Doyle v. Huntress, Inc.

United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit

Nos. 07-1396, 07-1506

TIMOTHY DOYLE; GREG HAGAMAN; BRIAN LAGUE;
ANTHONY W. RICHARDS; ERIC EDWARDS,

Plaintiffs, Appellants/Cross-Appellees,

v.

HUNTRESS, INC.; RELENTLESS, INC.,

Defendants, Appellees/Cross-Appellants,

GREG BRAY and KYLE GOODWIN,

Defendants.

APPEALS FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF RHODE ISLAND

[Hon. Ronald R. Lagueux, Senior U.S. District Judge]

Before

Lynch, Circuit Judge,
Gibson,* Senior Circuit Judge,
and Howard, Circuit Judge.

Merlyn P. O'Keefe for appellants/cross-appellees.
Martin K. DeMagistris with whom J. Renn Olenn and Olenn &
Penza, LLP were on brief for appellees/cross-appellants.

January 25, 2008

*
Of the Eighth Circuit, sitting by designation.
 LYNCH, Circuit Judge. This decision addresses the

doctrine of laches in claims for wages by seamen under 46 U.S.C.

§ 11107, where the claims are meant both to compensate and to

encourage compliance with the requirement in 46 U.S.C. § 10601 that

the seamen be given pre-trip written agreements.

From 1993 to 2000, the plaintiffs, Timothy Doyle, Greg

Hagaman, Brian Lague, Anthony W. Richards, and Eric Edwards, worked

as fishermen on a number of trips aboard the vessels Persistence

and Relentless, owned by defendants Huntress, Inc., and Relentless,

Inc., respectively. The vessels are the only fishing boats

operating out of the port at Davisville, Rhode Island. In 2001,

the seamen brought suit against the vessel owners in federal

district court, alleging that because the defendants had never put

in writing their compensation arrangements with the fishermen, the

defendants violated 46 U.S.C. § 10601. That statute requires

owners of certain fishing vessels to enter into written fishing

agreements with each seaman employed aboard the vessel prior to the

voyage. The seamen claimed relief under 46 U.S.C. § 11107, which

allows seamen to recover wages for employment under conditions

contrary to federal law.

The district court granted partial summary judgment to

the plaintiffs, finding that the defendants had violated § 10601

and concluding that the plaintiffs had a cause of action under

§ 11107. Doyle v. Huntress, Inc. (Doyle I), 301 F. Supp. 2d 135,

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145, 148 (D.R.I. 2004). The district court also found, however,

that trial was necessary to resolve genuine issues of material fact

as to the defendants' defenses of laches and waiver. Id. at 149,

151.

Before trial, the defendants filed an interlocutory

appeal with this court challenging the district court's grant of

partial summary judgment to the plaintiffs. We affirmed the

district court in Doyle v. Huntress, Inc. (Doyle II), 419 F.3d 3,

15 (1st Cir. 2005). The district court then held a bench trial to

resolve the issues of laches and waiver. Doyle v. Huntress, Inc.

(Doyle III), 474 F. Supp. 2d 337 (D.R.I. 2007). It awarded three

of the seamen $1,274.28, $1,353.38, and $2,381.74, plus pre-

judgment interest; two received nothing. Id. at 347. Additional

facts are to be found in the three earlier published decisions.

I.

In Doyle II, we held that a cause of action is created

for seamen under 46 U.S.C. § 11107. 419 F.3d at 15. That statute

provides that a seaman engaged "contrary to a law of the United

States . . . may leave the service of the vessel at any time" and

is entitled to receive the higher of two amounts: (1) "the highest

rate of wages at the port from which the seaman was engaged" or (2)

"the amount agreed to be given the seaman at the time of

engagement." 46 U.S.C. § 11107.

