Opinion
Case No. 2:08-cv-0452.
February 25, 2011
OPINION AND ORDER
Jeremy Garrett, a state prisoner, has filed an action in his capacity as the surviving spouse of Barbara Jean Garrett, who died on May 10, 2006. The effective filing date of the complaint is May 6, 2008. Mr. Garrett's complaint asserts causes of action against the Belmont County Sheriff's Department and the Belmont County Jail, claiming that they violated Ms. Garrett's Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. Fairly read, his complaint also includes wrongful death claims asserted under state law.
The defendants filed a motion to dismiss on the basis of the statute of limitations, which was subsequently supported by an affidavit. The Court elected to treat the motion as one for summary judgment and allowed Mr. Garrett to file evidence in response. On January 10, 2011, the Magistrate Judge recommended granting the motion as it pertains to the federal law claims, and dismissing any state law claims without prejudice. Mr. Garrett has filed objections. For the following reasons, his objections will be overruled and the Court will adopt the recommendation to dismiss the case.
I.
The Report and Recommendation sets forth the correct legal standard for analyzing a summary judgment motion and Mr. Garrett has not objected to that part of the Report and Recommendation. Further, with respect to the precise issue raised by defendants' motion, the relevant facts — which include the last date on which the named defendants had any interaction with Ms. Garrett, the date of her death, and the date the complaint was filed — are not in dispute. The Court reviews the Magistrate Judge's conclusion concerning the statute of limitations de novo. 28 U.S.C. § 636(b)(1)(B); Fed.R.Civ.P. 72(b)(3).
II.
The rough sequence of facts leading up to Ms. Garrett's suicide are that she was arrested and held in the Belmont County Jail; she was released on bond from that facility; she was then admitted to a mental institution; she was later released from that facility as well; and she eventually committed suicide. The complaint alleges that the failure of officials at the Belmont County Jail to give her adequate medical attention while she was there — or to provide her such attention while she was out on bond — was a direct cause of her suicide.
The affidavit submitted by defendants in support of their summary judgment motion provides a more precise time line for some of these events. According to that affidavit, Ms. Garrett was incarcerated in the Belmont County Jail from February 11, 2006, until February 24, 2006. She posted a surety bond on that date. If, as Mr. Garrett alleges, she was committed to a mental hospital later and then released, neither the jail officials nor the Sheriff had any connection with that. Consequently, the last time the defendants could have done anything to violate Ms. Garrett's constitutional rights would have been February 24, 2006, a date more than two years before Mr. Garrett filed suit. Mr. Garrett does not dispute any of these facts, but argues that all of his claims, including the § 1983 claims, accrued on the date of his wife's death and not before. He filed his complaint within two years of that date.
III.
As Mr. Garrett has phrased his objections, he asserts, first, that his federal constitutional claims and his wrongful death claim asserted under Ohio law are "inextricably bound to each other" so that they comprise a single legal claim rather than two separate claims. He therefore argues that the wrongful death statute of limitations should apply to his claims under § 1983. Even if the Court did not accept that argument, Mr. Garrett asserts that under the "discovery rule" applicable to the limitations period for his federal claims, he did not and could not reasonably have discovered the basis for those claims until, at the earliest, the date of his wife's death. Neither of those arguments is persuasive.
It is beyond dispute that the statute of limitations for claims arising under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 is the two-year statute of limitations found in Ohio Rev. Code § 2305.10. Browning v. Pendleton, 869 F.2d 989 (6th Cir. 1989). The question here is not so much how long the limitations period is, but when it began to run. Although state law provides this limitations period, federal law governs when a claim for damages under § 1983 accrues — that is, federal law defines the date on which the statute of limitations begins to run. See Kuhnle Bros., Inc. v. County of Geauga, 103 F.3d 516, 520 (6th Cir. 1997).
Choosing the date of death as the triggering event for the limitations period certainly has some surface appeal. In fact, for a state law claim in Ohio based upon wrongful death, that is the correct date. See Ohio Rev. Code 2125.02(D); but see also Collins v. Sotka, 81 Ohio St. 3d 506 (1998) (holding that under certain circumstances, it may accrue later than that date). But Ohio law does not control here, and § 2125.02(D) is not the applicable limitations provision. The key question for this case is how the federal courts have dealt with the situation where a person was injured by a violation of his or her constitutional rights on a date prior to a death which allegedly grew out of that violation. In those cases, most courts have required the suit to be filed within two years (if that is the applicable limitations period) from the date of the constitutional violations, and not from the date of death.
