Estate of Isaiah Andrews v. City of Cleveland, OhioEstate of Isaiah Andrews v. City of Cleveland, Ohio
COUNSEL
SUTTON, C.J., delivered the opinion of the court in which BUSH, J., joined. CLAY, J. (pp. 14–21), delivered a separate opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part.
_________________OPINION
_________________SUTTON, Chief Judgе. Isaiah Andrews spent nearly 46 years in prison for the alleged 1974 murder of his wife. After an Ohio court determined that the government failed to turn over key exculpatory evidence, Ohio granted Andrews a new trial, and a new jury found him not guilty. He filed a
I.
Sometime between 7:00 am and 2:00 pm on September 18, 1974, someone fatally stabbed Regina Andrews. Cleveland police found her body in a park wrapped in bed linens. The scene offered sоme clues. A nearby newspaper showed a bloody palm print, and a blood-stained pillowcase carried a tag from Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge.
Officers went to the Howard Johnson’s motel. The desk clerk told police that bed linens were missing from the room of Willie Watts. The next morning, police arrested Watts for Regina’s murder. His custody did not last long. The police released Watts after he established an alibi for the morning of September 18.
The police identified Regina’s husband, Isaiah Andrews, as another suspect. No physical evidence linked him to the scene. But the State had recently released Andrews for a previous murder, he admitted to arguing with Regina shortly before her death, and his polygraph results and alibi did not add up. An Ohio grand jury indicted Andrews for murder, and a jury found him guilty in 1975. He received a life sentence.
During the next 45 years, Andrews periodically pursued postconviction relief in state court. In 2020, the State granted Andrews a new trial after finding that he never received exculpatory evidence concerning Watts. In October 2021, the new jury found Andrews not guilty.
On February 14, 2022, Andrews filed this
The district court ruled as a matter of law for all of the defendants. It dismissed the claims against the Hubbard and Rowell estates because Andrews had waited too long to bring his claims against them. See
II.
Andrews’ estate argues that the district court erred in dismissing the
Federal civil rights laws play a key role in the balance between national and state authority. Perhaps the most pivotal of these laws,
In thinking about whether federal law incorporates state law with respect to a cause of action, three questions come into play. Does a “suitable federal rule exist[]” or has Congress left a gap for state law to fill? Wilson v. Garcia, 471 U.S. 261, 267 (1985) (quotation omitted). If a gap exists, what is the “most analogous” state rule? Id. at 267–68. Is the state rule “inconsistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States”? Id. at 267 (quotation omitted).
As to the first question, federal law does not tell us what to do when a plaintiff or a defendant in a
As to the second question, we look to the forum State, Ohio, to determine how to proceed. “All creditors having claims against an estate,” Ohio law says, must present their claims “within six months after the death of the decedent.”
As to the third question, these Ohio principles are not “inconsistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States.” It is not inconsistent with federal policy for a State to say that a cause of action abates when a party dies, or to forbid the substitution of the deceased with their personal representative. Robertson, 436 U.S. at 590–92; see also Moor v. Alameda County, 411 U.S. 693, 702 n.14 (1973). Confirming the point, several federal statutes “take the same approach” to survival and do not allow the substitution of a deceased party’s personal representative. Robertson, 436 U.S. at 592 n.8.
The greater state power upheld in Robertson—to end a cause of action based on the claimant’s death—includes the lesser power to require the timely presentation of claims before proceeding against an estate administrator. As in Robertson, Ohio law leaves open the possibility that claims might survive against parties other than the deceased’s personal representatives—here to account for the deaths of Hubbard and Rowell in 2009 and 2015. See
Put another way, once an estate has been wrapped up and a final distribution has been made, Ohio law allows a creditor with a contingent claim to proceed directly “against the distributees of the decedent’s estate” without presentation to them or to the estate administrators.
Under Ohio law, Andrews may not maintain this
Andrews mounts several responses, one under Ohio law, a few under federal law.