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 The entitlement to this statutory remedy under § 11107 is

dependent on a showing that the employment was "contrary to a law

of the United States." It is now undisputed that the seamen

plaintiffs were engaged to work on voyages from 1993 to 2000

through lay share contracts which did not comply with the

requirements of 46 U.S.C. § 10601. That statute requires written

fishing agreements signed by each seaman prior to the voyage that

"specify the terms of each seaman's compensation arrangement,

including the amount of the seaman's anticipated 'share' in the

proceeds of the catch." Doyle I, 301 F. Supp. 2d at 144.1 The

defendants used various types of fishing agreements with

1
The version of 46 U.S.C. § 10601 effective at the time of
the filing of the complaint required, in pertinent part, that:

(a) Before proceeding on a voyage, the master or
individual in charge of a fishing vessel. . . shall
make a fishing agreement in writing with each
seaman enployed [sic] on board . . . .
(b) The agreement shall also be signed by the owner
of the vessel.
(c) The agreement shall-
(1) state the period of effectiveness of the
agreement;
(2) include the terms of any wage, share, or
other compensation arrangement peculiar to the
fishery in which the vessel will be engaged
during the period of the agreement; and
(3) include other agreed terms.

46 U.S.C. § 10601 (1988). Section 10601 was amended in 2002 to
remove subsection (b). Pub. L. No. 107–295, § 441(a) & (b)(1)-(3),
116 Stat. 2064, 2131 (2002). See Doyle I, 301 F. Supp. 2d at 142
n.5.

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plaintiffs: oral agreements, form agreements that described the lay

share compensation scheme but not the exact share, form agreements

that left the share terms blank, and crew roster sign-in sheets

with disclaimer language. Id. The district court found none of

these agreements satisfy the requirements of § 10601. Id.

To be clear, the seamen were all paid for their services.

They were paid according to the "lay share system," under which

each fisherman received some share of the net profits of each

voyage, with the exact share determined by the captain based on the

fisherman's skill, experience, and performance on the voyage.2

This court noted that "in this instance, where the fishermen have

already received a lay share portion of the proceeds from the

fishing voyages . . . , there does not appear to be any other real

remedy for the vessel owners' failure to comply with § 10601,

absent § 11107." Doyle II, 419 F.3d at 14.

The case then returned to the district court for the

determination of an appropriate remedy for the violation. The

vessel owners had asserted a laches defense, which the court found

meritorious as to all claims for wages before August 31, 1998,

three years before the filing of the complaint. Doyle III, 474 F.

Supp. 2d at 345. As a result, only three of the five plaintiffs

received any damages. Id. at 347.

2
A fuller account of the mechanics of the lay share system
is set out in our earlier opinion. Doyle II, 419 F.3d at 6.

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 Each side has appealed.

II.

A. Laches in Admiralty Cases

This case, concerning seamen's wages, was brought within

the admiralty jurisdiction of the federal courts, 46 U.S.C. § 1333.

Doyle II, 419 F.3d at 7. The statutes on which relief is sought,

46 U.S.C. § 11107 and § 10601, do not contain a statute of

limitations.

"In an admiralty case, maritime law and the equitable

doctrine of laches govern the time to sue." TAG/ICIB Servs., Inc.

v. Pan Am. Grain Co., 215 F.3d 172, 175 (1st Cir. 2000). The use

of laches is governed by an initial determination, on which the

court relies to establish both burdens of proof and presumptions of

untimeliness. Id. The initial determination requires the district

court to choose the most analogous statutory limitation period.

This may be located either in federal law or in state law. Id. at

176.

Once the most analogous statutory limitation period is

determined, claims filed outside that period are subject to a

presumption of laches and the plaintiff bears the burden of showing

these claims are not barred. Id. at 176. As to claims filed

within the analogous statutory limitation period, the burden of

showing laches falls on the defendant. Id. at 175.

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 The substantive content of the laches doctrine requires

focus on whether the plaintiff's delay in bringing suit was

unreasonable and whether that delay caused prejudice to defendant.

