Honaker v. Smith

256 F.3d 477 (7th Cir. 2001)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

P owned that was not his primary residence, but where he would occasionally stay overnight. The utilities were kept on in the house, though the gas and electricity were not activated. P had begun extensive remodeling on the house including the removal of an interior wall. Because of this ongoing construction, the house was in very poor condition. P earned a living by rebuilding pallets on the property where this house was located. Wood and other debris were often strewn around the property. Residents often complained about the state of the property to Lovington's City Council, and P received citations from local police officers due to the property's poor condition. Members of the City Council often discussed these complaints and expressed their displeasure with the property's condition. As mayor, D was a member of the City Council. Relations between P and the Village were very hostile including lawsuits and alleged threats to burn him out. P's house caught fire. The Village's Volunteer Fire Department responded to the call regarding the fire, which came in at 1:51 a.m., within minutes. There were four fire trucks and twenty volunteer firefighters from the Fire Department at the scene. Another fire truck and several firefighters were called in from the neighboring Sullivan, Illinois, Fire Department to help extinguish the blaze. D was the fire chief, and he determined that the house's structure was already badly damaged and noticed that a number of floor joists and beams supporting the second floor were cracked and bowed. He ordered the firefighters not to enter the house to battle the fire because the house's structure was too unstable to risk such entry. The fire was extinguished three hours later, and it rekindled twice during that day, requiring the firefighters to return each time to quench the flames. A fire investigator from the Illinois State Fire Marshall's Office, arrived at the scene of the fire at 3:30 a.m. and observed the structural problems and believed that the firefighters were making every effort to extinguish the blaze. The P fire was not the first time that dilapidated buildings owned by a Lovington resident had burned down under suspicious circumstances. A few months before the fire to P's house, buildings in poor condition that belonged to Lovington resident Tom Brewer also had caught fire. As in P's case, the poor condition of Brewer's property had been discussed in the City Council before the fire, and the Village had asked Brewer to tear down those buildings. Before Brewer took any action, the buildings burned down, and the cause of that fire never was determined. Rumors of who may have started to fire began to grow. P sued D in his official capacity as Mayor of Lovington and Fire Chief of the Lovington Fire Department. A jury trial began on February 14, 2000. At the close of all of the evidence, D filed a motion for judgment as a matter of law on all of the claims in the complaint. With regard to Count I's Section 1983 claims, the court took the motion under advisement but allowed the action to be submitted to the jury. However, the court granted the motion as to Count IV's emotional distress claim. It did so because it found that P presented 'no evidence of emotional distress . . . other than the mere claim that he was upset' and 'no evidence of any medical treatment . . . or any follow-up whatsoever with counseling in any way.' The jury returned a verdict on Count I in favor of P in the amount of $45,000. D then filed a renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law, and on May 4, 2000, the district court granted that motion and entered judgment as a matter of law notwithstanding the verdict on Count I. There was no evidence to support the verdict as P had put forward only unsupported speculation and conjecture on that point. It also ruled that even assuming the evidence was sufficient to support a finding that D had set the fire, there was no evidence that he did so 'under color of state law,' a requirement of all Section 1983 claims. The court noted that P presented no evidence to support his assertions that alternative methods should have been used to fight the fire or that the Fire Department should have taken far less time than the three hours it needed to initially extinguish the blaze. As a result, the district court determined that no rational jury could have found in favor of P on Count I and granted D's motion for judgment as a matter of law on that cause of action.