Our latest “Name That Verdict” challenge is about the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which “constrains a State’s authority to bind a nonresident defendant to a judgment of its courts,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote today in the case of Walden v Fiore et al.
Here are the facts, which are not in dispute: Anthony Walden, a police officer in Covington, Ga., was working at the airport in Atlanta in 2006 as a deputized agent of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
On Aug 8 of that year, Transportation Security Administration agents at the airport in San Juan searched Gina Fiore and Keith Gipson and found they were carrying $97,000 in cash. The two were headed for Atlanta to catch a connecting flight to Las Vegas.
They told TSA agents they were professional gamblers and had won the money at a casino in San Juan, so they were allowed to board their plane and fly to Atlanta.
However, TSA officials in San Juan notified Mr Walden’s unit in Atlanta, where Ms Fiore and Mr Gipson were detained and their money confiscated after drug-sniffing dogs sniffed their luggage.
No drugs were ever found, but the DEA kept the money, advising Ms Fiore and Mr Gipson it would be returned as soon as they had provided adequate documentation that it was obtained legally.
Over the next month, Ms Fiore and Mr Gipson made two attempts to have the money returned to them at their residence in Nevada.
Meanwhile, Mr Walden wrote and filed an affidavit with the attorney general in Georgia stating that the money should be forfeited because Ms Fiore and Mr Gipson had failed to show they obtained it legally. They finally got it back in March 2007, so no forfeiture occurred, just a delay.
Ms Fiore and Mr Gipson sued Mr Walden in federal court in Nevada over the delay he had caused in returning their money, asserting their Fourth Amendment right against illegal seizure. But the court said it had no jurisdiction because there wasn’t a significant enough connection to Nevada: only a court in Georgia would have personal jurisdiction in this matter.
Ms Fiore appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which overturned the district court’s ruling that it had no jurisdiction in the matter. Mr Walden then appealed to the Supreme Court, and that’s where the case brings us today.
See Calder v Jones, 465 US 783 (1984)
The district court said that Mr Walden’s search and seizure of the money in Georgia did not “establish a basis to exercise personal jurisdiction in Nevada.” This was the ruling at the district court level, even though Mr Walden knew Ms Fiore lived in Nevada.
The issue of the false affidavit
The appellate court ruled that, while a Nevada court could not exercise jurisdiction over the money, they could exercise jurisdiction when it came to the false affidavit Mr Walden sent to the attorney general. Mr Walden “definitely knew,” the appellate court wrote, “at some point after the seizure but before providing the alleged false probable cause affidavit, that [Ms Fiore and Mr Gipson] had a significant connection to Nevada.”
See World-Wide Volkswagen Corp v Woodson, 444 US 286, 291 (1980)
The Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment constrains a state in terms of how much nonresident defendants can be bound by its courts.
See International Shoe Co v Washington, 326 US 310, 316 (1945)
Although presence within the state isn’t actually required, the nonresident must have “certain minimum contacts … such that the maintenance of the suit does not offend traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice.”