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Crime Laboratory v. Blenden6/24/1999
State to judicial authority without the State's permission. In this case, however, the State came into the judicial arena willingly.
. A number of federal courts have held that absent an express waiver of sovereign immunity, the judiciary is without authority to assess monetary sanctions against the government. United States v. Woodley, 9 F.3d 774, 781 (9th Cir. 1993); Graham v. United States, 981 F.2d 1135, 1141-42 (10th Cir. 1992). Congress has enacted statutes which provide for the imposition of judicial monetary sanctions. See M.A. Mortenson Co. v. United States, 996 F.2d 1177, 1179 (Fed. Cir. 1993) ("[Equal Access to Justice Act] § 204(a), 28 U.S.C. § 2412(b) (1998), explicitly waives the government's sovereign immunity in a civil case to an award of reasonable attorney fees..."); United States v. Ranger Electronic Communications, Inc., 22 F. Supp. 2d 667, 674 (W.D. Mich. 1998) ("In adopting the Hyde Amendment, Congress made criminal fee requests subject to the procedures and limitations utilized by civil litigants under the Equal Access to Justice Act..."). The Ninth Circuit has also held that even where a statutory waiver of immunity is inapplicable, sanctions may be imposed under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Where a Rule expressly provides that a court may impose monetary sanctions, Woodley, 9 F.3d at 781, in so far as that particular Rule is concerned, the government waives immunity by coming into the court as a party, Mattingly v. United States, 939 F.2d 816, 818-19 (9th Cir. 1991) (cited with approval in Woodley, 9 F.3d at 781). Conversely, the Ninth Circuit held that monetary sanctions were not available under the Federal Criminal Rule of Procedure 16(d)(2), in which there is no express provision for the imposition of monetary sanctions. Woodley, 9 F.3d at 781.
. Although a Mississippi court's authority to impose sanctions under it Rules is not as restrictive as that espoused in Mattingly and Woodley, in the case at bar, the trial court did not impose sanctions under any of the Rules of Civil or Criminal Procedure, but rather found that it had the authority to impose the sanctions on the basis of its inherent power to control matters which are prosecuted before it. The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has addressed the issue of whether federal courts may impose monetary sanctions against the government through a court's inherent power to control matters before it. United States v. Horn, 29 F.3d 754 (1st Cir. 1994). That court held that:
"In this case, the doctrines of sovereign immunity and supervisory power, each formidable in its own right, are in unavoidable tension. Despite the fact that, in recent years, the domain of sovereign immunity has tended to contract and the domain of supervisory power has tended to expand, we believe that sovereign immunity ordinarily will trump supervisory power in a head-to-head confrontation. The critical determinant is that the doctrines are of fundamentally different character: supervisory powers are discretionary and carefully circumscribed; sovereign immunity is mandatory and absolute. Consequently, whereas the former may be invoked in the absence of an applicable statute, the latter must be invoked in the absence of an applicable statute; and whereas the former may be tempered by a court to impose certain remedial measures and to withhold others, the latter must be applied mechanically, come what may. In other words, unlike the doctrine of supervisory power, the doctrine of sovereign immunity proceeds by fiat: if Congress has not waived the sovereign's immunity in a given context, the courts are obliged to honor that immunity." See, e.g., Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. v. Meyer, 510 U.S. 471, 473, 114 S.
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