Miсhelle Gomez BEREZOWSKY, Plaintiff-Appellee v. Pablo Angel RENDON OJEDA, Defendant-Appellant
No. 15-20037
United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
Date Filed: 06/13/2016
249
Peter N. Susca, Attorney, San Antonio, TX, John K. Grubb, John K. Grubb & Associates, Houston, TX, for Defendant-Appellant.
Before HIGGINBOTHAM, OWEN, and ELROD, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM:*
Michelle Gomez Berezowsky and Pablo Angel Rendon Ojeda, Mexican nationals, are locked in a custody dispute over their six-year-old son, “PARB.” Berezowsky filed a Hague Convention petition in the
I
Since shortly after PARB‘s birth in May 2009, Berezowsky and Rendon have been fighting over the child in state, federal, and foreign courts.2 The events underlying the present appeal began in fall 2012, when, amidst conflicting rulings from a Texas state district court and several Mexican courts, Rendon took PARB from his school in Mexico and brought him to Texas. Berezowsky then filed a Hague Convention petition in the Southern District of Texas, alleging that Rendon had illegally removed PARB from his habitual residence.3 The district court agreed and ordered PARB returned to Berezowsky.4 Rendon complied, and Berezowsky, with the district court‘s permission, left for Mexico with PARB.
In the meantime, Rendon appealed, asking that PARB be returned to him. In an August 2014 decision (hereinafter Ojeda I), we overturned the district court‘s judgment, finding that “Berezowsky failed to meet her burden of establishing that Mexico was PARB‘s place of habitual residence.”5 We concluded, in relevant part, that “[f]or the reasons stated in this opinion we VACATE the district court‘s order and REMAND with instructions to dismiss.”6 The accompanying mandate stated that “[i]t is ordered and adjudged that the judgment of the District Court is vacated, and the cause is remanded to the District Court for further proceedings in accordance with the opinion of this Court.”
On remand, the district court succinctly “ORDERED THAT the [District] Court‘s Order for the return of the child [to Berezowsky] is VACATED and this action is DISMISSED.” Rendon timely filed a
II
We review the denial of a
The same abuse of discretion standard and three-prong test govern a district court‘s decision to deviate (or not) from a mandate.10 “We review de nоvo whether a district court accurately interpreted and applied the directives of an appellate court‘s mandate.”11
III
Rendon and Berezowsky offer starkly different readings of our Ojeda I mandate. Rendon claims that the mandate unambiguously required the district court to order PARB‘s return to him. On this reading, the district court “manifestly err[ed]” in refusing to enter such an order, rendering its denial of Rendon‘s 59(e) motion an abuse of discrеtion. Rendon plausibly claims that any other reading would allow his victory on appeal to become a de facto defeat, impermissibly violating the spirit (if not the letter) of our mandate;12 as he points out, “[t]he current reality on the ground is Berezowsky retains possession of [PARB] solely by virtue of a Return Order which has been vacated by this Court.”13
Berezowsky claims that the Ojeda I mandate forbade the district court from
Second, Berezowsky argues that the Ojeda I court‘s failure to explicitly order a re-return, despite Rendon‘s request for one, should be interpreted as an implicit decision not to allow a re-return order, which in turn prevented the district court from ordering that relief. We find this interpretation plausible, but note that only “matters which were ‘decided by necessary implication [or] explicitly‘” are off-limits on remand.19 Rendon‘s request demonstrates at a minimum that our silence as to a re-return order was deliberate, since the request alerted us to the pоssibility of such an order. But even if our silence was deliberate, it does not necessarily follow that our silence implied rejection of Rendon‘s request and foreclosed the district court from granting it.
Third, and relatedly, Berezowsky argues that the text of our mandate must be construed strictly; because the text does not expressly contemplate a re-return order, she claims, no such order may issue. Berezowsky pоints to the principle that “[t]he mandate rule requires a district court on remand to effect [the] mandate and to do nothing else,”20 and argues that
IV
Given the above, we find neither Berezowsky‘s nor Rendon‘s interpretation of our Ojeda I mandate entirely compelling. Moreover, we have found no binding precedent addressing how a mandate “vacat[ing] ... and remand[ing] with instructions to dismiss” should be parsed.22 Given this, we conclude that Ojeda I neither required nor forbade a re-return order. Rather, we simply did not decide in that case whether or not a re-return order was warranted. Because a lower court “is free to decide matters which are left open by the mandate,” the decision to issue or deny
The district court decided not to issue a re-return order. As noted above, its subsequent refusal to amend the judgment (which provides the basis of the present appeal) is reviewed for abuse of discretion, and amendment is appropriate if the controlling law has changed, if new evidence is available, or if the initial decision was manifestly erroneous as a matter of law or fact. But Rendon does not allege new evidence or a change in controlling law, and the district court‘s decision was not legally or factually erroneous. The law of the case did not compel a re-return order; and the court reasonably could have concluded on these facts that the equities did not favor a re-return order. As thrеe Justices noted in a concurrence in Chafin, re-return orders may prolong and fracture custody proceedings, and “shuttling children back and forth between parents and across international borders may be detrimental to those children’ whose welfare led [to] the
The district court did not abuse its discretion in refusing to issue a re-return order. We therefore decline to disrupt the status quo.26 The judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.
