WILLIAM H. STEELE, Chief District Judge.
This matter comes before the Court on the Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings (doc. 56) filed by defendants Jerome Woods, Kirven Lang, and Jason D. Laffitte (collectively, the "Individual Defendants"). The Motion has been briefed and is now ripe for disposition.
This putative class action was brought by six Mobile County Public School ("MCPS") students pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging infringement of their procedural due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. In particular, plaintiffs maintain that each of them was "long-term suspended [from school] without proper notice or a hearing for minor infractions," in violation of their "Fourteenth Amendment right to receive notice and a hearing before being punished with long-term suspensions." (Doc. 1, ¶ 1.) The Complaint names as defendants the Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County (the "Board"), as well as the three Individual Defendants, solely in their official capacities as principals or assistant principals in the MCPS system.
The Complaint asserts a § 1983 procedural due process claim against the Board for its "official disciplinary procedure ... that allows principals to impose long-term suspensions without first holding hearings at which students and parents can challenge proposed suspensions." (Id., ¶ 4.) It also asserts a § 1983 procedural due process claim against the Individual Defendants for their alleged practice of "summarily suspend[ing] students until the end of the semester without following even the minimal procedures set forth in the Board's official policy." (Id.) So, plaintiffs contend that the Board has a policy that violates the Fourteenth Amendment, and that the Individual Defendants (who work for the Board) have a custom or practice that does the same thing. The ad damnum clause of the Complaint specifies that plaintiffs seek, inter alia, judicial declarations that defendants' conduct deprived plaintiffs of their Fourteenth Amendment due process rights, an injunction requiring defendants to cease their unconstitutional activities, other equitable relief, and an award of costs and attorney's fees. (Id. at 32.) Plaintiffs do not claim monetary damages.
The Individual Defendants have now filed a Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings, in which they argue that plaintiffs' claims against them are redundant of their claims against the Board, and should therefore be dismissed. Plaintiffs oppose the Motion for the stated reasons that (i) their claims against the Individual Defendants are not redundant and (ii) their claims are confined to seeking injunctive and declaratory relief.
In this Circuit, "[j]udgment on the pleadings is proper when no issues of material fact exist, and the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law based on the substance of the pleadings and any judicially noticed facts." Cunningham v. District Attorney's Office for Escambia County, 592 F.3d 1237, 1255 (11
The legal issue presented by the Individual Defendants in their Rule 12(c) Motion is narrowly circumscribed, to-wit: Whether plaintiffs can maintain a § 1983 claim against them for declaratory and injunctive relief solely in their official capacity as MCPS employees/ administrators, when plaintiffs are already pursuing a separate § 1983 claim against the Board itself seeking the same remedies.
The logical starting point is the well-worn proposition that "[w]hen an officer is sued under Section 1983 in his or her official capacity, the suit is simply another way of pleading an action against an entity of which an officer is an agent. .... Such suits against municipal officers are therefore, in actuality, suits directly against the city that the officer represents." Busby v. City of Orlando, 931 F.2d 764, 776 (11
In reliance on this notion, courts in this Circuit routinely and overwhelmingly deem suits against both a local government official in his official capacity and the entity of which the officer is an agent to be redundant, and dismiss the official-capacity claims against the individual defendant on that basis. See, e.g., Abusaid v. Hillsborough County Bd. of County Com'rs, 405 F.3d 1298, 1302 n.3 (11
In response, plaintiffs propound two arguments. First, plaintiffs insist that their claims against the Board and against the Individual Defendants "are not the same," because they charge the Board with "implementing a policy authorizing the violation of due process," and the Individual Defendants with violating plaintiffs' due process rights, "whether or not the policy itself authorizes violations." (Doc. 67, at 7.) But this argument amounts to disingenuous hair-splitting. Under any reasonable reading, the Complaint states the same claim (violation of Fourteenth Amendment due process rights by summarily suspending plaintiffs for longer than 10 days without notice or hearing) in two different ways, first that the Board has a
Some elaboration on this point may be helpful. Again, as a matter of law, "suits against an official in his or her official capacity are suits against the entity the individual represents." Burrell v. Board of Trustees of Ga. Military College, 970 F.2d 785, 789 n.10 (11
Second, plaintiffs urge the Court to find that the entire Busby line of authorities is distinguishable because Busby involved claims for money damages, whereas the plaintiffs in this action seek only injunctive and declaratory relief. The immediate problem with plaintiffs' argument is that they identify no authorities recognizing such a distinction, much less declining to apply the rule in Busby where claims of injunctive and declaratory relief are in play.
The bottom line is this: Plaintiffs insist that official-capacity claims against municipal officials are not redundant of claims against the municipality as long as they seek injunctive relief, not money damages. But they identify not a single authority that supports this proposition. The Court's research discloses none. And cases in this Circuit, apparently following the Supreme Court's lead in Graham, routinely dismiss both damages and injunctive relief claims against municipal agents in their official capacities as redundant and confusing under Busby where, as here, the entity has also been sued for the same relief. Under these circumstances, the Court will not unilaterally devise a sweeping exception to the Busby rule that is drawn from nothing more than thin air. This conclusion holds particularly true given that, as discussed supra, if plaintiffs successfully obtain a prospective injunction barring the Board from implementing a custom or policy of imposing long-term suspensions of MCPS students without prior notice and hearing, then imposition of a similar injunction against the Individual Defendants in their official capacities would gain precisely nothing for plaintiffs, but would simply reiterate the injunction against the Board. Repetition neither makes the heart grow fonder nor the injunction grow stronger, and an entity need not be told the same thing twice before a court order will stick. This case is about claims for injunctive relief against the Board, and plaintiffs cannot repackage those same claims against the Individual Defendants in their official capacities to bring them twice, at the cost of unnecessary redundancy, inefficiency, and risk of confusion.
For all of the foregoing reasons, the Individual Defendants' Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings (doc. 56) is
DONE and ORDERED.