Petition for Review – Standing

Listen to this article

7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: DND International, Inc., v. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration

Case No.: 14-3755

Officials: MANION, ROVNER, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Petition for Review – Standing

DND International is a trucking company whose operations were frozen in April 2014 when the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) declared DND an imminent hazard and gave it only a few hours to pull its trucks off the road. This case started with a tragic accident on an unlit road on the night of January 27, 2014, when driver Renato Velasquez of DND International crashed his semi-truck into two emergency vehicles and another semi which were stopped on an Illinois highway. An Illinois Toll Authority employee was killed and a police officer was seriously injured. As a result of this tragedy, the FMCSA immediately revoked Velasquez’s commercial-driving privileges. The FMCSA then opened a company-wide investigation into whether DND’s drivers were following federal regulations designed to keep exhausted drivers off the roads. This investigation went on for approximately two months, and it appears to have been quite thorough. It entailed many interviews, examination of records, verification of statistics, and a number of interactions among FMCSA personnel. In fact, at the conclusion of the investigation, the Field Administrator of the Midwestern Service Center, Darin Jones, in consultation with the FMCSA Director of Enforcement, legal counsel, and FMCSA headquarters, spent one full week reviewing all relevant information to ensure all the results were accurate before he made his decision to issue an imminent-hazard out-of-service order, also known as an IHOOSO. Significantly, all during the two-month investigation DND was permitted to continue normal operations. It was later determined that during the two-month period there were two or three minor problems, but otherwise the company operated fully and efficiently without incident. Nevertheless, on April 1, 2014, the FMCSA issued an IHOOSO without warning, directing DND to immediately halt its trucking operations nationwide. This was not an order telling the company it must conclude all deliveries and not dispatch new deliveries or pickups. Rather, trucks were ordered to immediately stop within eight hours, no matter where the trucks were, and no matter what loads were in the process of being delivered. DND petitioned for administrative review of the IHOOSO. In response, an administrative law judge (ALJ) opened a hearing nine days after the freeze order issued and rendered his decision after another six days. The ALJ ultimately found that the IHOOSO should not have been issued, and he revoked it, noting that the IHOOSO was an effective “death penalty” to this small company. As best we can tell from the record and from the oral argument, the company has ceased doing business during the pendency of this action. The sudden halt to the company’s operations put the company out of business. As shown below, this petition for review does not focus on the irretrievable damage suffered by DND, but rather seeks to correct a decision of an assistant administrator that upheld the ALJ grant of relief to DND. As a result, the case is moot and this court lacks the jurisdiction to provide DND any relief. Thus, we dismiss the petition for review for want of Article III standing.

Dismissed

Full Text

Attorney Derek A. Hawkins is the managing partner at Hawkins Law Offices LLC, where he heads up the firm’s startup law practice. He specializes in business formation, corporate governance, intellectual property protection, private equity and venture capital funding and mergers & acquisitions. Check out the website at www.hawkins-lawoffices.com or contact them at 262-737-8825.