JENNIFER WALKER ELROD, Circuit Judge, concurring in the judgment:
This Hague Convention1 proceeding is but the latest chapter in a multi-volume cross-border custody dispute spanning the courts of Texas, the United States, and Mexico. See Berezowsky v. Ojeda (Ojeda I), 765 F.3d 456, 459-65 (5th Cir. 2014) (recounting the involvement of “at least 12 different courts“). Deploying the Hague Convention‘s “return” remedy, the district court ordered respondent Pablo Angel Rendon Ojeda to return his then-three-year-old son PARB to PARB‘s mother, petitioner Michelle Gomez Berezowsky, in Mexico. The district court denied the father‘s stay motion and PARB was returned immediately, even as the father appealed the return order tо our court. We ultimately vacated the return order, holding that a prerequisite to the Hague Convention return remedy was absent because Mexico was not PARB‘s place of habitual residence. Id. at 459; see Convention art. 3(a). But vacating the order did not undo its practical effect, which by then was already complete: PARB remained—and, as far as we know, remains now—in Mexico with his mother as a result of the ordеr that we held was erroneous.
Out of concern that children “would lose precious months when [they] could have been readjusting to life in [their] country of habitual residence,” the Supreme Court has discouraged courts from routinely staying return orders pending their final resolution on appeal. Chafin v. Chafin, --- U.S. ---, 133 S.Ct. 1017, 1027, 185 L.Ed.2d 1 (2013); accord id. at 1029-30 (Ginsburg, J., concurring). Denying a stay, however, entrenches the return order while it may yet be vacated. See, e.g., Redmond v. Redmond, 724 F.3d 729 (7th Cir. 2013) (reversing alrеady-executed return order where stay had been denied); Larbie v. Larbie, 690 F.3d 295 (5th Cir. 2012) (reversing already-executed return order where no stay had been sought). “Where no stay is ordered, the risk of a two-front battle over custody will remain real.” Chafin, 133 S.Ct. at 1030 & n.4 (Ginsburg, J., concurring) (citing the rival custody proceedings in Larbie). Cases like this one illustrate the truth of this statement.
This case provides yet another example of the problems that can occur when federal courts address Hague Convention return petitions. The Hague Convention‘s role within the broader context of cross-border custody disputes is to undo an abduction so as tо “facilitate custody adjudications, promptly and exclusively, in the place where the child habitually resides.” Chafin, 133 S.Ct. at 1028 (Ginsburg, J., concurring) (citing Convention arts. 1, 3). But time and again federal courts have struggled in that task, likely because of both the substantive law involved and the procedural strictures of federal court litigation. Cf. Redmond, 724 F.3d at 749 (Easterbrook, J., dubitante) (“It is time for this federal overlay to end and the subject be returned to the domestic-relations apparatus of Illinois and Ireland, where it should have been all along.“).
For example, we have struggled to heed our own admonition that, in light of the Hague Convention‘s limited purview, courts “must not cross the line into a consideration of the underlying custody dispute.” Sealed Appellant v. Sealed Appellee, 394 F.3d 338, 344 (5th Cir. 2004); see
Nor are we well-suited to the prompt resolution that the Hague Convention envisions we will achieve. The Convention sets six weeks as the target time for judicial disposition of a petition, see Convention art. 11, but in 2008, from the filing of a Hague Convention petition in the United States, “the average time taken to reach a first instance decision was 209 days compared with 441 days to finalise a case that was appealed.” Nigel Lowe, A Statistical Analysis of Applications Made in 2008
Justice Ginsburg has suggested a legislative fix by which district court return orders could be appealed only with leave from the court of appeals, with the return order routinely stayed if leave is granted. Chafin, 133 S.Ct. at 1030 (Ginsburg, J., concurring). In the meantime, any parent with a foreign custody judgment can keep federal courts out of the equation altogether by seeking the enforcement of that judgment in the courts of any of the fifty states, all of which have adopted either the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA) or its predecessor statute. Gregory, Swisher & Wilson, supra, at 501. See generally Robert G. Spector, International Abduction of Children: Why the UCCJEA Is Usually a Better Remedy than the Abduction Convention, 49 Fam. L.Q. 385 (2015) (contrasting the Hague Convention and UCCJEA regimes). As for the parties here, I am reminding of my colleague‘s admonition in our previous encounter with this case: “‘You owe your child better than this’ and [we] urge both parents to make a concerted effort to settle this matter in PARB‘s, not their own, best interests.” Ojeda I, 765 F.3d at 476 (Haynes, J., dissenting).
