marcia-lee-stresemann-dba-affiliated-counseling-center-llc-v-lucinda ( 2015 )

STATE OF MINNESOTA
IN SUPREME COURT
A13-1967
Court of Appeals Page, J.
Marcia Lee Stresemann, d/b/a Affiliated Counseling
Center, LLC,
Appellant,
vs. Filed: August 5, 2015
Office of Appellate Courts
Lucinda Jesson, Commissioner of the Minnesota
Department of Human Services, in her individual
and official capacity, et al.,
Respondents.
________________________
John M. Degnan, Scott M. Flaherty, Briggs and Morgan, P.A., Minneapolis, Minnesota,
for appellant.
Lori Swanson, Attorney General, Scott H. Ikeda, Aaron Winter, Assistant Attorneys
General, Saint Paul, Minnesota, for respondents.
Richard C. Landon, Gray, Plant, Mooty, Mooty & Bennett, P.A., Minneapolis,
Minnesota; and
Teresa J. Nelson, American Civil Liberties Union, Saint Paul, Minnesota, for amicus
curiae American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota.
________________________
SYLLABUS
Prosecutorial immunity does not extend to an investigator whose conduct is not
intimately involved with the initiation and maintenance of criminal charges.
1
Reversed and remanded.
OPINION
PAGE, Justice.
We granted review to answer the question “whether and under what circumstances
prosecutorial immunity protects a person who is not a prosecutor.” Appellant Marcia Lee
Stresemann is the sole owner of Affiliated Counseling Center, LLC (Affiliated).
Respondent Catharine Morton-Peters was the Chief Investigator for the Medicaid Fraud
Control Unit (MFCU) of the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office at the time the
relevant events in this case occurred. The MFCU has statutory authority to investigate
and prosecute suspected Medicaid fraud. See 42 U.S.C. § 1396b(q) (2012). In late 2011,
Morton-Peters began investigating Affiliated for Medicaid fraud. As a part of the
investigation, Morton-Peters applied for and received a search warrant for Affiliated’s
premises. The warrant application included a request for patient files. The Fridley Police
executed the warrant and seized numerous documents from Affiliated’s office, including
patient files for non-Medicaid patients. Stresemann later sought to have certain files and
records returned. When the MFCU failed to return the files and records, Stresemann sued
Morton-Peters,1 alleging, among other claims,2 that Morton-Peters committed conversion
1
Stresemann also sued Department of Human Services (DHS) Commissioner
Lucinda Jesson and DHS Manager Ron Nail. The claims against Jesson and Nail were
dismissed and are not before us in this appeal. Because there are no issues before us
relating to Jesson and Nail, their involvement in these proceedings will not be discussed
further.
2
and trespass to chattels by losing and/or destroying some of Affiliated’s patient files.
Morton-Peters moved to dismiss, asserting that she was absolutely immune from civil
liability based on prosecutorial immunity. The district court found that Morton-Peters
was not entitled to prosecutorial immunity. 3 The district court reasoned that “there is no
evidence that any of the Defendants were involved in the filing and maintaining of any
charges against Plaintiffs. As such, Defendants’ absolute immunity defense is
inapplicable to the present facts . . . as absolute immunity is narrowly applied to
individuals acting in a prosecutorial capacity.”
Morton-Peters appealed, seeking interlocutory review of the denial of immunity.
The court of appeals reversed, concluding that Morton-Peters is entitled to prosecutorial
immunity because her challenged conduct was taken pursuant to her statutory authority to
investigate Medicaid fraud. See Stresemann v. Jesson, No. A13-1967, 2014 WL
3800289, at *6-7 (Minn. App. Aug. 4, 2014). The court relied on Hyland v. State, 509
N.W.2d 561, 564 (Minn. App. 1993), rev. denied (Minn. Feb 24, 1994), for the
proposition that prosecutorial immunity extends to government employees whose actions
are taken pursuant to their statutory authority to investigate and prosecute statutory
(Footnote continued from previous page.)
