Hearts With Haiti, Inc. v. Kendrick

United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 15-2401
HEARTS WITH HAITI, INC., and MICHAEL GEILENFELD,
Plaintiffs, Appellees,
v.
PAUL KENDRICK,
Defendant, Appellant.
No. 16-1839
HEARTS WITH HAITI, INC., and MICHAEL GEILENFELD,
Plaintiffs, Appellants,
v.
PAUL KENDRICK,
Defendant, Appellee.
APPEALS FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MAINE
[Hon. John A. Woodcock, Jr., U.S. District Judge]
Before
Howard, Chief Judge,
Souter, Associate Justice,*
and Stahl, Circuit Judge.
* Hon. David H. Souter, Associate Justice (Ret.) of the
Supreme Court of the United States, sitting by designation.
Russell B. Pierce, Jr., with whom Norman, Hanson & DeTroy,
LLC, was on brief, for Hearts With Haiti, Inc., and Michael
Geilenfeld.
Brent A. Singer, with whom Matthew M. Cobb and Rudman
Winchell were on brief, for Paul Kendrick.
April 27, 2017
SOUTER, Associate Justice. Hearts With Haiti, Inc.,
and Michael Geilenfeld brought this action against Paul Kendrick
alleging defamation, false light invasion of privacy, and
tortious interference with business relations. The claims were
based on Kendrick's public accusations that Geilenfeld sexually
abused boys in an orphanage he personally operated in Haiti and
that the abuse was enabled by Hearts With Haiti, a North
Carolina corporation that raised funds for the orphanage. A
jury found for the Plaintiffs with separate awards of damages
totaling $14.5 million. Kendrick appealed. While the appeal
was pending, Kendrick's lawyer discovered a plausible argument
that federal subject-matter jurisdiction was lacking. This
court remanded the case to the district court to address
Kendrick's argument in the first instance, and the district
court dismissed the action for lack of diversity jurisdiction.
Hearts With Haiti, Inc. v. Kendrick, 192 F. Supp. 3d 181 (D. Me.
2016). Now, the Plaintiffs appeal the dismissal, and Kendrick
appeals with claims of trial error. We affirm the dismissal,
thus resolving both appeals.
Federal subject-matter jurisdiction over this dispute
is premised on diversity of citizenship, requiring the
allegation in a case of domestic-citizen diversity that each
plaintiff is a citizen of a different state from the
defendant's. See 28 U.S.C. § 1332(a)(1). "In order to be a
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citizen of a State within the meaning of the diversity statute,
a natural person must be both a citizen of the United States and
be domiciled within the State." Newman-Green, Inc. v. Alfonzo-
Larrain, 490 U.S. 826, 828 (1989) (emphasis in original); accord
D.B. Zwirn Special Opportunities Fund, L.P. v. Mehrotra, 661
F.3d 124, 126 (1st Cir. 2011) ("United States citizens who are
domiciled abroad are citizens of no state[.]"). Domicile is
"the place where [one] has his true, fixed home and principal
establishment, and to which, whenever he is absent, he has the
intention of returning." Rodríguez-Díaz v. Sierra-Martínez, 853
F.2d 1027, 1029 (1st Cir. 1988) (internal quotation marks
omitted). The district court held jurisdiction wanting because
it found that Geilenfeld was domiciled in Haiti and thus not a
citizen of a state for the purposes of diversity jurisdiction.
The trial court's conclusion was not clearly erroneous. Bank
One, Tex., N.A. v. Montle, 964 F.2d 48, 51 (1st Cir. 1992) (a
district court's determination of domicile is reviewed for clear
error).
For more than two decades, Geilenfeld has lived in
Haiti, where he owns property, is employed, pays taxes, and
intends to be buried. In a pre-trial deposition, he described
his "status in Haiti" as that of "permanent resident." It is
true, as the Plaintiffs point out, that Geilenfeld has
connections to Iowa as well: he was born and raised there, holds
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an Iowa bank account and an Iowa driver's license, is registered
to vote in Iowa, and occasionally visits Iowa. But in reality
these bare facts are inconsequential. Not long after graduating
from high school, Geilenfeld left Iowa to engage in foreign
missionary work for a Roman Catholic missionary order; the bank
account is largely, if not exclusively, used as a conduit of
funds to support his orphanage in Haiti; his only motor vehicle
is jointly owned in Haiti; he has not voted in Iowa since 1972;
and on his occasional visits to the state he stays in the guest
room of a family friend, since he owns no Iowa real estate.