Pointing to Ohio law, Andrews argues that he did not bring a “claim[] against an estate,”
What’s more, even if Andrews did obtain a judgment against Hubbard and Rowell, it’s not clear that the City would indemnify them. Put to one side the argument that, under Ohio law, a political subdivision must indemnify “the employee[s],” not necessarily their estates.
As to federal law, Andrews argues that Ohio’s estate administration deadlines violate “the Constitution and laws of the United States” because they stand as an obstacle to prevailing in a federal civil rights claim.
But a statute does not become “‘inconsistent’ with federal law merely because the statute causes the plaintiff to lose the litigation.” Robertson, 436 U.S. at 593. And neither Burnett nor Felder supports his theory.
Felder is afield in other ways. It concluded that
In telling contrast, the relevant Ohio law applies to all lawsuits and serves to further the efficient, timely, and fair administration of estates, something federal and state law have long promoted. See In re Broderick’s Will, 88 U.S. at 509; In re Natherson’s Estate, 134 N.E.2d 852, 855 (Ohio Ct. App. 1956); The Ohio Sav. Ass’n v. Friedman, No. 40001, 1980 WL 354413, at *2 (Ohio Ct. App. Jan. 4, 1980). Ohio applies these estate administration provisions equally to all creditors with contingent claims, regardless of whether the defendants are government employees or private parties, and regardless of whether the cause of action sounds in civil rights litigation, contract, tort, or something else. As with the survivorship statute in Robertson, no official clued into Ohio estate administration law would “be influenced in his behavior by its provisions.” 436 U.S. at 592. This “neutral, uniformly applicable state rule” satisfies
Nor is Robertson distinguishable. True, Robertson specifically concerned whether a
Nor does Sullivan v. Little Hunting Park, Inc., 396 U.S. 229 (1969), change things. Sullivan explained that, even though federal law does not specify that damages are available in a
The district court correctly held that Andrews could not proceed against Hubbard and Rowell’s estate administrator.
III.
Andrews separately argues that the district court erred in summarily rejecting his claim against the City of Cleveland. We give fresh review to this claim and draw all reasonable factual inferences in favor of Andrews. Seе Peffer v. Stephens, 880 F.3d 256, 262 (6th Cir. 2018).
A criminal defendant suffers a due process violation when the prosecution fails to turn over favorable evidence that would materially aid in his defense. See Brady, 373 U.S. at 87. Police share this obligation. Just as prosecutors must make Brady disclosures to the defendant, police bear “an equally important Brady-derived responsibility to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to the prosecutor’s office.” Moldowan v. City of Warren, 578 F.3d 351, 381 (6th Cir. 2009) (quotation omitted). Cities do not face vicarious liability for the acts of their employees. See Monell v. Dep’t of Soc. Servs. of City of N.Y., 436 U.S. 658, 694 (1978). But a city will face liability under
At stake is whether the police suppressed two exculpatory pieces of evidence and, if so, whether they did so in connection with an unconstitutional policy of the City of Cleveland. The two pieces of evidence are (1) notes about a bloody palm print and (2) a missing page from a police report. Each one deserves a turn.
Handprint Notes. Recall that the police found a bloody palm print at the scene of the crime. The Scientific Investigation Unit compared the palm print to Andrews’ print. In a handwritten note, one of the prosecutors, Carmen Marino, wrote that “per SIU, partial print completely NOT DEFENDANT’S PRINT.” R.97-1 at 269. He then scratched that note out and wrote “PRINT NOT CLEAR ENOUGH TO COMPARE.” Id.
Marino’s notes do not show that the police suppressed exculpatory information from the prosecutor. In an earlier postconviction action, Andrews said that he told his defense counsel “prior to trial and during trial that the prosecutor had in his files information of a ‘bloody palm print’ found at the scene of the crime which established that it was someone’s print other than [Andrews’].” Id. at 245. Given this prior acknowledgement, Andrews сannot now say that the prosecution never had the information in its files.
