The Southern District of California dismissed an action by several disenrolled members of the Pala Indian tribe in Allen v. Smith (link to TurtleTalk for court documents). The tribal defendants filed a motion to dismiss on the basis of sovereign immunity, as is typical in these membership actions. What sets this decision apart from your garden variety disenrollment dismissal is the first apparent decision regarding the individual/official capacity distinction that was referenced in this opinion. And for that, we need to back up and explain things a little.
The Maxwell Decision
This time, plaintiffs attempted to make use of a new 9th Circuit case, Maxwell v. County of San Diego (link to Ninth Circuit for published opinion) to sue tribal officers in their individual capacity rather than the tribe itself. In most sovereign immunity cases involving state and local governments, when a public officer is sued it makes a difference whether that person is sued in their individual or official capacity. To keep it brief, official capacity suits are no different than suing the sovereign entity itself because if the plaintiff wins, then the money is paid by the entity. However, when officials are sued in their official capacity, they are entitled to assert sovereign immunity as a defense to the plaintiff’s claim so long as they can show they were operating within the scope of their official authority. Individual suits, on the other hand, target only the public official for his own actions and do not seek relief from the entity, but from the individual.
In Maxwell, family members of a shooting victim brought an action in federal court against a tribal fire department and its paramedics, alleging that the individual paramedics unreasonably delayed in obtaining medical treatment for the victim. The paramedics asserted tribal sovereign immunity because they were operating under a public safety cooperative agreement which expressly reserved the tribe’s immunity in case of suit. However, that did not work out for the paramedics because the Ninth Circuit held that a remedy against the paramedics would have operated against them individually and not the tribe. The paramedics themselves would be paying the plaintiffs’ damages, not the tribe (indemnity agreements notwithstanding); therefore, as persons sued in their individual capacity, the paramedics could not assert sovereign immunity as a defense.
Overall, the Maxwell case is troubling for tribal governments because the official/individual capacity distinction did not exist in federal Indian common law until this decision, to which the Turtle Talk blog discussed. I could go on as to why I like and dislike the Maxwell, but at the time I wondered if Maxwell gave disenrollees another shot at challenging their disenrollments if the individual tribal officers were sued in their individual capacities and not the tribe. The plaintiff’s attorney in this case thought the same thing, but unfortunately, it did not work out.
The Remedy Sought in Disenrollment Challenges Operates Against Tribes, Not Individuals
The Hon. William Hayes of the Southern District of California began its analysis with the usual verbiage about the contours of sovereign immunity, including familiar references to Santa Clara Pueblo that most disenrolled are familiar with it. Next, the court moved onto Maxwell and held that it did not apply here.
Maxwell calls for a “remedy-focused” analysis in determining whether an individual capacity suit against a tribal official was really an individual suit or a cloaked version of an official capacity suit. Here, the plaintiffs’ complaint sought money damages, injunctive relief and declaratory relief, essentially asking that the plaintiffs become restored to the tribal membership rolls. The tribe itself was not sued, only members of Pala’s Executive Committee (including the tribal chairman), who revised enrollment ordinances which gave them power to adjust the membership as they saw fit. Subsequently, the defendants disenrolled the plaintiffs, thus commencing this legal fight. However, the court ultimately determined that the remedy being sought would ultimately operate against the tribe because only the tribal government (via the defendant tribal officers acting in an official capacity) could reverse their disenrollment, and not the individuals acting only in an individual capacity. And, as the court noted:
Although Plaintiffs challenge the motives and the findings of the [Enrollment] Committee’s individual members, the [Plaintiffs'] Complaint alleges that the Committee, acting as a governing body, disenrolled Plaintiffs. ‘Without more, it is difficult to view the suit against the officials as anything other than a suit against the Band.’ [Citations omitted].
Plaintiffs called upon the court to make a tribe do something that Santa Clara Pueblo and well-established Ninth Circuit precedent says courts cannot do: interfere with tribal membership disputes.
Conclusion
So Maxwell was not what I was hoping it to be in this case, and once again the disenrolled do not get their day in court. However, this is the Southern District’s opinion; it remains to be seen how Maxwell establishes itself in the Northern, Eastern, and Central Districts.
