Carl Culp v Scott CaudillCarl Culp v Scott Caudill
*1 Before R OVNER , H AMILTON and S CUDDER , Circuit Judges . R OVNER , Circuit Judge . Carl and Roberta Culp filed suit al- leging federal and state law claims against the defendants in- cluding: claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against Fort Wayne and Allen County police officers of excessive force in viola- tion of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments; Indiana state law claims of intentional infliction of emotional distress, neg- ligent infliction of emotional distress, assault and battery, and criminal mischief against defendants Whitney Woods and Stevan Schulien; and claims against all defendants alleging vi- olations of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act (“ADA”). The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the defendants on nearly all of the claims, leaving for trial only Carl Culp’s § 1983 excessive force claim against Fort Wayne Police Officers Woods and Schulien, and the state law claims by both Carl and Roberta Culp against Woods and Schulien. A jury subsequently re- turned a verdict in favor of the defendants as to all claims ex- cept the state law count of battery brought by Roberta Culp against defendant Woods. As to that claim, the jury found in favor of Roberta Culp, awarding her nominal damages of $1. The Culps appealed, arguing that the district court erred in granting summary judgment to the defendants. Defendants Wood and Schulien cross-appealed, challenging the court’s decision not to award costs to them.
The claims in this case arose out of an incident involving the plaintiffs and the defendants on August 20, 2018, which we will only briefly relate so as to provide context for the is- sues on appeal. On that day, Carl Culp attended an office ap- pointment with his psychiatrist at PPG Mind-Body Medicine in Fort Wayne, Indiana. During that appointment, he ex- pressed to Nurse Practitioner Glassley that he had a plan to commit suicide using a box cutter. He refused to grant Glass- ley permission to speak to his wife for safety assurance and also refused to go to the hospital. Glassley consulted with the 3 psychiatrist and then contacted the Fort Wayne Police Depart- ment’s Crisis Intervention Team. In the meantime, Carl [1] de- cided he did not want to continue to talk with Glassley further and left the office in his wheelchair, which he used because he was a double amputee.
When the Fort Wayne officers arrived at the scene, it was raining heavily, and they observed Carl load his wheelchair into his Ford Escape and then walk, using his prosthetic legs, around the car to the passenger seat. They approached Carl while he was proceeding to the passenger door and asked to speak to him, but he refused and proceeded to enter the car and sit in the passenger seat. The situation escalated at that point. When asked to exit the vehicle, Carl told the officers he “would like to see you try” to get him out of the car and braced himself with the steering wheel. According to the Culps, an officer at one point stated to him that “we don’t want to beat the ass of a handicap [sic] man.” The officers used increasing physical force to try to remove him from the car, culminating in the use of a taser that was without effect, and then the use of pepper spray. At some point during the increasingly violent confrontation, Carl’s wife Roberta asked Carl “why don’t you get out of the vehicle?” She exited along with their dog after pepper spray was deployed, and eventu- ally Carl was physically removed from the vehicle by the of- ficers. The Culps brought suit against the officers who had ar- rived at the scene and were involved in the physical confron- tation, as well as other Fort Wayne officers and officers from Allen County who arrived after Carl was handcuffed. The Culps first argue that the district court improperly granted summary judgment to the Fort Wayne defendants on all counts because the supporting brief for those defendants failed to include citations to the facts that they claimed were undisputed. For this argument, they rely on the district court’s local rules, which at the relevant time stated that “[t]he brief supporting a summary judgment motion or the brief’s appendix must include a section labeled ‘Statement of Mate- rial Facts’ that identifies the facts that the moving party con- tends are not genuinely disputed.” U.S. Dist. Ct. for the Northern Dist. Ind. Rule 56.1(a), eff. 1-1-2012 (“Local Rule”) (subsequently amended). The defendants’ brief in favor of summary judgment included in its appendix a document en- titled Local Rule 56.1 Statement of Undisputed Material Facts, which set forth in detail the undisputed facts, but Culp asserts that the brief in support of summary judgment did not con- tain specific cites beyond referring the court to that document. The Culps argue that such a presentation and use of undis- puted facts violates the Local Rule and that the district court should have denied summary judgment on that basis. They argue that courts are not required to scour the record to de- termine whether claims have sufficient factual and legal sup- port, and that motions that fail to comply with Local Rule 56.1 are subject to denial.
