something more is needed. Thus, for example, in Cartwright we indicated that an award of punitive damages in addition to compensatory damages was “strong evidence of public purpose” — the public being served by punishing those who willfully or with reckless abandon trample on the guarantees afforded by the United States Constitution. 7 F.3d at 110. Here, however, the plaintiff failed to establish anything more than that he had been denied a protected right: he did not establish that he had suffered actual injury (hence the award of only nominal damages); he did not obtain an injunction prohibiting future violations; and he did not establish that the defendants’ conduct was sufficiently reprehensible to warrant punitive damages.

Having weighed the Farrar factors, we hold that the district court abused its discretion by awarding attorney’s fees to Maul: the difference between the judgment sought and obtained was great and the public purpose of the litigation was minimal. Since plaintiffs victory was de minimis, an award of attorney’s fees was inappropriate. The district court’s denial of the defendants’ Rule 60(b)(5) motion for relief from that court’s earlier award of attorney’s fees is therefore reversed and the case is remanded to the district court to order plaintiffs attorney to refund the $18,542.93 attorney’s fees he was paid by the defendants.⁴

1 . Although plaintiff argued before the district court, and does so again here, that the award of attomey’s fees is reasonable despite our reversal of the $22,500 damages award, plaintiff does not dispute that it was necessary to reassess the award of attorney’s fees under Rule 60(b)(5) after this Court reversed the underlying damage award. See Mother Goose Nursery Schools v. Sendak, 770 F.2d 668, 676 (7th Cir.1985), certiorari denied, 474 U.S. 1102, 106 S.Ct. 884, 88 L.Ed.2d 919 (1986).

2 . Plaintiff later "waived his original request for injunctive relief in light of the Agreed Entry filed in [the United States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana] in Anderson v. On, civil action [No.] S83-0481 on January 13, 1983” (Trial Br. at 1).

3 . The dissent claims that "plaintiff’s suit accomplished the public goal of forcing defendants to abide by their own regulations regarding involuntary medication” because it "is more than mere conjecture” that Maul's suit deterred future violations. Dissent at 149. But even Farrar's victory secured that much deterrence: surely his $1 victory to some extent discouraged future misconduct by the defendant in that case. However, by rejecting Farrar’s request for attorney's fees, the Supreme Court made clear that more than this level of deterrence — whether it is “merely conjectural" or slightly more than that — • is required before attorney’s fees are appropriate. And since we are not persuaded that the district court or the dissent has established that the deterrent effect of Maul's victory is any greater than the nominal deterrence caused by Farrar’s victory, we find it impossible to conclude that Maul’s attorney is entitled to an award of fees.

4 . Defendants argue that this refund should include interest from the date the attorney’s fees were paid to plaintiff, but they have not persuaded us that such interest would be appropriate.