Justia U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

Petitioner, convicted of murder and sentenced to death, was granted a federal writ of habeas corpus on the ground that his right to confrontation had been violated at his resentencing hearing. The court reversed, concluding that because hearsay was admissible at capital sentencing and petitioner had an opportunity to rebut the hearsay, petitioner's claim that the admission of hearsay testimony at his resentencing hearing violated his rights under the Confrontation Clause failed. The court also concluded that, because the retrospective application of the cold, calculated, and premeditated statutory aggravating factor did not disadvantage petitioner, his claim that the application of the factor violated his rights under the Ex Post Facto Clause failed. View "Muhammad v. Secretary, FL Dept. of Corrections, et al." on Justia Law

Plaintiff filed suit under 42 U.S.C. 1983 against the City and others after he was fired from the police department for violating department policies. On appeal, plaintiff challenged the district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of defendants. The court concluded that the district court correctly concluded that plaintiff failed to establish that any of the personnel, internal affairs, or disciplinary decisions about which he complained was made by a final policy maker for the City such that municipal liability attached; plaintiff's First Amendment claims failed because he could not establish that his speech played a substantial part in the police department's decision to conduct internal affairs investigations or terminate him; and plaintiff's false arrest, imprisonment, and malicious prosecution claims also failed because he has not presented any evidence that he was arrested without probable cause and the evidence could not be read to establish that there was a causal connection between either of the individual defendants' actions and plaintiff's arrest, imprisonment, and prosecution. Accordingly, the court affirmed the grant of summary judgment to all defendants. View "Carter, Jr. v. City of Melbourne, FL, et al." on Justia Law

Plaintiff, a civil detainee at the Florida Civil Commitment Center (FCCC), was involuntarily committed pursuant to Fla. Stat. 394.910 et seq. Plaintiff filed suit under 42 U.S.C. 1983, alleging that defendant, the facility director at the center, violated his expressive freedoms under the First and Fourteenth Amendments by promulgating a policy that limited all residents of the center from copying plaintiff's newsletter. In November 2010, after litigation had begun but before the district court had entered summary judgment for defendant, defendant adopted a new, different, and stricter policy. The court vacated and remanded, concluding that the district court should consider the constitutionality of the November 2010 policy along with the earlier policy in order to avoid piecemeal adjudication of the two policies. View "Pesci v. Budz" on Justia Law

TBW filed suit against several defendants, including HDR Engineering and Barnard Construction Company, alleging that HDR defectively designed TBW's reservoir and that Barnard defectively constructed it. The primary issue on appeal concerned the district court's decision to allow HDR to present evidence that Barnard caused the reservoir damage. The court held that, in the procedural posture of this case, the summary judgment granted to Barnard did not directly estop HDR from introducing evidence at trial that Barnard caused the damage; the district court's admission of certain expert testimony was not manifestly erroneous or an abuse of discretion; and the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying TBW's motion for leave to amend its complaint for a second time. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment of the district court and denied the motion to certify. View "Tampa Bay Water v. HDR Engineering, Inc." on Justia Law

Plaintiffs filed suit against defendant, in her official capacity as Interim Secretary for the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), alleging that defendant violated the Medicaid Act, 42 U.S.C. 1396 et seq., by denying Medicaid coverage of applied behavioral analysis (ABA) to treat plaintiffs' autism spectrum disorders. The court concluded that the district court did not abuse its discretion in issuing a permanent injunction that overruled AHCA's determination that ABA was experimental and required Medicaid coverage of this treatment. However, because the language in the injunction's final sections was out of step with the district court's analysis and what was actually decided, the court vacated the injunction in part and remanded to the district court to modify Paragraphs 2 and 6. View "Garrido, et al. v. Interim Secretary, FL Agency for Health Care Admin." on Justia Law

