Alejandro MARTINEZ, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. THE PORT AUTHORITY OF NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY, Paul Nunziato, Shield # 865, and Patrick Callaghan, Shield # 816, Defendants-Appellants.
Docket No. 04-6636 CV.
United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.
Decided: April 13, 2006.
445 F.3d 158
Before: CABRANES, SOTOMAYOR, and RAGGI, Circuit Judges.
Argued: April 5, 2006.
Joan F. Bennett (Milton H. Pachter, Carlene V. McIntyre, Thomas M. Hoey, Jr., on the brief), New York, NY, for Defendants-Appellants.
PER CURIAM.
Defendants-appellants, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (“Port Authority“) and police officers Paul Nunziato and Patrick Callaghan, appeal the November 7, 2005 judgment of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (P. Kevin Castel, Judge) awarding plaintiff-appellee Alejandro Martinez $464,000 in damages on his false arrest and malicious prosecution claims, after plaintiff accepted a remittitur of the $1,104,000 in damages awarded by the jury. We assume the parties’ familiarity with the underlying facts and procedural history, and set forth only those facts necessary to resolve the appeal.
Plaintiff brought the instant action claiming false arrest and malicious prosecution under
Based on our assessment of the parties’ submissions, the applicable case law, and the record on appeal, we conclude that defendants’ claims are without merit. The District Court‘s remittitur of the damages awarded on plaintiff‘s false arrest claim from $1,000,000 to $360,000 — combined with the Court‘s decision not to remit the $100,000 in damages on plaintiff‘s malicious prosecution claim — brought the damages awarded to plaintiff on both claims within, even if at the high end of, the broad range of awards authorized in similar, even if not wholly identical, cases. See Martinez v. Port Auth., 2005 WL 2143333, at *20-*21 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 2, 2005) (collecting and comparing cases). Where, as here, the District Court has “use[d] the least intrusive standard for calculating a remittitur” — namely, “remit[ting] the jury‘s award only to the maximum amount that would be upheld by the district court as not excessive,” Earl v. Bouchard Transp. Co., 917 F.2d 1320, 1330 (2d Cir.1990) (emphasis added) — our review on appeal is especially deferential. See id. at 1329 (“[A]n appellate court should be more willing to defer to a district court‘s remittitur the more the district court‘s standard for calculating the remittitur was faithful to the jury‘s apparent intent.“); see also id. at 1330 n. 8 (same); Gasperini v. Ctr. for Humanities, Inc., 149 F.3d 137, 142 (2d Cir.1998) (“[T]he federal system places primary responsibility for conducting this [remittitur] analysis in the district court. We cannot set aside its fairly-reasoned decision merely because we might disagree with the outcome it reached, or because, if it were left to us, we might decide the matter differently.“).
Applying this deferential standard of review, we conclude that defendants have failed to establish that the District Court, in conducting its remittitur analysis, reached clearly erroneous findings of fact, committed legal error, or otherwise abused its discretion. Defendants’ contention, for example, that the District Court “did not take into account the totality and nature of plaintiff‘s injuries,” Defs.’ Br. at 29, is belied by the Court‘s own decision, which acknowledged that plaintiff had not been “subjected to physical assault,” but concluded, in due deference to the jury‘s verdict, that plaintiff had nevertheless “experienced considerable anguish because of his arrest . . . includ[ing] sleeplessness, loss of appetite, anxiety bouts, cessation of social, volunteer, and church activities, ideations of suicide, and concerns about his immigration status,”
Finally, in upholding separate damage awards for the emotional injuries that plaintiff sustained with respect to his false arrest and malicious prosecution claims, the District Court did not sanction the awarding of duplicative compensatory damage awards. As the District Court made clear in its remittitur order, plaintiff sustained emotional distress from his malicious prosecution claim — as manifested in his feelings of “desperat[ion]” while undergoing trial on a “highly stigmatizing charge” and his response to the “intimidating conduct” of officer Nunziato while plaintiff was en route to a court appearance, Martinez, 2005 WL 2143333, at *22 — in a manner that was sufficiently distinct as to support a separate award of damages. Cf. Bender, 78 F.3d at 794 (indicating that “the omission of any instruction to avoid totally or partially overlapping awards” may be excused “where a plaintiff‘s claims allege entirely distinct injuries,” but not where “the injuries from the various claims are substantially overlapping“). Although it would have been preferable had the District Court specifically instructed the jury to avoid duplicative damage awards in this case,1 defendants have failed to establish “with any degree of certainty” that such double-counting actually or likely occurred in this particular case. See Gentile v. County of Suffolk, 926 F.2d 142, 154 (2d Cir.1991).
For the reasons stated above, we conclude that the District Court did not abuse its discretion in calculating the appropriate amount of damages to award plaintiff under the facts and circumstances of this case. Accordingly, the judgment of the District Court is hereby AFFIRMED.