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Ninth Circuit:
Suit Against City Over Late-Payment Penalty May Proceed
Lee Says Los Angeles’ Failure to Establish Reason for Setting Penalty at 100 percent of Parking-Ticket Fine Undermines Summary Judgment in Case Alleging Eighth Amendment Violation; Bennett Dissents
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The City of Los Angeles is not entitled to summary judgment in a class action alleging that its setting of the penalty for late payment of a parking ticket at 100 percent of the ticketed charge violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against excessive fines where the municipality failed to provide any evidence as to how it determined the appropriate fee amount, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held yesterday.
The Eighth Amendment provides that “[e]xcessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed” and the U.S. Supreme Court has held that a fine runs afoul of the clause if its amount is grossly disproportional to the seriousness of the defendant’s offense.
At issue is a $63 penalty charged by the city for failure to pay a parking meter violation ticket within 21-days. The court found that the failure of the defendant to cite any reason for the amount meant that the city could not establish that the fee is not grossly disproportional to the harm caused by the untimely payment.
Civil Action
Plaintiffs Jesus Pimentel, David R. Welch, Jeffrey O’Connell, Edward Lee, Wendy Cooper, Jacklyn Baird, and Rafael Buelna—each of whom incurred at least one parking meter citation and late fee—filed a class action complaint against the city, objecting to both the initial fine and the late payment penalty. On May 21, 2018, District Court Judge Fernando M. Olguin of the Central District of California granted summary judgment to the city as to all claims.
The Ninth Circuit, in an opinion by Circuit Judge Kenneth K. Lee, on July 22, 2020, affirmed the judgment as to the fine but reversed as to the late-payment penalty, finding that Olguin failed to apply the relevant analysis to that portion of the complaint.
On remand, the city failed to present any evidence as to why the fine was set at $63 but Olguin again granted the defendant’s motion for summary judgment.
Olguin reasoned:
“Plaintiffs attempt to dispute the City’s justifications for the late payment penalty by arguing that the City has not proffered evidence regarding its ‘intent’….According to plaintiffs, the City’s primary goal in raising the initial late payment penalty from $35 in 2002 to $63 in 2012 was to increase revenue to the General Fund….But the City’s intent to use the late payment penalty as a revenue source for its General Fund, even if it were mutually exclusive from the penalty’s deterrent effect, does not necessarily render the penalty unconstitutionally excessive. As noted, the Supreme Court has held that policymakers should be afforded wide deference in setting fine amounts.”
Lee’s View
Lee authored yesterday’s opinion reversing the judgment due to the city’s failure to establish the reason for imposing the penalty in the amount set. He opined:
“The City…insists that we should defer to the commonsense presumption that a $63 late fee would help ensure compliance with the law. We can, of course, presume that any late penalty will encourage timely payment and compliance….But we must be careful not to conflate the legitimacy of the City’s interest in ensuring timely payment with the proportionality of the 100 percent late payment penalty….[T]he City’s interest alone does not validate any fine amount that the City might arbitrarily impose. Otherwise, no fine—no matter how sizable or disproportionate—would ever violate the Excessive Fines Clause because the government always has an interest in enforcing its laws.”
The court declined to incorporate a means-testing requirement for claims arising under the excessive claims clause of the Eighth Amendment.
Circuit Judge Johnnie B. Rawlinson joined in the opinion. Circuit Judge Mark J. Bennett dissented as the reversal of summary judgment, saying “[b]ecause I believe the $63 late fee clearly and undeniably passes constitutional muster, I respectfully dissent.”
Bajakajian Case
In the 1998 U.S. Supreme Court case of U.S. v. Bajakajian, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, outlined several factors to consider regarding the proportionality of a fine including the nature of the underlying offense and whether it is related to any other illegal activities, whether other penalties may be imposed, and the extent of the harm caused by the infraction.
Lee said that the case turns largely on the analysis of the final factor—the extent of the harm caused by the plaintiffs’ violation of the law. He reasoned:
“Here, the monetary harms to the City are fairly obvious: administrative costs to collect the parking fines and the time-value of fees not collected timely. And as for non-monetary harms, the government has an interest in ensuring compliance with the law, even for a matter as seemingly trifling as timely payment of a parking ticket.”
However, he said:
“The tougher question is whether a 100 percent late fee of $63 for a $63 parking ticket—or, for that matter, a hypothetical late fee of $126 or $200—is ‘grossly disproportional’ to the gravity of nonpayment within 21 days. To avoid delving into this policy-laden determination, we generally defer to the government’s basis for setting fines….So long as a government provides an unrebutted commonsense explanation or some—even relatively weak—evidence to justify its fine, it will likely prevail against an Excessive Fines Clause challenge.”
Arbitrary Imposition
Applying the analysis to the present case, Lee said:
“But this deference does not command judicial blindness to the arbitrary imposition of punitive fines. Here, the City has offered no evidence to justify or explain its $63 late fee. Indeed, the City’s witness—Robert Andalon, who oversaw the City’s parking fines and fees from 2000 to 2012—testified that he has no clue how the City came up with that amount. To put it bluntly, as far as the City knows, the late fee’s $63 amount is arbitrary. And we cannot fall back on reflexive deference to conclude that an arbitrary fine passes constitutional muster.”
The jurist continued:
“Had the City provided something—testimony from a…witness, a declaration from a City official, or even a single piece of paper shedding light on the City’s basis for the $63 late fee amount—the City would have likely prevailed. But the City provided zilch.”
He declared:
“[O]ur decision is based on the City’s inability to adduce any evidence that its late fee was not arbitrarily imposed, not on improper judicial scrutiny of legislative motives. This is a low evidentiary bar, not—as the dissent erroneously claims—a searching inquiry demanding from municipal officials ‘evidence of why the City chose $63 and not $62.’….And under the specific facts here, the City has not met that low bar.”
Bennett’s View
Bennett reasoned:
“The majority…holds governments to a standard found neither in the precedent of the Supreme Court, our court, nor in the history of the Eighth Amendment. The majority neither gives legislative bodies the substantial deference that they are owed, nor does it adequately address how, even viewing all facts in Plaintiffs’ favor, a $63 fine could be grossly disproportionate—especially in light of Plaintiffs’ own expert testifying that some fine was appropriate and that even a $25 fine would be proportional.”
He continued:
“The majority also agrees with Plaintiffs’ primary argument that the City’s motive behind the late fee is to generate revenue, which supposedly per se renders the late fee excessive, or at the very least, provides a supposed disputed issue of material fact, thus precluding summary judgment. But by adopting this view, the majority injects itself into the legislative process and creates a requirement that courts parse a legislative body’s motive in implementing a fine, including through holding a trial to determine such motive.”
The judge declared:
“The late fee here, on its face, is, as a matter of law, reasonable and not excessive. That should have ended the inquiry. In addition, on its face, that late fee is not grossly disproportionate to the harms it is intended to address. That too should have ended the inquiry. Application of the Excessive Fines Clause to the $63 late fee here trivializes the monumental import of the documents from which the Clause sprung—Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and the Virginia Declaration of Rights. But that is not the end of the flaws of the majority opinion. The majority places our court as the overseer of state and municipal legislative and executive authority, and mandate federal court Civil Rights Act review of the most routine of municipal decisions. This federalism flaws stands as important as the others just mentioned.”
The case is Pimentel v. City of Los Angeles, 22-55946.
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