Melissa HEARRING, Individually and as natural mother and next friend of B.H., a minor child, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Karen SLIWOWSKI, Individually, Defendant, Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, Defendant-Appellant.
Nos. 14-6039, 14-6315
United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.
Nov. 20, 2015.
806 F.3d 864
Before: COLE, Chief Judge; SUTTON, Circuit Judge; BELL, District Judge.*
OPINION
SUTTON, Circuit Judge.
This dispute began in 2009 when a first-grader in the Nashville public schools complained to a teacher that her genitals hurt. The teacher sent the child to a school nurse who visually inspected the girl. Perhaps understandably, that did not make the girl‘s mother happy, particularly since the nurse did not seek her consent before the examination. Less understandably, the examination led to a half-dozen years of litigation.
The mother filed a money-damages action against the nurse and the school district for conducting a search in violation of her child‘s Fourth and Fourteenth Amend-
I.
In October 2009, B.H., a first-grade student in the Metropolitan Nashville Public
The aftermath lasted six years. Hearring filed this
Sliwowski filed a motion for summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds. The district court denied the motion on the ground that “B.H.‘s Fourth Amendment right to be free from such a[] highly invasive search was clearly established at the time of Sliwowski‘s search.” Hearring v. Sliwowski, 872 F.Supp.2d 647, 673 (M.D.Tenn.2012). A panel of this court reversed, holding that qualified immunity protected Sliwowski from the Fourth Amendment claim. Hearring v. Sliwowski, 712 F.3d 275 (6th Cir.2013). On remand, Hearring added a Fourteenth Amendment claim against the school district, alleging that its failure to train made it liable for a violation of B.H.‘s substantive due process rights because the exam was “an invasion of [B.H.‘s] privacy.” R. 88 at 5.
The money-damages claims against the school district—for an unconstitutional search and unconstitutional invasion of privacy—proceeded to trial. To prevail, Hearring had to show that (1) Sliwowski violated at least one of these constitutional rights, (2) the school district showed “deliberate indifference” to those rights through its failure to train employees properly in this area, and (3) the failure caused the constitutional violation. See, e.g., Connick v. Thompson, 563 U.S. 51, 131 S.Ct. 1350, 1357-58 & n. 3, 179 L.Ed.2d 417 (2011); Monell v. Dep‘t of Soc. Servs., 436 U.S. 658, 694-95, 98 S.Ct. 2018, 56 L.Ed.2d 611 (1978). The jury balked at the first step. It found that Sliwowski did not violate either constitutional right. Hearring moved for a new trial, and the district court denied the motion. The court, however, did not leave it at that. It granted an unrequested injunction, one that “require[d] training of the relevant Metro school employees” on constitutional limits “to ensure safeguards for school children‘s privacy.” R. 186 at 14-15. Two days after this decision, Hearring moved to amend her complaint to add a request for an injunction consistent with the one the district court ordered. Another two days later, the court granted the motion through a handwritten note on the first page of the motion, saying: “This motion is granted, but Plaintiff‘s complaint sought whatever relief the Court deemed just, fit and proper.” R. 190 at 1. The school district appealed the injunction. Hearring did not appeal the district court‘s denial of a motion for a new trial.
The district court erred in imposing the injunction.
First, Hearring never sought an injunction and indeed in the pre-trial order expressly sought only money damages. Her original and amended complaints, all three of them, say nothing about an injunction. They mention only her requests for money damages. The joint pretrial order filed by the parties and issued by the district court made this request explicit. That order “supplant[ed] the pleadings” and gave a “Succinct Statement of the Relief Sought“: “The Plaintiff is seeking One Million Seven Hundred Hundred Fifty Thousand Dollars ($1,750,000.00) in compensatory damages, attorney fees, and costs.” R. 168 at 1, 7. The parties, no surprise, never offered any evidence or argument about why such an injunction should be granted or for that matter denied. Ours is an adversarial system. Courts must give both sides of the case an opportunity to join a debate about any appropriate relief, requested or not, in a given matter. Nothing of the sort happened here—even after four years of litigation.
