Cotterill v. City and County of San Francisco

Background

Cheryl Cotterill brought an underlying civil-rights lawsuit against The Regents of the University of California, the City and County of San Francisco, and individual employees of those entities. After the case was dismissed, the Regents and the City defendants sought attorney’s fees and costs. The court found that continuing the lawsuit after depositions of key witnesses was reckless and that Haynes had unreasonably and vexatiously multiplied the proceedings in violation of 28 U.S.C. § 1927.

The court awarded $165,578.37 to the Regents and $196,967.24 to the City. The court imposed those amounts on Haynes, Cotterill’s counsel, rather than on Cotterill. The Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal and remanded only for a discretionary determination about Haynes’s ability to pay the sanctions. After reviewing the submissions, the court left the awards unchanged. Haynes’s later appeal was dismissed with prejudice for failure to prosecute.

In 2022, the Regents obtained renewal of the judgment for another ten-year term. Haynes had previously moved to set aside or vacate the judgment, and the court denied that motion in January 2023. He filed the present motion on August 17, 2023, again relying on the fact that the judge’s son had worked in the City Attorney’s Office during the underlying litigation.

Timeliness

The court treated the motion as seeking relief under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60. That rule generally requires such a motion to be filed within a reasonable time, and some grounds have a one-year limit. The court held that Haynes’s motion was filed too late because it came roughly ten years after the judgment and sanctions award and eight years after the affirmance on appeal. The court also held that renewal of the judgment did not restart the time for filing a Rule 60 motion. It stated that the motion could be denied on that basis alone.

Merits of the Motion

The court also addressed Haynes’s arguments under Rule 60(b)(4), Rule 60(b)(6), and Rule 60(d)(3). Rule 60(b)(4) permits relief from a void judgment when a substantial jurisdictional defect or a due-process violation made the judgment legally ineffective. Rule 60(b)(6) allows relief in extraordinary circumstances when necessary to accomplish justice. Rule 60(d)(3) permits a court to set aside a judgment for fraud on the court, which requires clear and convincing evidence of an improper scheme affecting a central issue and the outcome.

The court found no extraordinary circumstance making the judgment void and no fraud on the court. It relied in part on a November 15, 2013 opinion letter from the Committee on Codes of Conduct of the Judicial Conference of the United States, which concluded that the judge’s son’s employment in the City Attorney’s Office, considered in the circumstances presented, did not require recusal or reasonably call the judge’s impartiality into question. The court stated that the son’s employment did not create a conflict, show bias, or provide a basis for declaring the judgment void.

Disposition

The court denied Haynes’s motion to vacate the judgment as untimely and denied it on the merits. The order did not alter the existing judgment or the attorney-fee and cost awards.