11th Circuit -- Title VII judgment caps, a Ponzi scheme, and more...

The Eleventh Circuit has not been as prolific as the Georgia Supreme Court this week, having issued just 5 published decisions on a variety of topcs in the first part of the week.

The case of Bradshaw v. School Board, in an opinion written by 7th Circuit Judge Cudahy, takes on the overlap between Title VII's limits on recovery and a Florida state statute's somewhat different limit on recovery against a governmental body.  Bradshaw's award was $500,000.  Under Title VII, which limits damages based on the number of employees, the cap on recovery under that statute is $300,000. Under general Florida tort law, waiver of sovereign immunity is subject to a cap of $100,000. So it stands to reason that Bradshaw should get $400,000, right?

Wrong. The Florida statute caps judgments, not just claims. So, the Court reasoned, the $500,000 judgment would normally be capped at $100,000 under Florida law, except that Title VII's $300,000 cap (as to the Title VII claim) preempts the overall Florida cap on judgments, and expands her recovery to the full amount of the Title VII cap -- but no more.

In USA v. Ward, the court also addressed a series of federal convictions relating to a Ponzi scheme to convince investors to invest in a program that would lend money to auto dealers to enable them to purchase inventory -- with spectacular annual rates of return of 28-50% for the investors. While a small portion of the money went to loans to a few dealers, the defendants used most of the money to gamble, make personal investments, and pay interest on the defendants' loans. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the resulting conspiracy charge, but did convict Ward of mail and wire fraud. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed his conviction, reiterating that it was not necessary that a defendant personally cause specific mailings or wires, so long as a coschemer had done so and the defendant knowingly participated, and finding that the court's instruction to the jury that it was not necessary to find guilt on conspiracy in order to reach the substantive counts was not a constructive amendment to the indictment, because the reference in the substantive counts to the "aforementioned conspiracy" was merely surplusage.

In Andujar v. Rodriguez, the Court issued a revised opinion in a § 1983 case correcting a footnote in the original opinion. The case involved a fleeing suspect in a truck hijacking who was located -- and dragged from his hiding place -- by a police dog, causing serious puncture wounds. The paramedics cleaned and bandaged the wounds and released him to police custody. However, the police decided to "repeatedly plunge a police baton into the bandaged wounds" as a means of interrogation, causing the wounds to begin to bleed profusely, and it was only then that he was taken to a hospital to be stitched up. The Eleventh Circuit, both in the original opinion and the new opinion (revised to state that the defendants conceded the injuries were "serious") found the paramedics were entitled to qualified immunity on the claims of deliberate indifference because it was not unconstitutional simply to turn him over to police custody. There's no indication in the opinion of the status of the claims against the officer who beat on the plaintiff's wounds...

In Jordan v. Secretary, the Eleventh Circuit addressed the maze of hurdles to a successive habeas petition based on a claim of actual innocence, specifically, that two of Jordan's fellow inmates said they saw someone else do it, and the only reason he confessed is that they threatened to prosecute his mother. The Eleventh Circuit ruled that he could not rely on a freestanding claim of actual innocence, but only one that was paired with a constitutional violation. The allegedly coerced confession in this case was not newly discovered evidence (since Jordan obviously was aware of his own coercion) nor was it based on a new rule of constitutional law, so the district court properly dismissed it.

Finally, in USA v. Llanos-Agostadero, the Eleventh Circuit established the shocking proposition that aggravated battery on a pregnant woman is a "crime of violence" under § 2L1.2 of the Sentencing Guidelines.