Maldonado-Cabrera v. Anglero-Alfaro

United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 20-2030
MARÍA DOLORES MALDONADO-CABRERA ET AL.,
Plaintiffs, Appellants,
v.
DR. JORGE ANGLERO-ALFARO ET AL.,
Defendants, Appellees.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO
[Hon. Raúl M. Arias-Marxuach, U.S. District Judge]
Before
Howard, Chief Judge,
Selya and Barron, Circuit Judges.
Michelle Annet Ramos-Jimenez on brief for appellants.
Fernando Figueroa-Santiago, Solicitor General of Puerto Rico,
and Omar Andino-Figueroa, Deputy Solicitor General, on brief for
appellee Dr. Bryan Santiago-Díaz.
February 25, 2022
SELYA, Circuit Judge. This appeal requires us to examine
the framework governing a stay or dismissal of a federal action
that is duplicative of parallel state litigation. Because the
court below erroneously applied the "prior pending action"
doctrine in lieu of the test adumbrated in Colorado River Water
Conservation District v. United States, 424 U.S. 800 (1976), and
its progeny, we vacate the order dismissing the plaintiffs' action
and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
I
We start by chronicling the travel of the case. On
September 6, 2018, the plaintiffs, María Dolores Maldonado-Cabrera
and Annelys Maldonado-Cabrera, commenced this civil action,
seeking damages for medical malpractice, in the United States
District Court for the District of Puerto Rico. They premised
federal jurisdiction on diversity of citizenship and the existence
of a controversy in the requisite amount. See 28 U.S.C. § 1332(a).1
Their complaint alleged negligence under Puerto Rico law leading
to the death of their mother, Gregoria Cabrera-Bayanilla, during
the previous year. They named as defendants the physicians who
cared for the decedent, the hospital in which she was a patient,
and two insurance companies (who are no longer parties).
1The plaintiffs are citizens of Florida. All of the
defendants are citizens of Puerto Rico. The amount in controversy
exceeds $75,000.
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Roughly a month before the plaintiffs instituted this
action, a larger group of plaintiffs (also relatives of the
decedent) brought a similar medical malpractice suit in the
Superior Court of Puerto Rico, sitting at Ponce. This earlier
suit also arose from Mrs. Cabrera-Bayanilla's death, asserted
similar causes of action, and named the same defendants. The
earlier action was captioned Luis Alberto Maldonado Cabrera y Otros
v. Hospital Episcopal San Lucas y Otros, No. PO2018CV00625.
In due course, Dr. Bryan Santiago-Díaz — who was a
defendant in both cases — filed a motion in the federal court
seeking either to stay or dismiss the federal-court proceeding.
As relevant here, Santiago-Díaz's motion — docketed on February
21, 2020 — asked the district court to act based upon either
Colorado River abstention or the "prior pending action" doctrine.
Although expressing doubt that either staying or
dismissing the federal-court proceeding was called for under
Colorado River, the district court concluded that it "need not
consider [the] request for abstention under Colorado River"
because the prior pending action doctrine applied. Maldonado-
Cabrera v. Alfaro, No. 18-1661, 2020 WL 6047748, at *2, (D.P.R.
Oct. 13, 2020). That doctrine, as the court understood it,
provided that "the pendency of [a] prior action, in a court of
competent jurisdiction, between the same parties, predicated upon
the same cause of action and growing out of the same transaction,
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and in which identical relief is sought, constitutes good ground
for abatement of the later suit." Id. (quoting Rowayton Venture
Grp. LLC v. McCarthy, No. 19-12240, 2020 WL 4340985, at *3 (D.
Mass. July 28, 2020)). The court proceeded to find the prior
pending action doctrine applicable and dismissed the federal-court
suit without prejudice. Id. at *5. This timely appeal followed.
II
When a district court has yielded jurisdiction in favor
of a prior pending federal-court action, we review its order of
dismissal for abuse of discretion. See Curtis v. Citibank, N.A.,
226 F.3d 133, 138 (2d Cir. 2000). Here, however, the parties have
been unable to find any relevant authority identifying the standard
of review that obtains when a federal court has yielded
jurisdiction in favor of a prior pending state-court action.2
The closest parallel, we think, is that we review a
district court's decision to abstain under Colorado River for abuse
of discretion. See United States v. Fairway Cap. Corp., 483 F.3d
34, 40 (1st Cir. 2007). We apply that standard of review here.