Andrews points to Marino’s notes as proof that the police withheld a written report on the palm print. But we can only speculate about whether a written report ever existed. Marino attested that he got his information over the phоne, not in a written report. And while Andrews argues that the Scientific Investigation Unit should have written such a report, Brady concerns the failure to turn over evidence, not the failure to create it. See Hill v. Mitchell, 842 F.3d 910, 926 (6th Cir. 2016) (explaining that Brady requires a showing that favorable evidence existed and was suppressed); Bell v. Bell, 512 F.3d 223, 234 (6th Cir. 2008) (stating that “not disclosing something” that police “d[o] not have[] cannot be considered a Brady violation” (quotations omitted)). So long as police turn over the substance of an investigation to the prosecution, a Brady violation does not arise merely from failing to memorialize that information in a formal report.
Police Report. On the same day that the police discovered Regina’s body, Rowell prepared a four-page police report. On page three, he documented that, “[a]t the scene,” he and Hubbard found a bloody pillowcase from the Howard Jоhnson’s Motor Lodge. R.109-1 at 23. The same page added that he learned from the Howard Johnson’s desk clerk that, on the same day as the murder, the bed linens from Watts’s motel room were missing. This page was favorable to Andrews and material to his defense because it showed someone else may have committed the murder. See Jackson, 925 F.3d at 814. Yet the parties dispute whether, as a factual matter, the police turned over this page to the prosecutors.
Whether the police turned over page three of the police report is a material dispute of fact that a jury must decide. Two members of the prosecution team, Ronald Adrine and Joseph Gibson, attested that they were not aware of any physical evidence tying Watts to the murder. And sometime before 2018, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office digitally sсanned its files spanning from the 1975 pre-trial investigation to the 1995 denial of state postconviction relief to Andrews’ 2009 parole proceedings. No legible copy of page three of the police report appears in any of these files. Nor is there any other mention of the tie between the Howard Johnson’s motel pillowcase and Watts. A reasonable jury could conclude that police withheld the pillowcase evidence against Watts.
The City pushes back, pointing out that a copy of page three appears in the 2018 scan of the prosecution’s files. True enough. But the page is incomprehensible, whether due to lack of ink, water damage, poor scan quality, or something else. More, this illegible copy of the police report appears in the prosecutor’s files sandwiched between a 1976 state court decision denying Andrews’ direct appeal and a 1978 motion concerning post-conviction relief. A reasonable juror, viewing this evidence, could conclude that police gave the prosecutors an illegible copy of page three or
The City also cites another copy of the report found elsewhere in the prosecutor’s digital scan. This one is legible, and it contains handwritten notes that resemble Marino’s handwriting, supporting the inference that trial counsel had it. But this annotated copy of the report skips from page two to page four. A reasonable jury, again, could conclude that, when police turned over the report to the prosecutors, they left out page three.
The City maintains that the County Coroner’s оffice had its own copy of this report. But this copy, too, does little. The police have a Brady obligation to provide information to the prosecutors, not just to the coroner, and there is no evidence that the coroner’s files ever made it into the hands of the prosecutors. See Moldowan, 578 F.3d at 378.
The City insists that the prosecutors could have pieced together some of the story from other evidence in the record. They noted, for example, that the record contained evidence that police found a bloody pillowcase near the scene of the crime, that police suspected and arrested Watts, and that he stayed at the Howard Johnson’s. We agree to a point. One page of the record, annotated with Marino’s handwriting, discloses that police arrested Watts. But those facts do not tell the full story. The information on pagе three—that the pillowcase came from the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge at the same time that all of Watts’s bed linens went missing—provided the crucial link between the crime scene and the alternative suspect. The City has not shown that this link appeared anywhere else in prosecution’s files at trial.
