On June 6, in a unanimous opinion delivered by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the U.S. Supreme Court cited §§ 96 and 99 of the Restatement of the Law, Judgments, and § 51 of the Restatement of the Law Second, Judgments.
The case, Simmons v. Himmelreich, involved two suits filed by a federal prisoner. The first suit was filed against the United States, alleging that a severe beating the prisoner received from a fellow inmate was the result of negligence by prison officials. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio treated that suit as a claim under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), and granted the government’s motion to dismiss that claim on grounds that it “fell into one of the ‘Exceptions’ to the FTCA for ‘[a]ny claim based upon . . . the exercise or performance . . . [of] a discretionary function,’ namely, deciding where to house inmates.”
While the motion to dismiss in that case was pending, the prisoner filed a second suit against individual Bureau of Prison employees. The District Court granted the government’s motion for summary judgment in the second suit on grounds that it was precluded under the FTCA’s judgment bar provision, which generally prevented a plaintiff who had received a judgment in an FTCA suit from bringing a second suit against individual government employees based on the same underlying claims. The Sixth Circuit reversed that ruling.
The Supreme Court affirmed the Sixth Circuit’s judgment, holding that the judgment bar provision did not apply to categories of claims in the FTCA’s “Exceptions” section. The Court noted that its conclusion “was buttressed by analogy to the common-law doctrine of claim preclusion,” as set out in the Restatements of Judgments, which “would not prohibit a second suit where the first suit was dismissed under the ‘Exceptions’ section.”