Crawford v. Antonio B. Won Pat International Airport Authority, Guam, No. 17-16942 (9th Cir. 2019)
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Plaintiff, individually and on behalf of others similarly situated, filed suit under 42 U.S.C. 1983 and Guam law, alleging procedural due process and equal protection violations in connection with plaintiff's attempts to be compensated for ancestral land taken by the government of Guam for the operation of A.B. Won Pat International Airport. As a preliminary matter, the Ninth Circuit held that the GIAA Defendants were not a proper party in this appeal and must be dismissed, because the GIAA was not named in either count that was at issue in this appeal.
On the merits, the panel held that none of the Guam Public Laws raised by plaintiff, individually, read together, or read together with Chapter 80 of the Guam Code Annotated, gave rise to a protected property interest for purposes of a due process analysis. In regard to plaintiff's Fourteenth Amendment equal protection claims, the panel held that the classifications established in the Chapter 80 statutory scheme survived rational basis review. In this case, the Guam legislature's Chapter 80 statutory scheme focused on the additional issues presented by the claims of the In-Use Class and related rationally to legislative facts considered at the time to be true.
Court Description: Civil Rights. The panel dismissed the appeal in part and affirmed in part the district court’s summary judgment in an action brought by plaintiff, individually and on behalf of others similarly situated, pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and Guam law, alleging procedural due process and equal protection violations in connection with plaintiff’s attempts to be compensated for ancestral land taken by the government of Guam for the operation of A.B. Won Pat International Airport. The United States government took control of substantial amounts of privately owned land on Guam for military purposes around the time of World War II. Plaintiff’s ancestral land is in a region where many of the taken properties were subsequently transferred by the United States to the government of Guam, including land where the international airport is now located. In 1999, the Guam * The Honorable Leslie E. Kobayashi, United States District Judge for the District of Hawai`i, sitting by designation. CRAWFORD V. A.B. WON PAT INT’L AIRPORT AUTH. 3 legislature passed the Guam Ancestral Lands Act, which added Chapter 80 to the Guam Code Annotated and established an administrative process for exercising ancestral property rights. However, no claims by ancestral landowners whose land is currently being used for public purposes have been considered and resolved through compensation. The panel held that because the International Airport Authority was not named in either the appealed due process or equal protection violation counts, it was not a proper party to the appeal and therefore needed to be dismissed. The panel further held that it would consider the merits of plaintiff’s equal protection claims only against the Guam government defendants. The panel held that while the Guam legislature had clearly established a process to receive, evaluate, and compensate ancestral property right claims, the legislature did not design the process to be sufficiently definite to transform plaintiff’s expectation into a property right entitled to due process protection. The panel therefore held that provisions of Chapter 80 and the Guam Public Laws, whether examined individually or read together, did not give rise to a protected property interest under the Due Process Clause. Plaintiff also alleged Fourteenth Amendment equal protection rights violations because, unlike the ancestral landowners who had received full compensation by the return of lands that were no longer being used by the government, plaintiff’s land has not been returned and he had not been compensated. The panel held that the statutory differences in treatment between a landowner whose lands were no longer in use and one whose lands continued to be used was not irrational, and served an important purpose—to resolve 4 CRAWFORD V. A.B. WON PAT INT’L AIRPORT AUTH. efficiently the ancestral land claims of the landowners whose lands were no longer in use. The panel therefore concluded that the classifications established in the statutory scheme survived rational basis review and the panel affirmed the district court’s summary judgment on the equal protection claim.
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