Jefferson v. Moore.
No. 25-3020. 6/8/2026. D.Kan. Judge Hartz. Interlocutory Appeals—Collateral Order Doctrine—Subject Matter Jurisdiction.
June 8, 2026
Jefferson was incarcerated at El Dorado Correctional Facility. He alleges that he had a medical emergency during which he was restrained, kneed, and choked. Jefferson unsuccessfully sought recourse through El Dorado’s internal grievance process and then filed a pro se civil rights action under 42 USC § 1983 against eight prison officers and a nurse staffing company alleging an Eighth Amendment violation for excessive force and a violation of his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause for denial of his administrative grievance. Six defendants (defendants) filed a “Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings or, in the Alternative, for Summary Judgment” requesting that the court dismiss the claims for lack of subject matter jurisdiction and failure to state a claim, or, alternatively, grant summary judgment in their favor. Defendants maintained that the claims against them in their official capacities were barred by Eleventh Amendment immunity and that the claims against them in their individual capacities were barred by qualified immunity. At defendants’ request, the magistrate judge stayed discovery until the district court ruled on the motion. The district court held that the motion exceeded the page limits under local rules and, alternatively, that the summary judgment motion was premature. As to the latter, the court acknowledged that while defendants were entitled to move for summary judgment at that time, courts frequently deny summary judgment motions at such an early stage when a case is not yet developed and no discovery has occurred. The court denied the motion without prejudice. Defendants then filed this interlocutory appeal.
On appeal, defendants argued that the district court erred in denying their summary judgment motion as premature. They asserted jurisdiction under the collateral-order doctrine, alleging that the court (1) denied them the ability to raise qualified immunity arguments through summary judgment and thus forced them to be burdened with pretrial discovery, thereby denying them qualified immunity by postponing it; and (2) abused its discretion by misapplying the page limits in the local rules. The collateral-order doctrine allows interlocutory appeals of rulings that conclusively resolve claims of right separable from, and collateral to, the rights asserted in the action. As relevant here, an order is not immediately appealable if it defers deciding a qualified immunity claim because the claim depends, at least partially, on a fact question; the court is unable to rule on the claim without further factual clarification; and the court allows discovery tailored to uncover only those facts needed to rule on the claim. The Eleventh Amendment and qualified immunity protect public officers from significant litigation burdens, but requiring public officers to comply with non-onerous procedural requirements does not impair a substantial public interest. Here, defendants were not denied the protections of immunity because if they wanted to have the district court rule on their motion for judgment on the pleadings, they simply needed to resubmit it as a separate motion subject to the local rules on length, which is not the sort of litigation burden that justifies interlocutory appeal. Further, if defendants were concerned that discovery would begin after the district court’s dismissal without prejudice of the motion, they could easily have obtained an extension of the discovery stay from the magistrate judge. Additionally, defendants’ immunity from litigation would not be substantially burdened by waiting for resolution of the motion for judgment on the pleadings and any discovery relevant to immunity. Accordingly, the collateral-order doctrine does not apply.
The appeal was dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.