2
Stresemann’s amended complaint also alleged that Morton-Peters violated:
(1) Minn. Stat. § 144.298, subd. 2 (2014); (2) 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (2012); and (3) Article 1,
Section 10, of the Minnesota Constitution. These claims were dismissed on various
grounds, none of which are before us in this appeal.
3
Morton-Peters also sought dismissal based on a number of other claims of
immunity. The district court rejected those immunity claims.
3
violations. Id. at *6. Because we conclude that prosecutorial immunity does not extend
to an investigator when the investigator’s conduct is not intimately involved with the
initiation and maintenance of criminal charges, we reverse and remand to the court of
appeals for consideration of Morton-Peters’ remaining immunity claims.4
The application of immunity is a question of law that we review de novo.
Schroeder v. St. Louis Cty., 708 N.W.2d 497, 503 (Minn. 2006). It is well established
that prosecutors are entitled to absolute immunity from civil liability “when acting within
the scope of their duties by filing and maintaining criminal charges.” Brown v. Dayton
Hudson Corp., 314 N.W.2d 210, 214 (Minn. 1981). Absolute immunity provides a
recipient with a “total shield from liability,” Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 813
(1982), such that the recipient is immune from suit.5 See Linder v. Foster, 209 Minn. 43,
48, 295 N.W. 299, 301 (1940) (holding that when court-appointed physicians act within
the scope of their duties, those physicians receive absolute immunity and are thus
“immune from suit”). We commonly use the phrase “prosecutorial immunity” when
referring to the absolute immunity granted to prosecutors when they act within the scope
of their duties by filing and maintaining criminal charges.
4
Because the court of appeals resolved the claim of prosecutorial immunity in
Morton-Peters’ favor, see Stresemann v. Jesson, No. A13-1967, 2014 WL 3800289, at *7
(Minn. App. Aug. 4, 2014), it did not reach her other immunity claims on appeal.
5
Qualified immunity, in contrast, provides that a recipient is shielded from civil
liability so long as that recipient acted in “good faith.” See Elwood v. Cty. of Rice, 423
N.W.2d 671, 674 (Minn. 1988).
4
We first addressed the scope of prosecutorial immunity in Brown, 314 N.W.2d at
213-14. In Brown, we adopted the rule announced by the United States Supreme Court in
Imbler v. Pachtman, 424 U.S. 409, 430 (1976), that a prosecutor is absolutely immune
from civil suit for damages under Section 1983 so long as the prosecutor’s conduct is
“intimately associated with the judicial phase of the criminal process.” In Imbler, the
Supreme Court reasoned that prosecutorial immunity is necessary to preclude the
possibility “that harassment by unfounded litigation would cause a deflection of the
prosecutor’s energies from his public duties, and the possibility that he would shade his
decisions instead of exercising the independence of judgment required by his public
trust.” 424 U.S. at 423. Leaving open the question of “whether like or similar reasons
require immunity for those aspects of the prosecutor’s responsibility that cast him in the
role of an administrator or investigative officer rather than that of advocate,” Imbler
limited its extension of prosecutorial immunity to the prosecutor’s role of “initiating a
prosecution and presenting the State’s case.” Id. at 431. Persuaded by this reasoning, we
concluded in Brown that “[t]he discretionary decision whether to charge and whether to
continue a prosecution lies at the very heart of the prosecutorial function.” 314 N.W.2d
at 214. Consequently, we adopted “the majority rule that public prosecutors, when acting
within the scope of their duties by filing and maintaining criminal charges, are absolutely
immune from civil liability.” Id. We have not discussed the scope of prosecutorial
immunity since our decision in Brown.
The Supreme Court revisited the scope of prosecutorial immunity in Burns v.