In doing so, we remain mindful that a material error of law is
2 To be sure, Puerto Rico is not a state. The law is clear,
though, that cases pending in the Puerto Rico courts are treated
as functionally equivalent to state-court cases for purposes of
Colorado River abstention. See, e.g., Nazario-Lugo v.
Caribevisión Holdings, Inc., 670 F.3d 109, 114 (1st Cir. 2012);
Jiménez v. Rodríguez-Pagán, 597 F.3d 18, 27 (1st Cir. 2010).
Consequently, we refer throughout to the suit that is pending in
the Superior Court as a state-court suit.
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perforce an abuse of discretion. See Charbono v. Sumski (In re
Charbono), 790 F.3d 80, 85 (1st Cir. 2015); United States v.
Caraballo, 552 F.3d 6, 8 (1st Cir. 2008). Thus, a court abuses
its discretion if it fails to apply the Colorado River standard
when that precedent supplies the relevant benchmark. See Moses H.
Cone Mem'l Hosp. v. Mercury Constr. Corp., 460 U.S. 1, 19 (1983).
The prior pending action doctrine is good law where it
belongs, but it does not belong here. It covers scenarios in which
"actions involving the same parties and similar subject matter are
pending in different federal district courts" and "the overlap
between the two suits is nearly complete." TPM Holdings, Inc. v.
Intra-Gold Indus., Inc., 91 F.3d 1, 4 (1st Cir. 1996). When such
a scenario looms, we have made pellucid that "the usual practice
is for the court that first had jurisdiction to resolve the issues
and the other court to defer."3 Id. This "power to dismiss a
duplicative lawsuit is meant to foster judicial economy and the
'comprehensive disposition of litigation.'" Curtis, 226 F.3d at
138 (quoting Kerotest Mfg. Co. v. C-O-Two Fire Equip. Co., 342
U.S. 180, 183 (1952)).
3 In TPM Holdings, we also said that "where the overlap between
two suits is less than complete, the judgment is made case by case,
based on such factors as the extent of overlap, the likelihood of
conflict, the comparative advantage and the interest of each forum
in resolving the dispute." 91 F.3d at 4 (internal citation
omitted).
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The Supreme Court, though, has left no doubt that such
a "general principle . . . to avoid duplicative litigation" holds
water only within the federal system. Colo. River, 424 U.S. at
817. When the jurisdictional overlap is "between state and federal
courts" the justification for applying that general principle
vanishes: "the pendency of an action in the state court is no bar
to proceedings concerning the same matter in the Federal court
having jurisdiction." Id. (quoting McClellan v. Carland, 217 U.S.
268, 282 (1910)); see Sprint Commc'ns, Inc. v. Jacobs, 571 U.S.
69, 73 (2013). This divergence, the Court explained, "stems from
the virtually unflagging obligation of the federal courts to
exercise the jurisdiction given them." Colo. River, 424 U.S. at
817; accord Doran v. Salem Inn, Inc., 422 U.S. 922, 928 (1975).
Consistent with this distinction, the decisional
calculus changes when the competing litigation lies outside the
federal system. A federal court cannot renounce jurisdiction in
the absence of "the clearest of justifications." Jiménez v.
Rodríguez-Pagán, 597 F.3d 18, 27 (1st Cir. 2010) (quoting Colo.
