Negron-Almeda, et al v. PR Trade and Export. Nos. 07-2013, 07-2140. This was a Puerto Rican political discrimination suit. The plaintiff won. The District Court granted reinstatement and backpay and didn’t let the agency intervene (as of right) because it was filed late in the proceedings. More later.
This was a Puerto Rican political discrimination suit under 1983. From what I can tell, the Puerto Rican culture revolves around political discrimination. I don’t think they do anything else down there.
Anyway, he plaintiff won. The District Court granted reinstatement and backpay and didn’t let a successor defendant agency intervene (as of right) because it was filed late in the proceedings.
Earlier on, the official capacity claims were dismissed on summary judgment, which is strange, because it looked like the plaintiffs were seeking injunctive relief. Then, at trial, the District Court granted judgment as a matter of law the individual capacity claims against some of the defendants. In an earlier appeal, the First reversed, and they retried the case.
After the second trial, the District Court issued a decree providing for reinstatement anc back pay, and nothing that “it was never its intention to bar Plaintiffs from seeking and obtaining equitable relief at the time of the [2004] dismissal of their monetary claims against Defendants in their official capacities.” That doesn’t make sense. The defendants moved for some clarification as it seemed like the court was ordering some kind of retrospective relief. The District Court said that the defendants were entitled to qualified immunity and therefore the caselaw on whether “backpay could not be awarded against an individual employee but only against an employer.” The successor agent said it should be able to intervene because any award of back pay would be against it. The District Court said the motion to intervene was untimely.
The First says that the agency’s motion to intervene should have been granted. It says that the District Court, got overly hung up on the timing of the motion and didn’t seem to care about the other FRCP 24(a)(2) factors. The First points out that the 2004 order was confusing and ambiguous and screwed everyone up, because the defendants were under the impression that the claims for reinstatement were no longer moving forward.
More interesting is an argument that they had an implicit cause of action under Ex parte Young, 209 U.S. 123 (1908) . This was advanced by the plaintiffs at oral argument, but the First says that this wasn’t contained in the pleadings and it was waived anyway.
The First also says that the motion to intervene, made a month after the grant of equitable relief wasn’t too late, given the circumstances. So, the successor agency should have been able to intervene.
On the merits of the backpay, the First takes it away. The First reasons that “It is settled law in the federal courts that backpay as such cannot be awarded against a defendant in his or her individual capacity...backpay is an award against an employer and, thus, any demand for backpay from an individual-capacity defendant is a non-sequitur...a suit for backpay, even one brought under a tort-like cause of action such as that supplied by section 1983, necessarily stems from the contract of hire — a contract to which the individual-capacity defendant was never a party.” The First says this applies to retirement contributions as well. Then, it tries to rebut the inevitable firestorm of snarky comments from the hundreds of blogs that focus on the First Circuit:
Lest the cynical among us suggest that cold logic has robbed the plaintiffs of their just desserts, we hasten to add that this rule is in no way inequitable. While backpay as such cannot be imposed upon an individual-capacity defendant, a successful plaintiff is nonetheless entitled to receive compensatory damages against such a defendant. Properly proven, those damages will equal the grand total of the plaintiff's aggregate lost wages and benefits.
Finally, the First ends by saying that the plaintiffs can and should try and vacate that earlier confusing summary judgment order.
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