A reasonable jury, to be sure, could still take the opposite view on whether the police withheld evidence. A jury might discredit the prosecutors’ testimony that they were unaware of physical evidence tying Watts to the murder. It likewise might find that police gave one or more legible copies of page three to the prosecutors, and any such copies merely got lost or damaged in the years before the prosecutors digitized their files. But those are quintessential factual questions for a jury to dеcide.
That leaves the question whether a City policy created the violation. Because a reasonable jury could conclude that the police withheld information from the prosecution in violation of Brady, we must consider whether an unconstitutional policy of the City of Cleveland caused the violation. Jackson, 925 F.3d at 828. The parties briefed that issue at length below and renew their arguments here. But the district court did not reach the issue, and ours is a court of “sequels, not premiers.” Harrison v. Montgomery County, 997 F.3d 643, 652 (6th Cir. 2021). We will entrust the issue to the district court’s good judgment in the first instance. See id.
For these reasons, we reverse the district court’s grant of summary judgment to the City of Cleveland and remand for the district court to consider whether a City policy caused the Brady violation. We otherwise affirm the district court’s dismissal of Andrews’ claims against Hubbard and Rowell.
______________________________CONCURRENCE / DISSENT
______________________________CLAY, Circuit Judge, concurring in part and dissenting in part. Isaiah Andrews spent over 45 years behind bars for the brutal murder of his wife. A later jury—untainted by the Brady violations of his first prosecution—found him not guilty, and the state of Ohio has formally exonerated him. I agree in part with today’s holding because it allows Andrews’
Title
The majority affirms the district court’s dismissal of Andrews’ claims against the Defendant Estates—the estates of the individual Defendants who have passed away in the decades since Andrews was incarcerated—because it claims that Ohio law bars Andrews’ suit. Ohio requires that “all claims shall be presented within six months after the death of the decedent,” and that “a claim that is not presented within six months after the death of the decedent shall be forever barred as to all parties [and] [n]o payment shall be made on the claim and no action shall be maintained on the claim.”
In fact, both Supreme Court precedent and federal statutes command a different result. When deciding the application of state law to
The majority rests its contrary conclusion primarily on Robertson, in which the Supreme Court held that a Louisiana survivorship statute, which permitted only a plaintiff’s spouse, children, parents, or siblings to maintain an action after the plaintiff’s death, barred the action in that case. 436 U.S. at 587. Because “the greater state power upheld in Robertson”—to categorically bar an estate’s ability to pursue an otherwise timely
There is good reason not to apply Robertson to this case. First, the Court in Robertson believed it was addressing a Louisiana statute that would apply in relatively few cases, relying on the assumptions that “most Louisiana actions survive the plaintiff’s death” and “surely few persons are not survived by one of these [the statutorily-specified] close relatives.” Id. at 591–92. While those statements may be true, the same cannot be said for
Second, the state law in Robertson constrained who could bring an action on behalf of a deceased plaintiff, not who could be sued in lieu of a deceased defendant. That distinction matters. The Robertson Court thought that the Louisiana law did not endanger the policy behind
Finally, it is worth noting that Robertson itself was likely wrongly decided, given Supreme Court precedent, as well as federal statutes like
The majority’s other arguments are unavailing. First the majority claims that “Ohio law does not cut off the ability of claimants in Andrews’s shoes to bring a
But the majority argues that any reliance on Felder was misplaced. Maj. Op. at 7–8. In the majority’s view, that the state law at issue in this case applies to any claim against an estate, whether it is brought under
But Supreme Court precedent does not allow this; it requires the application of federal law where it “better serves the policies expressed in the federal statutes.” Sullivan, 396 U.S. at 240. And the federal statutes in this case were enacted to remedy “the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution,”
Finally, the majority favorably notes the interest that states have in the orderly disposition of estates.1 While states do
(1985) (“By providing a remedy for the violation of constitutional rights, Congress hoped to restore peace and justice to the region through the subtle power of civil enforcement.”); Robertson, 436 U.S. at 601 (1978) (Blackmun, J., dissenting) (“We are not concerned with the reasonableness of the Louisiana survivorship statute in allocating tort recoveries. We are concerned with its application in the face of a claim of civil rights guaranteed the decedent by federal law.”).