That argument is upended by the plain language of the
Local Rule cited by the Culps. The Local Rule at that time ex-
plicitly provided that “
[t]he brief
supporting a summary judg-
ment motion
or the brief’s appendix
” must include the state-
ment of undisputed fact, thus allowing the use of the appen-
dix challenged here. (emphasis added) Local Rule 56.1(a) eff.
1-1-2012. That comports with the statements by other district
courts addressing that version of the local rule, recognizing
that the required statement of material facts can be set forth
in either the memorandum or in the appendix accompanying
the summary judgment motion. See
Graves v. Job Works, Inc.
,
The Culps also assert that the district court improperly
granted summary judgment as to both the Fort Wayne Police
Department and the Allen County Sheriff’s Department de-
fendants as to Carl’s claims under Title II of the Americans
with Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. § 12131 et seq., and under sec-
tion 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 794. The Reha-
bilitation Act provides that “[n]o otherwise qualified individ-
ual with a disability in the United States … shall, solely by
reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the participa-
tion in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimi-
nation under any program or activity receiving Federal finan-
cial assistance ….” 29 U.S.C. § 794(a). Similarly, Title II of the
ADA provides that “no qualified individual with a disability
shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from partici-
pation in or be denied the benefits of the services, programs,
or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimina-
tion by any such entity.” 42 U.S.C. § 12132. The term “public
entity” under the ADA includes state or local governments
and their departments, agencies, special purpose districts or
other instrumentalities. 42 U.S.C. § 12131(1). This appeal does
not question summary judgment as to the individual officers
on these claims, but rather challenges summary judgment as
to the Fort Wayne Police Department and Allen County Sher-
iff’s Department, both departments of local government. We
have recognized that “[c]laims under § 504 of the Rehabilita-
tion Act are treated as ‘functionally identical’ and can be con-
sidered together with Title II claims.”
King v. Hendricks County
Commissioners
,
Carl Culp claims that the Fort Wayne and Allen County defendants violated Title II in the course of the interaction with Carl. The Culps argue that compensatory damages are recoverable where intentional discrimination is shown, and that our court has held that intentional discrimination can be established by showing deliberate indifference. See Lacy v. Cook Cty ., Ill. , 897 F.3d 847, 863 (7th Cir. 2018). We have adopted the two-part standard for establishing deliberate in- difference, requiring both “(1) knowledge that a harm to a federally protected right is substantially likely, and (2) a fail- ure to act upon that likelihood.” (internal quotation marks omitted) Id .
As we recognized in
King
, “[w]hether Title II applies to
law enforcement investigations and arrests, and if so to what
extent, is an open question in this circuit.” 954 F.3d at 988.
Similarly, the applicability of Title II has not yet been decided
in the Supreme Court, and the circuits diverge on this issue.
See
City and County of San Francisco, Calif. v. Sheehan
, 575 U.S.
600 (2015) (granting cert. to decide the issue but then dismiss-
ing it as improvidently granted after San Francisco changed
its argument);
King
,
As in
King
, we assume for the purposes of this opinion,
without deciding, that Title II applies to the officers’ interac-
tions, that the governmental unit can be held vicariously lia-
ble for the actions of individual officers, and that deliberate
indifference is the appropriate standard by which to analyze
the institutional defendants’ conduct.
Id
. at 989; see also
Gray
v. Cummings
,
The Culps argue that courts have identified two ways in which a police officer may violate the Rehabilitation Act and the ADA in executing an arrest—wrongful arrest and failure to accommodate. They argue that under the wrongful arrest theory, a violation exists when the police officer wrongfully arrests someone with a disability because they misperceived the effects of that disability as criminal activity. They argue that the second theory is the accommodations theory, under which a violation exists when an officer properly arrests someone with a disability for actions unrelated to that disa- bility but fails to reasonably accommodate the person’s disa- bility in the course of the arrest causing the person to suffer greater indignity in the process than other arrestees. The Culps assert that the wrongful arrest theory does not apply here, and rely only on the accommodations theory.
