In Dupree v. Younger, published May 25, 2023, the United States Supreme Court reversed a circuit court decision dismissing an appeal. The plaintiff alleged that while he was being held as a pretrial detainee, three corrections officers assaulted him. He sued them in federal court under 42 U.S.C. section 1983 for allegedly using excessive force in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. One of the officers moved for summary judgment based on his contention that the plaintiff had failed to exhaust administrative remedies, as required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act. The district court denied the motion, based on its conclusion that the plaintiff had satisfied the exhaustion obligation under the law. The case proceeded to trial. The jury found for the plaintiff. The officer did not file a FRCRP 50(b) post-trial motion. He appealed a single issue to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals: the district court's rejection of his exhaustion defense at summary judgment. The Fourth Circuit dismissed the appeal based on its precedent holding that a claim or defense rejected at summary judgment is not preserved for appellate review unless it was renewed in a post-trial motion.
The Supreme Court ruled that a purely legal challenge made and rejected in a summary judgment motion is preserved for appeal, regardless of whether it is renewed in a post-trial motion. An appeal from final judgment generally permits review of all rulings that led up to the judgment. Some interlocutory district-court rulings are unreviewable from final judgment, because they are superseded by later developments in the litigation. For instance, a sufficiency-of-the-evidence made at the summary judgment stage and rejected is superseded by the complete trial record. A party must therefore raise a sufficiency-of-the-evidence claim in a post-trial mtion to preserve it for appeal. The Supreme Court declined to apply this rule to pure questions of law. Trials leave pretrial legal rulings undisturbed. Trials resolve the facts, not the law. A district court's purely legal conclusions at summary judgment are not superseded by later developments in the litigation. Instead, they follow the general rule and merge into the final judgment. They are therefore reviewable on appeal. The court did not decide whether the exhaustion issue raised in this case was a purely legal issue.
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