Id. at 175. In the end, laches is an equitable doctrine, "within

the 'sound discretion' of the district court." Puerto Rican-

American Ins. Co. v. Benjamin Shipping Co., 829 F.2d 281, 283 (1st

Cir. 1987) (quoting Azalea Fleet v. Dreyfus Supply & Mach. Corp.,

782 F.2d 1455, 1458 (8th Cir. 1986)).

The district court correctly recited this framework of

analysis. Doyle III, 474 F. Supp. 2d at 345. Here, the "delay" in

filing the complaint was from 1993 to 2001, an eight-year period.

B. Choice of Analogous Limitation Period

The initial determination of the most analogous statute

of limitations is an issue of law, which we review de novo. See

Telink, Inc. v. United States, 24 F.3d 42, 46 (9th Cir. 1994);

Union Carbide Corp. v. State Bd. of Tax Comm'rs, 992 F.2d 119, 121

(7th Cir. 1993). Each side has appealed from the district court's

choice of the three-year limitation period for unpaid wage claims

in Rhode Island law. R.I. Gen. Laws § 28-14-20. The seamen argue

that they should get the benefit of the general ten-year limitation

period for civil actions in Rhode Island General Laws section 9-1-

13(a).

The vessel owners argue that state law is the wrong

source and that federal law is more appropriate, because the use of

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federal law serves the interests of national uniformity. The

federal law which is most analogous, they argue, is the two-year

statute of limitations in the Fair Labor Standards Act ("FLSA").

See 29 U.S.C. § 255(a).

We think the district court got it exactly right.

The more serious of the two arguments is that federal law

should apply, in the form of the two-year FLSA statute of

limitations. Some district courts have applied this federal

limitation period to similar claims. See, e.g., Brown v. Royal

Caribbean Cruises, Ltd., 2000 WL 34449703, at *3 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 24,

2000). While using a uniform federal standard has some attraction,

we think the FLSA cannot be used as most analogous to claims under

§ 11107, and no other federal statute has been suggested.

First, the FLSA expressly excludes from its coverage

claims of maritime fishermen. 29 U.S.C. § 213(a)(5) (excluding

from wage and hour requirements "any employee employed in the

catching [or] taking . . . of any kind of fish, shellfish, . . . or

other aquatic forms of animal and vegetable life"); see also Do v.

Ocean Peace Inc., 279 F.3d 688, 691-93 (9th Cir. 2002). There is

no reason to think Congress wanted this exclusion to apply to

everything except FLSA's limitation period. When Congress

recodified § 11107 in 1983, see Doyle II, 419 F.3d at 8, it could

easily have chosen to include a limitation period or to refer to

another federal statute, but did not.

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 Further, the general admiralty rule of applying laches to

untimely claims, against which Congress legislated, frequently

chose state law as an analogous limitation period. See, e.g.,

Larios v. Victory Carriers, Inc., 316 F.2d 63, 66 (2d Cir. 1963)

(Friendly, J.) (recognizing the relevance of "the analogous state

statute of limitations" in laches analysis); see also, e.g.,

Sandvik v. Ala. Packers Ass'n, 609 F.2d 969, 971 (9th Cir. 1979)

("In applying the doctrine of laches, weight is generally given to

the statute of limitations that would apply to a comparable

non-admiralty action filed in state court in the state in which the

cause of action arose."); Uisdean R. Vass & Xia Chen, The Admiralty

Doctrine of Laches, 53 La. L. Rev. 495, 518 (1992) (recognizing the

state law statute of limitations as a "good rule of thumb" to

determine the analogous prescriptive period).

