Rubie Rogers v. Robert Okin

821 F.2d 22, 1987 U.S. App. LEXIS 7511
CourtCourt of Appeals for the First Circuit
DecidedJune 12, 1987
Docket86-1777
StatusPublished
Cited by36 cases

This text of 821 F.2d 22 (Rubie Rogers v. Robert Okin) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the First Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Rubie Rogers v. Robert Okin, 821 F.2d 22, 1987 U.S. App. LEXIS 7511 (1st Cir. 1987).

Opinion

COFFIN, Circuit Judge.

This is the fee tail of a very long dachshund of civil rights litigation involving mental patients at a state hospital, which began in 1975 and in due course involved all three levels of federal courts as well as the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. 1 The merits having at last been re *24 solved, the present issue is what fees and costs, if any at all, should be paid counsel for plaintiffs under the authority of 42 U.S.C. § 1988.

The underlying lawsuit was brought by seven patients against the Massachusetts Commissioner of Mental Health, directors of separate mental health units of Boston State Hospital, and various psychiatrists and psychologists, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief against the forcible administration of anti-psychotic drugs to and the involuntary seclusion of both voluntarily and involuntarily committed mental patients in non-emergencies. Compensatory and punitive damages were also sought. A class was certified — all patients who have been or will be secluded or medicated without their consent at the two units of the hospital.

The stages of the litigation began with a temporary restraining order preventing then existing non-emergency seclusion and medication practices. It continued with settlement efforts, summary judgment motions, an interlocutory appeal, and a 74-day trial followed by a district court decision granting injunctive relief but denying damage claims. An appeal only from relief as to medication led to an appellate decision affirming in most respects the district court’s decision. There was then a grant of certiorari by the Supreme Court followed by a remand to us and our eventual certification of some nine questions to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts concerning the applicability of a recent decision involving the right of a non-institutionalized mental patient to refuse anti-psychotic drugs. Subsequently that court provided a set of rules governing the administering of anti-psychotic drugs, a decision which we recognized created federally protected liberty interests and also provided adequate state law process making unnecessary the continuation of a federal court injunction. The district court’s order dissolving the injunction was entered in June, 1984, some nine years after the filing of the complaint.

The present proceedings, relating to plaintiffs’ request for attorney’s fees and costs, have encompassed multiple depositions, interrogatories, one non-evidentiary hearing, a three-day trial, dozens of exhibits, and some 260 pages of proposed findings of fact. The district court made the following six findings: (1) plaintiffs were the “prevailing party” within the meaning of 42 U.S.C. § 1988, their claims concerning forced medication and seclusion being “essentially vindicated” and the rejected damages claims sharing a common core of facts and related legal theories with the claims for injunctive relief; (2) the time spent by plaintiffs’ attorneys in the trial, appellate, and fee phases was reasonable and involved no unnecessary duplication; (3) time records since mid-1977 were detailed and contemporaneous and, prior to this time, the reconstructed estimates of undocumented time were sufficiently reliable; (4) in the case of one of plaintiffs’ attorneys, preclusion from other employment is a relevant factor; (5) the customary community hourly rate testimony of plaintiffs’ expert, Barshak, was adopted and that of defendants’ expert rejected, the court further accepting present legal rates as an “appropriate means to compensate counsel for the delay in fee payment”; and (6) other factors — the results obtained, skill of counsel, unattractiveness and contingent nature of the litigation — do not require an upward adjustment in the lodestar. The court accordingly made a total award of fees and costs in the amount of $1,467,242.43. 638 F.Supp. 934 (D.Mass.1986).

There are three issues that merit discussion: (I) whether the district court’s finding that plaintiffs were “prevailing parties” is supportable under the teaching of Hensley v. Eckerkart, 461 U.S. 424, 103 S.Ct. 1933, 76 L.Ed.2d 40 (1983); (II) whether the Commonwealth enjoys an Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity precluding adoption of current legal hourly rates to compensate for delay in payment of the fee award under the teaching of Library of Congress *25 v. Shaw, — U.S.-, 106 S.Ct. 2957, 92 L.Ed.2d 950 (1986); (III) whether the district court’s lodestar findings as to time spent and hourly rates are supportable.

I. Prevailing Parties

In assessing whether the district court exercised its discretion appropriately, we look first to Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424, 434-435, 103 S.Ct. 1933, 1939-40, 76 L.Ed.2d 40 (1983):

Many civil rights cases will present only a single claim. In other cases the plaintiff's claims for relief will involve a common core of facts or will be based on related legal theories. Much of counsel’s time will be devoted generally to the litigation as a whole, making it difficult to divide the hours expended on a claim-by-claim basis. Such a lawsuit cannot be viewed as a series of discrete claims. Instead the district court should focus on the significance of the overall relief obtained by the plaintiff in relation to the hours reasonably expended on the litigation.

Particularly pertinent to this case are the following comments by the Court:

We agree with the District Court’s rejection of “a mathematical approach comparing the total number of issues in the case with those actually prevailed upon.” Such a ratio provides little aid in determining what is a reasonable fee in light of all the relevant factors. Nor is it necessarily significant that a prevailing plaintiff did not receive all the relief requested. For example, a plaintiff who failed to recover damages but obtained injunctive relief, or vice versa, may recover a fee award based on all hours reasonably expended if the relief obtained justified that expenditure of attorney time.

461 U.S. at 435-36 n. 11, 103 S.Ct. at 1940-41 n. 11 (citation omitted).

In this case plaintiffs’ counsel coded all their time and deleted some 363 hours spent on damage issues wholly unrelated to claims for injunctive relief. Research of the law dealing with the good faith immunity defense to the federal damage claims was an example. Although defendants express amazement that out of more than 10,000 hours, so little a portion could so be spent, we have no basis for faulting the district court’s finding in effect that most of the evidence relevant to damage claims was also necessary to justify injunctive relief. The district court’s conclusion remarkably paralleled those of the district court that were upheld in Riverside v. Rivera, — U.S. -, 106 S.Ct. 2686, 91 L.Ed.2d 466 (1986). 2

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Bluebook (online)
821 F.2d 22, 1987 U.S. App. LEXIS 7511, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/rubie-rogers-v-robert-okin-ca1-1987.