While the Plaintiffs try, on both legal and factual
grounds, to minimize the significance of this latter evidence,
their efforts are to no avail. Their legal argument is that the
determination of state citizenship of a United States citizen
within the meaning of § 1332(a)(1) should turn on one
controlling fact: the state of voting registration. In an
attempt to soften the radicalism of this proposal, they cite
Shelton v. Tiffin, 47 U.S. (6 How.) 163 (1848), as suggesting as
much. But Shelton's discussion of the law of domicile expressly
stops short of accepting the Plaintiffs' position. Although the
place of actually exercising the franchise was said to be
dispositive, the Court viewed registration without voting as
inconclusive: "acquiring a right of suffrage, accompanied by
acts which show a permanent location, unexplained, may be
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sufficient." Id. at 185. More to the point, of course, is the
most recent expression of the Supreme Court's understanding that
state citizenship for purposes of diversity jurisdiction
requires national citizenship plus state domicile, which we take
to mean domicile as traditionally understood, Newman-Green, 490
U.S. at 828; we read Newman-Green's citation of Chief Justice
Marshall's opinion in Brown v. Keene, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 112, 115
(1834), see Newman-Green, 490 U.S. at 828, as indicating that
the later Court understood domicile as determined through the
traditional multi-factual enquiry. Accordingly, this circuit
has declined to invest the fact of voting registration with
conclusive evidentiary significance on the question of domicile.
See Bank One, 964 F.2d at 50.
The Plaintiffs' second point calling for attention
goes to the district court's assignment of substantial weight to
Geilenfeld's long Haitian residence as an evidentiary fact
running counter to the presumption that domicile endures once it
is acquired. See id. (presumption favoring continuing
domicile). The Plaintiffs' argument is that a missionary moves
to a foreign place to serve its people, not to further personal
interests. They accordingly object to the district court's
emphasis on Geilenfeld's personal choice to live in Haiti and
operate his orphanage after leaving the religious order that
first assigned him to work there but later sent him elsewhere.
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There is, however, no religious exception to the criteria of
domicile, and because the individual's intent is a primary
subject of those criteria, there was no error in giving weight
to Geilenfeld's personal discretion to choose his missionary
field as he saw fit, once he was free from the order's authority
to determine his residence by posting him to a particular
mission.
Thus the district court did not clearly err in
applying customary standards to conclude that Geilenfeld's
contacts with Iowa have been too limited to cast doubt on the
sufficiency of the substantial evidence that Haiti is his
domicile. As a stateless American citizen domiciled abroad,
Geilenfeld did not satisfy the requirements of diversity
jurisdiction.
On the assumption that Geilenfeld could not satisfy
the jurisdictional state citizenship requirement, he and Hearts
With Haiti request that we preserve diversity jurisdiction (and,
with it, the jury award for Hearts With Haiti) by simply
dismissing Geilenfeld from the suit, which the district court
refused to do. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 21 ("On motion or on its
own, the court may at any time, on just terms, add or drop a
party."); see also Newman-Green, 490 U.S. at 827 (courts of
appeals can dismiss parties, too). Doing so at the post-trial
stage, however, would be unfair to Kendrick, as Geilenfeld's
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presence in this action gave Hearts With Haiti a significant
tactical advantage at trial. See Newman-Green, 490 U.S. at 838
(advising courts of appeals to consider "whether the dismissal
of a nondiverse party will prejudice any of the parties in the
litigation," including whether "the presence of the nondiverse
party produced a tactical advantage for one party or another");
accord Gorfinkle v. U.S. Airways, Inc., 431 F.3d 19, 22-23 (1st
Cir. 2005); Sweeney v. Westvaco Co., 926 F.2d 29, 41 (1st Cir.
1991).
Geilenfeld testified at trial about his appalling
experience in a Haitian jail on accusation of sexual
molestation, which was brought about in part by Kendrick's
defamatory campaign. The evidence detailed the horrific
conditions of the incarceration and tended to show Geilenfeld as
a person of exemplary integrity in his suffering. That
testimony was admitted on the ground that it was relevant to
Geilenfeld's damages for defamation, but there was an undeniable
risk that it would influence the jury's determination of the
issue common to both party's claims, whether a man of
Geilenfeld's character would sexually abuse the youth he served.
Although the jury was instructed to consider each plaintiff
separately in reaching the verdicts, the tendency of the prison
evidence to evoke sympathy for Geilenfeld and to portray him as
unlikely to molest children supported the position of Hearts
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With Haiti that it had not ignored impropriety on Geilenfeld's
part. To allow the verdict for Hearts With Haiti to stand,
then, would preserve an advantage that the organization has not
shown would have been available to it in the absence of
Geilenfeld's efforts as a co-plaintiff presenting evidence of
personal damages. See also Hearts With Haiti, 192 F. Supp. 3d
at 207-08 (stating that "[t]he plain fact is that this case
would not have been the same case if Mr. Geilenfeld had not been
a plaintiff," and noting, in particular, Geilenfeld's testimony
regarding his "harrowing experience in Haitian jail"). Hence,
we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion
in declining to cure the jurisdictional defect by dismissing
Geilenfeld from the action. See Perry v. Blum, 629 F.3d 1, 16
(1st Cir. 2010) (reviewing for abuse of discretion a district
court's decision on a motion to add or drop a party pursuant to
Rule 21). We likewise decline to dismiss Geilenfeld as a
plaintiff.
The district court's judgment dismissing this action
for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, which we review in case
No. 16-1839, is affirmed. We therefore do not reach the other
claims of trial error raised in case No. 15-2401. That appeal
is dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.
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