A state probate rule preventing civil rights plaintiffs like Andrews, whose claim did not accrue until well after Defendants’ deaths through no fault of his own but rather as a result of being wrongfully imprisoned by the state for 45 years, from holding those who violated the Constitution to task is undoubtedly inconsistent with federal law encouraging the enforcement and availability of
With respect to the majority’s Monell holding, I agree that Andrews has shown a
Further, our decision today allows Andrews’ Monell claim against Cleveland to go forward while foreclosing his claims against the individual Defendant Estates—meaning Andrews will be in the somewhat unique position of arguing at trial that a municipal policy or custom led to his constitutional violation, without being able to hold any individual liable. Cleveland claims that such arguments are foreclosed by case law, because Monell liability for a constitutional violatiоn can lie only when a “specific individual municipal employee committed the underlying constitutional violation and identifying a municipal policy or custom which caused the violation.” Def. Br., ECF No. 34, 34–35. But this argument is contradicted by our precedent.
Certainly, a finding that there has been a constitutional violation is required for Monell liability to lie. See City of Los Angeles v. Heller, 475 U.S. 796, 799 (1986). But this Court has not interpreted this statement so strictly as to require individual liability for that constitutional violation—just the opposite. “[I]t is proper to consider possible constitutional violations committed by a municipality qua municipality, even in the absence of a showing of a constitutional violation by any one individual officer.” Grote v. Kenton Cnty., Kentucky, 85 F.4th 397, 414 (6th Cir. 2023); see also Epps v. Lauderdale Cnty., 45 F. App’x 332, 334 (6th Cir. 2002) (Cole, J., concurring) (endorsing “read[ing] Heller to prohibit municipal liability only when the victim suffers no constitutional injury at all, not when the victim fails to trace that constitutional injury to an individual police officer”); Winkler v. Madison Cnty., 893 F.3d 877, 900 (6th Cir. 2018) (recognizing Heller’s narrow scope). Thus we, along with some of our sister circuits, have recognized that “Heller does not preclude a finding of municipal liability even if no individual officer violated the Constitution where constitutional harm has nonetheless been inflicted upon the victim and the municipality is responsible for that harm.” Grote, 85 F.4th at 414 (citation omitted); see also Fairley v. Luman, 281 F.3d 913, 917 (9th Cir. 2002) (“If a plaintiff establishes he suffered a constitutional injury by the City, the fact that individual officers are exonerated is immaterial to [municipal] liability under
Thus, on remand and while evaluating Andrews’ Monell claim, the district court may be confronted with the seemingly difficult question of whether his claim against Cleveland can proceed at all without any anchor of individual liability. But this question has an easy answer. Plaintiffs seeking to hold municipalities to account will still need to allege, establish, and prove that an official policy or custom caused a violation of their constitutional rights. Monell v. Dep’t of Soc. Servs. of City of N.Y., 436 U.S. 658, 694 (1978). It is entirely possible for plaintiffs to do so without necessarily proving that a specific individual violated their rights. Such a scenario might arise when “when the constitutional harm complained of relates to lack of action due to a failure to train,” Grote, 85 F.4th at 414, when a constitutional violation is “attributable to a municipality’s acts alone and not to thosе of its employees—as when a government actor in good faith follows a faulty municipal policy,” Epps, 45 F. App’x at 334 (Cole, J., concurring), or when “the combined acts or omissions of several employees acting under a governmental policy or custom may violate an individual’s constitutional rights.” Id. (quotation omitted). Therefore, a finding that an individual officer is liable for the constitutional violation is not a necessary prerequisite of Monell liability—just a finding that a constitutional violation occurred. And Andrews has certainly met his burden on that issue.