United States District Court, D. Arizona
ORDER
DOMINIC W. LANZA UNITED SLATES DISTRICT JUDGE.
Plaintiff
Esther De La Fuente (“Plaintiff”), on her own
behalf and on behalf of her son, A.D., has moved for
reconsideration of the Court's May 31, 2019 order (Doc.
91) granting summary judgment to Defendant Roosevelt
Elementary School District No. 66 (“the
District”) and the individual Defendants (together,
“Defendants”). (Doc. 94.) For the following
reasons, the Court denies the motion.
DISCUSSION
I.
Procedural Background
On
January 23, 2019, Defendants moved for summary judgment on
four grounds: (1) Plaintiff failed to exhaust her
administrative remedies before filing this suit; (2)
Plaintiff's claims are barred by the statute of
limitations; (3) Plaintiff is not entitled to recover damages
for her own emotional distress in these circumstances; and
(4) the official capacity claims against the individual
Defendants are duplicative of the claims against the
District. (Doc. 77.)
On May
31, 2019, the Court granted the motion on the second ground,
finding that the statute of limitations began to run by no
later than June 16, 2015, “which is the date on which
OCR ‘received a complaint alleging [the District]
discriminated against [A.D.] on the basis of disability . . .
by failing to . . . implement his Section 504 plan from March
2013 until May 2015.'” (Doc. 91 at 7-8, citing Doc.
77 at 29.) Because Plaintiff did not file her complaint in
this case until December 21, 2017 (Doc. 1), her claims fell
outside the two-year statute of limitations. The Court
reasoned that “[a]lthough Plaintiff may not have been
certain of the claims on that date [in June 2015], she had
reason to know of them, given that she had a copy of the
Section 504 plan (Doc. 83 ¶ 4) and suspected the
District had not been complying with that plan (id.
¶¶ 8-10), leading her to file the OCR
complaint.” (Doc. 91 at 7-8.) The Court further found
that Plaintiff was not entitled to equitable tolling because
“the District's protestations of [the] nonexistence
[of the Section 504 plan] (during the early stages of the OCR
proceedings) could not have concealed the injury or misled
Plaintiff from recognizing the legal wrong, ” given
that she knew the plan existed and knew enough by June 2015
to file an OCR complaint. (Id. at 8-10.)
Plaintiff
filed the instant motion, entitled “Plaintiffs'
Rule 59(e) Motion to Alter or Amend Judgment, ” on June
11, 2019. (Doc. 94.) The Court construed this motion as a
motion for reconsideration and permitted Defendants to file a
response and Plaintiff to file a reply. (Doc. 95.) The
parties have now filed these briefs.
II.
Legal Standard
The Court has discretion to reconsider and vacate a prior
order. Barber v. Hawaii, 42 F.3d 1185, 1198 (9th
Cir. 1994). However, motions for reconsideration are
generally disfavored and should be denied “absent a
showing of manifest error or a showing of new facts or legal
authority that could not have been brought to [the
Court's] attention earlier with reasonable
diligence.” LRCiv. 7.2(g). Indeed, reconsideration is
an “extraordinary remedy” that is available only
in “highly unusual circumstances.” Kona
Enters., Inc. v. Estate of Bishop, 229 F.3d 877, 890
(9th Cir. 2000) (citations omitted). The Local Rules further
state that “[n]o motion for reconsideration of an Order
may repeat any oral or written argument made by the movant in
support of or in opposition to the motion that resulted in
the Order.” LRCiv. 7.2(g).
III.
Analysis Plaintiff makes two main arguments in her
motion, both based on the Arizona Court of Appeals'
decision in Lasley v. Helms, 880 P.2d 1135
(Ariz.Ct.App. 1994). First, she argues the Court erred in
finding that equitable tolling/fraudulent concealment was
unavailable. (Doc. 94 at 3-7.) Specifically, she contends
“[t]he Court erred in limiting application of tolling
for fraudulent concealment to Plaintiffs' initial
suspicion of the District's wrongdoing rather than
applying it to the District's subsequent denial of
wrongdoing when confronted in the OCR complaint.”
(Id. at 3.) Second, she argues that “when
Plaintiff[] knew or should have known of the District's
fraud is a question for the jury, and the Court clearly erred
in determining a jury question.” (Id. at 7.)
In
their response, Defendants argue that (1) Plaintiff's
motion is improper under both the Local Rules and Federal
Rule of Civil Procedure 59(e) and (2) her “argument is
substantively meritless” because she did not present
clear and convincing evidence of wrongful concealment, there
was no fiduciary duty, and “Lasley is nothing
like this case.” (Doc. 96.)
As an
initial matter, the Court agrees with Defendants that
Plaintiff's motion for reconsideration is improper.
Plaintiff raised the equitable tolling/fraudulent concealment
argument in her response to Defendants' motion for
summary judgment (Doc. 82 at 15-16) and therefore may not
raise it again in a motion for reconsideration. And Plaintiff
has not cited any new facts or legal authority in her motion
that she could not have cited in her response.
In any
event, both of Plaintiff's substantive arguments lack
merit. In Lasley, the Court found that whether the
defendant breached his duty to the plaintiff posed a jury
question because “reasonable minds could agree with the
plaintiffs' theory of constructive fraud.” 880 P.2d
at 1138. The court then stated that if the jury found that
the defendant breached his duty, “a jury question
remain[ed] regarding the tolling of the statute of
limitations based upon when [the plaintiff] either knew, or
through due diligence should have known, of the fraud.”
Id.
Here,
reasonable minds could not disagree about Plaintiff's
theory of constructive fraud. As noted in the Court's
order, equitable tolling/fraudulent concealment applies
“where a defendant['s] . . . affirmative acts of
fraud or concealment have misled a person from either
recognizing a legal wrong or seeking timely legal
redress.” Porter v. Spader, 239 P.3d 743, 747
(Ariz.Ct.App. 2010). See also Anson v. Am. Motors
Corp., 747 P.2d 581, 587 (Ariz.Ct.App. 1987)
(“[T]he true inquiry [is] . . . whether the defendant
has wrongfully concealed facts ...