Garcia v. Pena

Background

Orlando Garcia alleged that he uses a wheelchair and encountered two accessibility barriers at Pena Meat & Food Market: noncompliant wheelchair paths of travel and insufficient clear floor space at sales counters. He alleged violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, and alleged that he planned to return to the store.

After Garcia filed the lawsuit, Martin Pena and Sara Pena hired a certified access specialist inspector to identify and correct the alleged barriers. The inspector later reported that all barriers had been removed. The defendants informed Garcia of the remediation and offered to pay the legal fees incurred to that point.

Garcia argued that dismissal would be premature because a site inspection had not yet occurred. The court ordered the parties to arrange an inspection and file declarations addressing what happened and whether the barriers remained. The defendants filed the required declaration. Garcia’s counsel did not file a declaration and, according to the defendants’ submission, did not dispute that the barriers had been removed.

Legal standard

The court explained that it must dismiss an action if it lacks subject-matter jurisdiction. The defendants made a factual challenge to jurisdiction, so the court considered evidence outside the complaint rather than presuming all of Garcia’s allegations were true.

For an ADA claim seeking an injunction, a plaintiff must face a real and immediate threat of repeated injury. The court also explained that a claim can become moot when later events make it clear that the challenged conduct is not reasonably expected to recur and the effects of the violation have been completely removed. Because this jurisdictional question was intertwined with the facts, the court applied the standard used for summary judgment: whether there was a genuine dispute about a material fact and whether the moving party was entitled to judgment as a matter of law.

Ruling

The court found that the defendants had affirmatively shown that no material dispute existed about whether the barriers remained. It concluded that the two alleged barriers had been fully corrected, so Garcia no longer faced a real and immediate threat of repeated injury. The court also concluded that the voluntary-cessation exception did not preserve the claim because the barriers were structural and had been modified in a way that removed the offending conditions.

The court therefore dismissed Garcia’s ADA claim for lack of jurisdiction. After dismissing the only federal claim, the court declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction—the court’s discretionary authority to hear related state-law claims—over Garcia’s Unruh Act claim. The conclusion states that the court granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.