In re Patrick Roughneed, M.D., Cherie Roughneen, and Patrick T. Roughneen, M.D., P.A. (No. 05-24-00191-CV; May 10, 2024) stemmed from a lawsuit in which relators sought to mandamus the trial court for not ruling on motions that had been pending for more than two years. The case involves a dispute over a settlement agreement from a prior dispute. Relators assert breach of contract and various tort theories against real parties in interest Baylor Scott & White and affiliated entities. Relators served several written discovery requests on their tort claims and, after real parties in interest stonewalled them, moved to compel discovery and requested the trial court to make a ruling under Texas Occupations Code § 160.007(b) “that the subjects of the inquiry were relevant to their anticompetitive claims and, therefore, were not confidential or subject to the peer-review privilege.” In all, relators sought rulings on four motions from the trial court filed in March and April 2022. According to relators, the trial court issued a summary judgment order on April 2, 2024, which disposed of two of the motions. As to the other two, the trial court had not ruled for mover than 740 days.
In an opinion by Justice Molberg, the court of appeals conditionally granted mandamus and directed the trial judge to rule on relators’ pending motions within five days of the date of the opinion. The mandamus standard for a trial court’s refusal to rule on a motion is straightforward: the relator must establish that it properly filed the motion, the motion has been pending a reasonable time, relator asked for a hearing on the motion, and the trial court did not rule within a reasonable time (citations omitted). Without asking any other questions, the court concluded that 740 days was too long and ordered the trial court to get on with it, especially since the current trial setting was May 24, 2024.
This is another case in which a trial court simply isn’t doing its job. There ought to be—and perhaps we will propose one—a disciplinary consequence for this kind of inaction. Every day a litigant has to wait not only costs time and money, it ramifies the stress that ongoing litigation imposes on the people involved in it. If a trial court has so little regard for the litigants, perhaps that judge needs to be suspended or removed and replaced with someone who is willing to do the job. Perhaps even worse, a trial judge who either refuses to make rulings or is too incompetent to do so constitutes an affront and a menace to the judicial system and the hundreds of judges and justices who take to heart their duty to Texas Constitution and laws of the state. Judges who persist in not following the law and in failing to clear their dockets promptly and efficiently should be relieved of duty for violating their oath of office.