Where a state law provides a longer period than the two

years under the FLSA, using the state law is also in greater accord

with the presumption of liberal treatment afforded to seamen. The

Supreme Court has emphasized that "congressional legislation in aid

of seamen . . . is largely remedial and calls for liberal

interpretation in favor of the seamen. . . . '[T]he maritime law by

inveterate tradition has made the ordinary seaman a member of a

favored class.'" Isbrandtsen Co. v. Johnson, 343 U.S. 779, 782

(1952) (quoting Warner v. Goltra, 293 U.S. 155, 162 (1934)); see

also Doyle II, 419 F.3d at 9 ("Another significant factor that we

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must consider in our construction of this statute is the

presumption in favor of seamen."). As a practical matter, seamen

are out at sea, sometimes for months at a time, without direct

access to courts, and here the longer state three-year limitation

period fits better with this reality. Finally, given admiralty

law's traditional hospitality towards seamen, it would be dissonant

to give seamen less protection for the timeliness of their wage

claims compared to the wage claims of their non-nautical neighbors

in Rhode Island.

The seamen, in turn, argue that this legal doctrine of

hospitality towards them dictates that the longer state contract

limitation period of ten years must apply. The operative

principle, though, is that the most analogous statute of

limitations, not the most generous one, should set the benchmark.

The wage statute, R.I. Gen. Laws § 28-14-20, clearly is a tighter

analogy than Rhode Island's catchall statute of limitations for

civil actions. On the plain language of the statute, section 28-

14-20 specifically provides for the recovery of unpaid wages: "a

person who is required to be paid wages for his or her labor" may

recover wages from his or her employer "within three (3) years from

time of services rendered by an employee." R.I. Gen. Laws § 28-14-

20(a), (b). The lay shares by which the seamen were paid meet the

statute's definition of "wages": "all amounts at which the labor or

service rendered is recompensed, whether the amount is fixed or

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ascertained on a time, task, piece, commission basis, or other

method of calculating the amount." R.I. Gen. Laws § 28-14-1(4).

Section 28-14-20 is clearly the comparable non-admiralty action:

were the seamen able to bring their claim under Rhode Island state

law, their action would be based on this statute.

The seamen characterize the state unpaid wage statute as

dissimilar because an enforcement action under the unpaid wage

statute would be brought by the director of the Rhode Island

Department of Labor, not by the individual employees, imposing less

of a burden on the plaintiffs. That argument best goes to whether

any delay by the plaintiffs was unreasonable, not to whether the

limitation period is analogous.

C. Application of Laches

Unlike the de novo initial determination of an analogous

limitation period, we review the court's application of the laches

doctrine for abuse of discretion. Ansin v. River Oaks Furniture,

Inc., 105 F.3d 745, 757 (1st Cir. 1997); see also Puerto

Rican-American Ins. Co., 829 F.2d at 283. Of course, use of an

inapplicable legal standard is an abuse of discretion. Picciotto

v. Cont'l Cas. Co., ___ F.3d ___, 2008 WL 62451, at *3 (1st Cir.

Jan. 7, 2008) (citing Rosario-Urdaz v. Rivera-Hernandez, 350 F.3d

219, 221 (1st Cir. 2003), and Smilow v. Sw. Bell Mobile Sys., Inc.,

323 F.3d 32, 37 (1st Cir. 2003)). We break the analysis of the

court's treatment of laches into two parts: (a) the order barring

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all pre-August 31, 1998 claims for wages and (b) the ruling

allowing wages for the claims within the analogous three-year

statutory period.

1. Pre-August 31, 1998 Claims

The district court held that with respect to the pre-

August 31, 1998 claims, the plaintiffs had not met their burden to

displace the presumption of laches. The court found that it was

"unreasonable for the crewmen to pursue wage claims from the

distant past and, similarly, it is prejudicial to Defendants to be

required to pay over money to Plaintiffs that has already been

distributed to the other crewmen." Doyle III, 474 F. Supp. 2d at

345.

The seamen attack the ruling, arguing that the vessel

owners had acted in bad faith, and therefore cannot invoke laches

at all. The plaintiffs must show the court clearly erred.