As in King , the evidence in this case falls short of the legal standard for demonstrating an ADA or Rehabilitation Act vi- olation. There is no evidence that the actions of the police were even related to Carl’s disability, nor is there evidence that but for the disability the actions by the officers would have been different. The only connection that the Culps iden- tified was the statement by the officer for Carl to comply and that they did not want to beat a handicapped man. That at best establishes their awareness of his disability. But that was not at issue, because it is undisputed that they saw him when he was in a wheelchair near his car, and saw him put on his prosthetic legs, stand, place his wheelchair in the trunk, walk around the car to the door, and—ignoring their requests to stop and talk—enter the car. The officers were aware of his disability but were also aware that he was capable of walking, lifting, and sitting with the prosthetic legs. Furthermore, when Carl refused the officers’ commands to cooperate and exit the car, Carl’s wife asked him why he did not get out of the car, thus further indicating to them that Carl was capable of doing so and that the obstacle was not any physical limita- tion related to his disability. Carl failed to present evidence of discrimination and also failed to present any evidence of a failure to provide a reasonable accommodation. In fact, Carl did not even request any accommodation. He never sug- gested to the police that his reluctance to exit the vehicle was related to his disability and that he needed an accommodation to do so. And he was out of the vehicle when he was first ap- proached by the officers and first refused to comply with their request, thus evidencing that his oppositional conduct was unrelated to his ability to navigate into and out of his vehicle with his disability but rather was related to some other cause. He further argues that when he was arrested his prosthetic legs were damaged and mishandled by the officers, and that the officers failed to accommodate him because he told the of- ficers the legs were not meant to get wet and they paid no attention. The district court noted that the legs had already gotten wet when Carl walked in the rain with them, and properly held that the statement that the legs were not meant to get wet without more was inadequate to constitute a re- quest for a reasonable accommodation or to evidence an act of deliberate indifference. We thus need not decide the ap- plicability of the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act to the ac- tions of law enforcement, because even if we assume the ap- plicability, the evidence demonstrates no violation.
Finally, in their cross-appeal, the defendants argue that
the district court erred in refusing to award them costs. Before
the district court, both parties sought an award of costs under
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(d), which provides that
“[u]nless a federal statute, these rules, or a court order pro-
vides otherwise, costs—other than attorney’s fees—should be
allowed to the prevailing party.” That creates a presumption
in favor of awarding costs to the prevailing party, which is a
party that has prevailed on a substantial part of the litigation
even if the party did not succeed on every claim.
Fed. R. Civ. P. 54(d)(1);
Baker v. Lindgren
, 856 F.3d 498, 502
(7th Cir. 2017). The district court noted that the presumption
of awarding costs to a prevailing party can be overcome, how-
ever, and that one situation in which it is often overcome is
when the case results in a mixed outcome, where each side
prevails in some respects. Dist. Order at 7, App. 31, citing
Testa v. Village of Mundelein, Ill.
,
Only the defendants appeal that decision. The defendants, Officers Schulien and Woods, argue that they are the prevail- ing parties in this case and that the district court should have awarded costs to them against the Culps. That is the relief they sought in the court below as well.
On appeal, our review is highly deferential, limited to a
determination as to whether the district court abused its dis-
cretion in determining that neither party would be awarded
costs. The prevailing party in a case is entitled to an award of
costs, but here the results were split. On numerous issues, the
defendants prevailed, but as to the state law battery claim
Roberta Culp prevailed and was awarded nominal damages
in the amount of $1. Even nominal damages have been con-
sidered enough to support a designation as a prevailing party,
and therefore provide the basis for the award of costs to that
party. See generally 10 Charles Alan Wright & Arthur R. Mil-
ler, 10 Federal Practice & Procedure § 2667 (4th ed. 2025);
Buckhannon Bd. & Care Home, Inc. v. W. Virginia Dept. of Health
and Human Resources
,
Accordingly, the decision of the district court is AFFIRMED.
Notes
[1] In order to differentiate between Carl Culp and his wife Roberta Culp, we refer to them by their first names.