Perhaps the most striking application of this rule is found inLockhart v. Government of Virgin Islands, 2009 WL 812266 (D. V.I. March 26, 2009). In that case, the plaintiff's decedent was shot by police officers shortly before midnight on August 12, 2003. He died precisely at midnight, which was on August 13, 2003. Plaintiffs filed their complaint on August 15, 2005. Had the statute begun to run on August 13, 2003, the date of death, the complaint would have been timely filed because August 13, 2005 fell on a Saturday, so that the next business day was Monday, August 15, 2005, the date of filing. However, the court held that the federal cause of action accrued on August 12, 2003, the date of the shooting, because the federal cause of action for unlawful use of excessive force was "complete" on that date and "the exact time of [the decedent's] death [was] irrelevant and immaterial to the accrual of his § 1983 claim." Id. at *6. That claim was therefore dismissed on limitations grounds.
A similar result was reached in Ferderbar v. County of Allegheny, 2006 WL 909478 (W.D. Pa. April 7, 2006). The decedent in that case was shot by a police officer (who was also her ex-boyfriend) on October 29, 2003. She died of her injuries five days later. Prior to the date of the shooting, the officer had, on several occasions, and with the help of other officers, improperly accessed data from the county's 911 system in order to locate the victim. The victim's personal representative filed suit on November 2, 2005, within two years of the date of death, asserting, among other claims, causes of action under § 1983. The court, again using federal law to determine the accrual date of the § 1983 claims, noted that its "review of plaintiff's complaint clearly establishes that the facts upon which the Section 1983 claims in this case are predicated all occurred on or before October 29, 2003, the date on which plaintiff's decedent was shot. . . . Thus, the Section 1983 claims accrued no later than October 29, 2003." Id. at *3.
The Ferderbar court based its conclusion, at least in part, on the reasoning employed in Goodhand v. United States, 40 F.3d 209 (7th Cir. 1994), which was a case brought under the Federal Tort Claims Act, 28 U.S.C. §§ 2671 et seq. alleging medical malpractice on the part of doctors at an Air Force hospital. Plaintiff did not submit an administrative claim until more than two years after the events in question, and argued that her suit was timely because she did not actually appreciate the full extent of her injuries until a date less that two years prior to suit. The court held that, as a "general principle of limitations law," "[t]he statute of limitations begins to run upon the discovery of the injury, even if the full extent of the injury is not discovered until much later." Goodhand, 40 F.3d at 212. Otherwise, every worsening of a known injury could be used as a basis for extending the running of the statute of limitations.
Brockman v. Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice, 2010 WL 3926860 (5th Cir. September 30, 2010), involves a set of facts which are extremely similar to the ones presented by Mr. Garrett's complaint. That was also a suicide case; the decedent hanged himself while in prison. He died on January 5, 2006, and his mother, in her capacity as his personal representative, filed suit on January 4, 2008. She claimed, among other things, that the suicide was the culmination of a series of earlier events, all of which she characterized as deliberate indifference to his serious medical need (bipolar disorder). In particular, she asserted that her son's jailers had ignored his condition, refused him treatment, and denied him medications. She claimed that just a month before he hanged himself, jail officials had declared him to be a "low suicide risk" and took no precautions to prevent his eventual death.
That court was also faced with the question of when a federal cause of action accrued for these events — the date on which each instance of alleged deliberate indifference occurred, or the date on which the decedent finally committed suicide. The court chose the earlier date, holding that any claims arising out of events which took place before January 4, 2006 (two years prior to the filing of the complaint) were time-barred. The court reasoned that the decedent could have known of these events on the day they occurred, and that under the usual federal rule defining the accrual of a cause of action — that a claim accrues "`when the plaintiff knows or has reason to know of the injury which is the basis of the action'" — the decedent (or his personal representative, standing in his stead) had only two years from the date of each separate occurrence to file suit.Brockman, 2010 WL 3926860, *3, quoting, inter alia, Jackson v. Johnson, 950 F.2d 263, 265 (5th Cir. 1992). It is important to point out that the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has adopted the same rule, tied to the date when the injured party knows or has reason to know of the injury, for deciding when a § 1983 claim accrues. See Sevier v. Turner, 742 F.2d 262, 273 (6th Cir. 1984).