River, 424 U.S. at 819). The dimensions of any such justification
are circumscribed "by an 'exceptional-circumstances test,' whose
non-exclusive list of factors we have drawn from Colorado River
and its progeny." Id. (quoting Moses H. Cone Mem'l Hosp., 460
U.S. at 16). Under this test, "[d]uplication and inefficiency are
not enough to support a federal court's decision to bow out of a
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case over which it has jurisdiction." Burns v. Watler, 931 F.2d
140, 146 (1st Cir. 1991) (quoting Villa Marina Yacht Sales, Inc.
v. Hatteras Yachts, 915 F.2d 7, 13 (1st Cir. 1990)). Except when
warranted by a doctrine of abstention or comity recognized by the
Supreme Court, see Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Indus. Corp.,
544 U.S. 280, 292 (2005), a federal court is not free to surrender
jurisdiction — whether by outright dismissal or by a stay — to a
parallel state-court action without a sufficient showing of the
required exceptional circumstances, see Moses H. Cone Mem'l Hosp.,
460 U.S. at 19.
In the case at hand, the district court abused its
discretion by skipping the Colorado River inquiry and using instead
a jerry-built substitute. See id. (holding that court's discretion
is abused where not "exercised under the relevant standard" of
"Colorado River's exceptional-circumstances test"). The court
below explicitly declined to "consider [the] request for
abstention under Colorado River."4 Maldonado-Cabrera, 2020 WL
6047748, at *2. Instead, it dismissed the case under the prior
pending action doctrine "in order to avoid inconsistent judgments
4 Although it did not decide the issue, the court expressed
doubt that Colorado River abstention was justified. See Maldonado-
Cabrera, 2020 WL 6047748, at *2. The court's misgivings were
rooted in the fact that "Dr. Santiago-Diaz's bid for Colorado River
abstention was largely premised on the existence of unsettled
issues of Puerto Rico law concerning application of the damages
cap," which issues had "since been settled by the Puerto Rico
Supreme Court." Id.- 7 -
and promote judicial efficiency." Id. at *5. Those reasons,
measured against Supreme Court doctrine, are insufficient.
We hold that the court's failure to apply the correct
test, drawn from Colorado River and its progeny, constituted an
abuse of discretion. Given that the district court has yet to
address the issue, we take no view as to whether the Colorado River
factors will support either a stay or an order of dismissal on
these facts.5 That determination is "left to the discretion of
the district court in the first instance." Moses H. Cone Mem'l
Hosp., 460 U.S. at 19.
We add a coda. The court below did not blaze a new trail
but, rather, followed a series of district court decisions in this
circuit that have embraced the prior pending action doctrine to
defer to parallel state-court litigation. See, e.g., U.S. Fire
Ins. Co. v. Equitas Ins. Ltd., No. 18-1205, 2019 WL 5457934, at *4
(D.N.H. Oct. 24, 2019); Bradeen v. Bank of New York Mellon Tr.
Co., No. 18-11753, 2018 WL 5792319, at *2-3 (D. Mass. Nov. 2,
2018); Qutab v. Kyäni, Inc., 324 F. Supp. 3d 243, 247 (D. Mass.
2018); Quality One Wireless, LLC v. Goldie Grp., LLC, 37 F. Supp.
5 When deferral under Colorado River is warranted, the
decision whether to stay or dismiss is "committed . . . to the
discretion of the district courts." Jiménez, 597 F.3d at 31.
Although other courts of appeals "have held that a stay is always
preferable," we have declined to lay down a categorical rule. Id.
at 31-32 (citing cases). We have, however, noted this circuit's
historical "trend" of opting for a stay and have observed that
this is "the more cautious route." Id. at 32.
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3d 536, 541-43 (D. Mass. 2014). We reject those decisions insofar
as they apply a test that departs from the test elucidated in
Colorado River and its progeny. Although the prior pending action
doctrine and Colorado River abstention are both grounded in similar
considerations of "wise judicial administration," Colo. River, 424
U.S. at 818, there is at least one salient difference: the
Colorado River test loads the dice with a "presumption in favor of
assuming jurisdiction," Jiménez, 597 F.3d at 28, which can be
overcome only by the "clearest of justifications displayed by
exceptional circumstances," Nazario-Lugo v. Caribevisión Holdings,
Inc., 670 F.3d 109, 116 (1st Cir. 2012). As we have explained,
the court below abused its discretion by failing to apply the
requisite exceptional-circumstances test.
III
We need go no further. For the reasons delineated above,
the order of the district court is vacated and the case is remanded
for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. Costs shall
be taxed in favor of the plaintiffs.
Vacated and Remanded.
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