The United States filed suit under the Clean Air Act, 42 U.S.C. 7401 et seq., against Alabama Power, alleging principally that Alabama Power made major modifications at three of its coal-fired power plants without obtaining a permit or installing modern pollution control devices. The court reversed the district court's wholesale exclusion of the expert testimony of two experts, a power plant reliability engineer (Mr. Koppe) and an environmental permitting engineer (Dr. Ranajit), in Alabama Power I, vacated the judgment in favor of Alabama Power, and remanded for further proceedings. The Koppe-Sahu model, as utilized here, was sufficiently reliable to establish a relationship between potential generation of electricity and expected pollutant emissions at Alabama Power's modified plants. Moreover, the Seventh Circuit's decision in United States v. Cinergy Corp did not preclude admission of the expert testimony. The court affirmed the district court's striking of the additional statements and calculations in Dr. Sahu's supplemental declaration in Alabama Power II. View "Alabama Environmental Council v. Alabama Power Co." on Justia Law

Chapter 7 debtor appealed the district court's reversal of the bankruptcy court's order denying relief from the automatic stay to the Disciplinary Board. Debtor was disbarred from the practice of law and the Disciplinary Board later filed a complaint in state court seeking to enjoin debtor from the unlawful practice of law and to appoint a conservator to take possession of debtor's client files and take other steps to protect his clients. At issue in this appeal was whether a debt's dischargeability in bankruptcy proceedings - standing alone - constituted "cause" sufficient for a bankruptcy court to provide relief from the automatic stay provisions of 11 U.S.C. 362(a). The court affirmed in part and reversed in part, concluding that the debt was nondischargeable but, in this instance, the district court erroneously relied solely on the debt's dischargeability status in its ruling on the "cause" issue. Accordingly, the court vacated and remanded in part for further proceedings. View "Disciplinary Bd. of the Supreme Court of PA v. Feingold" on Justia Law

Petitioner was sentenced to death for the murder of a Florida Highway Patrol who intercepted and opened a bomb that petitioner sent to a woman he feared would report a murder committed as part of a drug trafficking conspiracy. The court concluded that the district court did not abuse its discretion when it read Gonzalez v. Crosby to mean that the change of law in Holland v. Florida was not an extraordinary circumstance. Holland altered the court's previous interpretation of the statute of limitations of one year for a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The Supreme Court held that the type of change in decisional law in this instance was not an extraordinary circumstance under Rule 60(b). Accordingly, the court affirmed the denial of petitioner's motion for relief from judgment. View "Howell v. Sec., FL Dept. of Corrections" on Justia Law

Defendant pleaded guilty to possessing a firearm as a convicted felon. At issue was whether a district court had jurisdiction to entertain a motion to dismiss the charging document in a criminal case under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 12(b)(3)(B) while defendant's direct appeal was pending. Because defendant's conviction and sentence were already on direct appeal when he filed his Rule 12(b)(3)(B) motion to dismiss the Information for failure to state an offense, the court concluded that the district court lacked jurisdiction to entertain it. Accordingly, the court vacated and remanded with instructions to dismiss the motion for lack of jurisdiction. View "United States v. Diveroli" on Justia Law

Plaintiff filed suit against debt management businesses and individual employees of those businesses on behalf of herself and a statewide class of about 10,000 consumers. The parties agreed to allow a magistrate judge to enter a final judgment in the class action. The parties then reached a settlement agreement. Five class members and the Attorneys General of Connecticut, Florida, Maine, New York, and West Virginia objected to the settlement agreement. The court concluded that the magistrate judge had subject-matter jurisdiction to enter a final judgment because absent class members were not parties whose consent was required for a magistrate judge to enter a final judgment under 28 U.S.C. 636(c). However, the court vacated the judgment because the magistrate judge abused his discretion when he found, without adequate evidentiary support, that defendants could not satisfy a significant judgment. Accordingly, the court remanded for further proceedings. View "Day v. Persels & Assoc., LLC, et al." on Justia Law