Plaintiffs also argue that even in the absence of bad faith,

§ 10601 is a strict liability statute. They argue that once the

district court had found that the plaintiffs "did not know of their

rights under § 10601 . . . and that they filed suit promptly to

redress their rights after they learned of the existence of the

federal statute," id. at 343, the court clearly erred in finding

the delay unreasonable. The plaintiffs further argue that the

court committed legal error in not requiring a connection between

delay and prejudice to the defendants. Even if there was a delay,

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plaintiffs contend, any prejudice suffered by the defendants was

not a result of that delay as the amount owed the plaintiffs under

§ 11107 was the same immediately after the violation as it was when

the plaintiffs filed suit.

We cut to the chase, bypassing most of plaintiffs'

arguments. In the end, the district court reasoned that it was

inequitable to require the vessel owners, who had paid out all the

wages owed to all the crew members on the trips from 1993 to 1998,

to come up with additional monies to pay these plaintiffs

additional sums to equalize them with the top rates paid to others.

This is especially so since the others had been determined to be

more valuable to the success of the fishing enterprise. The

violation of § 10601 was not that the seamen were not paid, but

that they were not given fixed written employment contracts before

each trip.

While other courts may have reached a different result,

this conclusion was within the court's considerable range of

discretion. The seamen argue that the defendants could

retroactively take a lesser share of the profits of the vessel on

each of the trips, or just pay the plaintiffs. The argument does

not refute the district court's conclusion that there would be

additional costs to the defendants.

To the extent that the remedy of § 11107 could be viewed

as a type of incentive to secure compliance with § 10601, the

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district court found that the vessel owners had not acted in bad

faith and had not secured any financial windfall from their non-

compliance.

The seamen argue that this is not about the fairness of

the penalty or incentives to get defendants to comply with § 10601.

They say the point is that they have been deprived of compensation

that they deserved. They say that had their shares been disclosed

to them before the fishing trips instead of shares being awarded

after the trips based on their performance, they might not have

gone on the trips, or at least would have been in a better

bargaining position, which certainly would have produced higher

shares. This is sheer speculation, which the court was not

required to credit. We note that the district court found that

neither side's witnesses were very credible.

There was no abuse of discretion in applying laches to

the plaintiffs' older claims.

2. Damages Awarded for Post-August 31, 1998 Claims

Not content with their victory in defeating the vast

majority of the seamen's claims, the vessel owners argue the small

sums actually awarded must be reduced further. The vessel owners

argue the district court erred by simply taking the highest amount

paid to any crewman on a given trip and subtracting the amount paid

to each plaintiff to compute damages for that plaintiff; instead,

the court should have redivided the net profits of a given trip to

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give everyone an equal share and used that smaller amount as the

amount each plaintiff should have received. The difference between

the plaintiffs' and the defendants' proposed method of calculation,

however, amounts to significantly less than two thousand dollars.

Section 11107 allows a seaman to recover "the highest

rate of wages at the port from which the seaman was engaged." 46

U.S.C. § 11107. The district court interpreted this to mean

"whatever amounts to a full share for each trip [the seaman] went

on within the three year period." Doyle III, 474 F. Supp. 2d at

346. It is unclear whether "highest rate of wages" in § 11107 is

a term of art, as the Ninth Circuit's well-reasoned opinion in TCW

Special Credits v. Chloe Z Fishing Co., 129 F.3d 1330, 1333 (9th

Cir. 1997) suggests,3 or whether it has a literal meaning, as the

district court found.

We need not decide whether the district court's approach

or the Ninth Circuit's approach is correct. What is clear is that

the approach offered by the defendants to the court was not

correct, and need not have been used. We also note that this case

involves equitable principles, and the district court had already

reduced the potential award by applying laches to five of the eight

3
The Ninth Circuit construed "highest rate of wages" to
mean the amount "that could be earned by a seaman at the port of
hire who has the same rating as the complainant." TCW Special
Credits, 129 F.3d at 1333. "Ratings" are a way of classifying
seamen based on their duties, skills, and performance. See id. at
1333-34.

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years that the seamen worked. The district court's award to the

plaintiffs was not inequitable because it failed to make the award

smaller.

The judgment of the district court is affirmed.

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