There is at least one decision which seems to suggest a contrary result. Camps v. City of Warner Robins, 822 F.Supp. 724 (M.D. Ga. 1993), involved an attempted jail suicide. The plaintiffs claimed that a pattern of deliberate indifference to the injured party's serious medical and psychiatric needs eventually led to the suicide attempt. They filed a suit which, if the claims ran from the date of the suicide attempt, was timely. The court denied a motion to dismiss on statute of limitations grounds, doing so because it concluded that "under Georgia law, a personal injury claim cannot be brought until one suffers an injury." Id. at 730. However, that decision appears to have looked to state law to determine when a § 1983 cause of action accrues, which is clearly inconsistent with the rule applicable in this (and most) circuits, which is that federal law provides the answer to this question.
The great weight of federal authority favors a finding that, at least with respect to any action or inaction on the part of the defendants named in this case — the Belmont County Sheriff's Office and Jail — Ms. Garrett's claims under § 1983 accrued at the latest on February 24, 2006, when she was released from the jail on a surety bond. If she had been denied medical attention for any type of psychiatric condition by the jailers or the Sheriff while she was incarcerated, she would have known it by then. Perhaps it is true that, as Mr. Garrett alleges, this lack of treatment made her condition worse, and that it was one link in the chain of events that led to her suicide on May 10, 2006. However, as the Court of Appeals requires this Court to do, the Court has "looked to what event should have alerted the typical lay person to protect his or her rights." Dixon v. Anderson, 928 F.2d 212, 215 (6th Cir. 1991). Here, a lay person either would, or should, have known by February 24, 2006 that she had not been provided adequate treatment by the jail or Sheriff's office personnel during the time of her incarceration. How that lack of treatment (assuming that it occurred as Mr. Garrett has alleged) ultimately affected Ms. Garrett is not the issue here; as the decisions cited above hold, once the injury has occurred, any later events which make it worse are not relevant for limitations purposes.
Sometimes the dismissal of a case on limitations grounds may seem harsh, because the statute of limitations, by definition, operates to prevent litigants with even the most meritorious and sympathetic claims from having their cases heard if they have filed them too late. Here, however, had Mr. Garrett wished to file his § 1983 claims against these defendants within two years of the date his wife was released from the Belmont County Jail, he could have done so. He knew for more than one year and nine months before the statute of limitations expired that she had committed suicide and he could easily have chosen to file his suit three months earlier than he did. Also, the dismissal of this case will not affect his ability to pursue a wrongful death action against these defendants under state law in the state courts, because that claim will be dismissed without prejudice. Therefore, he still has remedies available to him, should he wish to pursue them, to seek recovery for what he believes to be the wrongful actions which led to the death of Ms. Garrett. If he does so, he will, of course, be subject to whatever merits-based or immunity-based defenses the defendants may have available to them on his state law claims. Retaining the wrongful death claim in this Court would not change that result, however, because if that claim remained pending here (and for the reasons set forth in the Report and Recommendation concerning the exercise of supplemental jurisdiction, it should not), the Court would be bound to apply the same state law rules to the claim as would an Ohio court. See Haynes v. Marshall, 887 F.2d 700 (6th Cir. 1989). Thus, it would be imprudent for the Court to retain jurisdiction over the state law claim once the federal law claims are dismissed. See 28 U.S.C. § 1367(c)(3).
IV.
For the reasons set forth in this Opinion and Order, the Court OVERRULES the objections filed by Mr. Garrett (#32) and ADOPTS the Report and Recommendation (#28). Defendants' motion for summary judgment (#20) is GRANTED. All of plaintiff's claims asserted under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 are DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE. Any state law claims are DISMISSED WITHOUT PREJUDICE. The Clerk is directed to enter a judgment terminating this case.
It is so ORDERED.
DATE: February 25, 2011