That the plaintiff‘s complaints sought “such other and further relief as the Court deems fit and proper” does not justify the order. R. 1 at 4; R. 10 at 6; R. 88 at 7. Hearring agreed that the pre-trial order “supplant[ed]” her earlier pleadings that included this language. R. 168 at 1. Even had that not been the case, one would still expect to see a request for such relief before a court entered it. That the district court later granted Hearring‘s motion to amend her complaint—after the jury rejected the pleaded claims and after the court entered the spur-of-the-moment injunction—does not make up for the error. The court had no authority to grant an amendment to a by-then superseded complaint. The point at any rate is to give the parties, even the ostensibly benefitted party, an opportunity to protest or promote the injunction before the court enters it. That did not happen. If we require courts to give “notice to the adverse party” before issuing a preliminary injunction, it follows that we should do (at least) the same before issuing a permanent injunction.
Second, the jury rejected the necessary factual predicate for such an injunction. It found that no constitutional violation occurred. Judges have authority to enter injunctions against a party—to change the party‘s behavior through the power of the federal courts—when they have done something wrong, and even then that will not always suffice by itself. See Winter v. Nat. Res. Def. Council, Inc., 555 U.S. 7, 32, 129 S.Ct. 365, 172 L.Ed.2d 249 (2008). But when “there was no constitutional violation[,] ... there is no ongoing unconstitutional conduct to enjoin.” Taylor v. Mich. Dep‘t of Nat. Res., 502 F.3d 452, 458 (6th Cir.2007). Any authority the district court had to require the school district to create this training program stemmed only from a finding that the school district had violated the constitutional rights of its students. Consider the language of
Third, even if we could overlook these two errors, there was one more still. Hearring (and her daughter) lacked standing to seek such an injunction. The federal courts are not free-range problem solvers. The Constitution empowers us to hear “Cases” or “Controversies,” and that is it.
Hearring cannot establish an “actual and imminent” threat, and City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95, 103 S.Ct. 1660, 75 L.Ed.2d 675 (1983), shows why. Los Angeles police applied a chokehold to a plaintiff who later sought an injunction against the department‘s chokehold policy. Id. at 97-98, 103 S.Ct. 1660. The Court held the plaintiff lacked standing for that relief because he had not shown that he “faced a real and immediate threat of again being illegally choked,” even if there was a possibility that the Los Angeles police might use a similar chokehold on someone else. Id. at 110, 103 S.Ct. 1660. Hearring faces a comparable problem. All of the evidence at trial showed that exams like the one Sliwowski performed on B.H. are vanishingly rare. The only person we know of who has ever performed one, as it happens, does not have the job anymore. Sliwowski left the job not long after this incident. The risk that B.H. would be subject to another such search is no more “actual and imminent” than the Chicago Cubs (or, we fear, the Cleveland Indians) winning the World Series. Hearring‘s claim, like the claim in Lyons, rests on mere “speculation,” and that does not suffice. Id. at 108, 103 S.Ct. 1660.
The district court as it turns out did not justify the injunction on the ground that B.H. would be injured anew; the court did not justify the injunction with reference to B.H. at all. It justified the relief as “necessary” to “ensure that ... children‘s Fourth Amendment rights are not subject to the discretion of the school official in the field.” R. 186 at 14-15. We have no problem with the sentiment behind the order; it‘s just that the court lacked authority to impose it. If advisory opinions are problematic, orders beyond the scope of Article III are worse. Such orders are not just “ghosts that slay,” Felix Frankfurter, A Note on Advisory Opinions, 37 Harv. L.Rev. 1002, 1008 (1924); they are orders that exercise power over real people and real institutions in the here and now with no basis for doing so. Cf. Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Env‘t, 523 U.S. 83, 106-07, 118 S.Ct. 1003, 140 L.Ed.2d 210 (1998). Because Hearring lacks standing to seek the injunction, it cannot stand.
III.
The school district also appeals the district court‘s decision to set aside its award of costs. Soon after the jury returned its verdict, the school district asked the court to order Hearring to pay about $3,400 in
For these reasons, we vacate the injunction, reverse the order setting aside the cost award, and remand with instructions to reinstate that award and to reenter judgment on the jury verdict in favor of the defendant.