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Ninth Circuit:

Jurisdiction Lies Over Case About State Court Custody Matter

Majority Reverses Dismissal of Civil Rights Lawsuit, Alleging That County Officials Lied in Superior Court, Saying There Is No Bar to Hearing Dispute Where Plaintiffs Seek Money Rather Than Reversal, Drawing Dissent

By Kimber Cooley, associate editor

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday, in a 2-1 decision, reversed the dismissal of a civil rights lawsuit alleging that Trinity County officials failed to provide required social services to a family and committed fraud in superior court child custody proceedings, resulting in the termination of their parental rights, finding that a doctrine that limits the power of federal courts to review state court matters did not act as a bar to jurisdiction.

In an opinion, authored by Circuit Judge Daniel A. Bress and joined in by Senior Circuit Judge Marsha S. Berzon, the court held that the so-called Rooker-Feldman doctrine—which establishes that District Courts lack subject matter jurisdiction over cases complaining of injuries caused by state-court judgments—did not operate as a bar to the present action, in which the plaintiffs sought only monetary relief and alleged misdeeds by the officials rather than by the court.

Bress wrote:

“We consider this often-misunderstood doctrine in the context of a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging that county officials failed to provide social services and committed fraud in state child custody proceedings. Although the plaintiffs’ lawsuit may suffer from other infirmities, most notably preclusion, the Rooker-Feldman doctrine did not deprive the district court of jurisdiction.”

Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke dissented, saying:

“[P]laintiffs have expressly disclaimed any extrinsic fraud by defendants in the state court proceedings, meaning that no act or omission independent of those proceedings prevented plaintiffs from presenting their case to the state court. As a result, plaintiffs functionally seek a remedy for an injury directly caused by a state court judgment, placing this case squarely within Rooker-Feldman’s ambit.”

Report to County

The dispute arose after a Trinity Superior Court judge, in 2019, permanently terminated the parental rights of Patricia and Stanley Miroth to their two minor children, identified as “A.M.” and “S.M.”, after the county’s Child Welfare Services Unit (“CWS”) received reports that the couple had engaged in physical altercations and had allowed a registered sex offender to live in their home.

Following unsuccessful appeals in the state court, the Miroths filed suit in federal court against Trinity County, CWS caseworker Megan Sholty-Scalzo, and various county employees, asserting claims under 42 U.S.C. §1983 and California law.

Patricia and Stanley Miroth allege that Sholty-Scalzo and other officials were aware of the difficulties in the Miroth home but made no effort to create a state-required safety plan to help them establish a pathway to maintain custody. They contend that the CWS employees lied to the judge about the circumstances surrounding the termination of Patricia Miroth’s rights relating to her older children and other factors.

In the original complaint, filed in March 2022, the couple requested that the District Court “[r]everse the termination of…parental rights, and make orders to reunify children and parents.”

District Court’s View

Then-Chief District Court Judge Kimberly J. Mueller of the Eastern District of California, now on senior status, dismissed the pleading, with leave to amend, under the Rooker-Feldman doctrine. The plaintiffs then filed the operative amended complaint, dropping the demand for the reinstatement of their rights and seeking only monetary damages.

On April 17, 2023, Mueller dismissed the federal claims for lack of jurisdiction, this time with prejudice, and declined to exercise authority over the state law claims. She opined that because the Miroths “still essentially ask the court to review the rulings of the state court and find they were in error,” the lawsuit remained “a forbidden de facto appeal” of a superior court judgment.

Noting that the plaintiffs had also removed allegations of extrinsic fraud from the operative complaint, she said the pleading “directly challenges the state court decisions.”

Yesterday’s opinion reversed the ensuing judgment.

Dropped Requests

After a lengthy discussion of the history of the doctrine, Bress wrote:

“Rooker-Feldman ‘applies only when the federal plaintiff both asserts as her injury legal error or errors by the state court and seeks as her remedy relief from the state court judgment.’ ”

Applying these principles, he concluded that the doctrine did not operate to bar the Miroths’ claims after they dropped the request to set aside the state court judgment and reinstate their parental rights.

Turning to the injuries asserted, he said:

“The Miroths’ allegation that the defendants failed to develop a required safety plan to ensure that the Miroths could retain custody of the children asserts a wrong by adverse parties, not the state court. The same is true of the Miroths’ allegations that the defendants defrauded the state court into terminating the Miroths’ parental rights.”

Under these circumstances, he opined that “Rooker-Feldman does not apply, and the district court had subject matter jurisdiction over the case.”

Addressing the extrinsic fraud issue, the judge remarked:

“[T]he Miroths withdrawing the extrinsic fraud allegations did not mean they were thereby alleging an injury caused by the state court, based on the state court’s legal errors. The Miroths did not walk into a Rooker-Feldman sinkhole the moment they excised ‘extrinsic fraud’ from their complaint. Instead, regardless of the legal labels attached to the allegations, the second amended complaint alleges that Sholty-Scalzo and other defendants defrauded the state court into issuing its order terminating the Miroths’ parental rights. Those allegations assert wrongful conduct by adverse parties in litigation, not by the state court itself.”

VanDyke’s View

Disagreeing with this analysis, VanDyke remarked:

“Rooker-Feldman applies narrowly, yes, but it shouldn’t be a paper tiger. If plaintiffs were claiming some extrinsic fraud that [interfered with their ability to present their claim] to the state court, I would readily agree with the majority that Rooker-Feldman does not preclude federal review….But plaintiffs disclaimed any extrinsic fraud. And they had ample opportunity in the state court proceedings to counter all the alleged intrinsic misstatements and omissions of which they now complain. The state court considered whatever responses the plaintiffs provided and simply disagreed with them. Returning this case to the district court to possibly provide a remedy for the state court removing plaintiffs’ children runs directly into Rooker-Feldman….I would affirm the district court, and therefore respectfully dissent.”

The jurist characterized the majority’s view as reducing the doctrine to a “mere pleading standard,” saying:

“[S]tate court losers can now bring federal lawsuits challenging unfavorable state court judgments if they do just one of the following: (1) avoid expressly requesting reversal of the state court’s decision or (2) simply allege that their opponent made false and misleading statements notwithstanding the fact that those statements were challenged in front of the state court.”

He added:

“I’m not aware of any circuit that has gone so far to say that the only way for Rooker-Feldman to apply is when a federal plaintiff expressly asks to overturn the state court judgment. It is true that the other circuits, like ours, have appropriately recognized that Rooker-Feldman is a narrow doctrine. But respecting the narrowness of the doctrine doesn’t mean effectively narrowing it out of existence as the majority does here.”

Framing the issue, VanDyke wrote:

“There is no denying that the fundamental injury in this case—the removal of plaintiffs’ children—was in fact produced by the state court judgment. No amount of reframing the injury as the result of other causes—such as defendants’ actions or arguments preceding the judgment— changes this reality because none of those causes could have led to the removal of plaintiffs’ children absent the state court’s judgment.”

The case is Miroth v. County of Trinity, 23-15759.