Reed, 500 U.S. 478 (1991), in which it considered whether a prosecutor was entitled to
5
absolute immunity for giving legal advice to police officers. Id. at 492. The Court held
that the prosecutor was not entitled to absolute immunity for that conduct because
“advising the police in the investigative phase of a criminal case” was not “intimately
associated with the judicial phase of the criminal process.” Id. at 493 (quoting Imbler,
424 U.S. at 430). The Court rejected the argument that investigative activities are related
to the prosecutor’s role in screening cases for prosecution, reasoning that:
Almost any action by a prosecutor, including his or her direct participation
in purely investigative activity, could be said to be in some way related to
the ultimate decision whether to prosecute, but we have never indicated that
absolute immunity is that expansive. Rather, as in Imbler, we inquire
whether the prosecutor’s actions are closely associated with the judicial
process. Indeed, we implicitly rejected the United States’ argument in
Mitchell [v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511 (1985)] where we held that the Attorney
General was not absolutely immune from liability for authorizing a
warrantless wiretap. Even though the wiretap was arguably related to a
potential prosecution, we found that the Attorney General “was not acting
in a prosecutorial capacity” and thus was not entitled to the immunity
recognized in Imbler.
Id. at 495-96 (citation omitted). The Supreme Court further clarified the parameters of
prosecutorial immunity in Buckley v. Fitzsimmons:
There is a difference between the advocate’s role in evaluating evidence
and interviewing witnesses as he prepares for trial, on the one hand, and the
detective’s role in searching for the clues and corroboration that might give
him probable cause to recommend that a suspect be arrested, on the other
hand. When a prosecutor performs the investigative functions normally
performed by a detective or police officer, it is “neither appropriate nor
justifiable that, for the same act, immunity should protect the one and not
the other.” Thus, if a prosecutor plans and executes a raid on a suspected
weapons cache, he “has no greater claim to complete immunity than
activities of police officers allegedly acting under his direction.”
509 U.S. 259, 273-74 (1993) (citations omitted).
6
Persuaded by the reasoning in Burns and Buckley, we conclude that there is a
material difference between investigative functions normally performed by an
investigator or police officer and the prosecutorial functions of filing and maintaining
criminal charges. Consequently, we hold that prosecutorial immunity does not extend to
an investigator whose conduct is not intimately involved with the initiation and
maintenance of criminal charges.6 Here, the alleged conduct by Morton-Peters was not
intimately involved with the initiation and maintenance of criminal charges, and therefore
the court of appeals erred when it concluded that she was entitled to prosecutorial
immunity.7 Consequently, we reverse and remand to the court of appeals for
consideration of Morton-Peters’ remaining immunity claims.
Reversed and remanded.
6
The court of appeals has extended “prosecutorial immunity” to investigators in
two separate situations. In Barry v. Johnson, the court of appeals held that investigators,
when acting at the direction of a prosecutor, are entitled to prosecutorial immunity for
“investigations into [the] circumstances of alleged crimes.” 350 N.W.2d 498, 499 (Minn.
App. 1984), rev. denied (Minn. Sept. 12, 1984). In Hyland v. State, the court of appeals
extended the holding in Barry, and held that investigators are entitled to prosecutorial
immunity for investigations conducted pursuant to their statutory authority to investigate
and prosecute statutory violations. 509 N.W.2d 561, 564 (Minn. App. 1993), rev. denied
(Minn. Feb. 24, 1994). To the extent that the court of appeals’ decisions in Barry and
Hyland are inconsistent with our holding today, we overrule those decisions.
7
Some of the arguments in Morton-Peters’ brief might be read as a request to
provide investigators with a form of absolute immunity that is separate and distinct from
“prosecutorial immunity.” We need not consider these arguments because Stresemann
petitioned for review on the specific and narrow issue of whether and under what
circumstances prosecutorial immunity protects a person who is not a prosecutor. See
George v. Estate of Baker, 724 N.W.2d 1, 7 (Minn. 2006) (“A petition for review to this
court must specify the legal issues to be reviewed.”).
7