Greene Johnson v. United States

Background

Helen Greene Johnson and Muhammad A. Aziz brought this action against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act, seeking damages for alleged misconduct by Federal Bureau of Investigation employees during and after criminal investigations and prosecutions related to the 1965 murder of Malcolm X. The plaintiffs allege that FBI employees concealed information for decades showing that Aziz and Khalil Islam were innocent. Aziz and Islam were exonerated in November 2021.

The parties had agreed to a partial discovery stay while the Government’s motion to dismiss was being resolved, but they were conducting limited discovery, including depositions. A dispute arose over when the Government would begin seeking security clearances for attorneys working on the case. The Government represented that it could not begin that process until the plaintiffs served document requests. The Government then moved to stay discovery pending resolution of its motion to dismiss.

Legal standard

Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(c), a court may stay discovery for good cause. The party seeking the stay has the burden of showing good cause. The court considered the breadth and burden of the requested discovery, the prejudice that a stay could cause, and the strength of the motion to dismiss. The court explained that merely filing a motion to dismiss ordinarily does not establish good cause for staying discovery.

Court’s analysis

The court found that the Government had not shown that the discovery would be unduly burdensome. The Government predicted that identifying, reviewing, logging, and producing responsive FBI materials might be onerous, but the court concluded that this prediction was not enough. The plaintiffs said that their May 10, 2024 email was not itself a formal discovery request and that the parties would confer about reasonable requests. The court also noted the Government’s representation that most FBI materials had already been disclosed during the 2020 reinvestigation, making it difficult to see how the new document discovery would be unduly burdensome.

The court found that a stay could prejudice the plaintiffs. The Government acknowledged potential prejudice caused by the age of some witnesses. Because the events occurred in the 1960s, additional witnesses identified through document discovery might also be elderly. Delaying document discovery could therefore make it harder to identify relevant witnesses.

The court recognized that the Government had raised serious, potentially dispositive arguments, including a statute-of-limitations argument. But the plaintiffs had raised substantive responses to the Government’s principal arguments. Without deciding the motion to dismiss, the court concluded that the Government had not made a strong enough showing that the plaintiffs’ claims were unmeritorious to justify a discovery stay.

Disposition

The court denied the Government’s request for a stay of discovery pending resolution of its motion to dismiss. The court determined that discovery should proceed because the Government had represented that it could not begin the security-clearance process until document requests were served. The parties were ordered to file a joint proposed Civil Case Management Plan and Scheduling Order by July 24, 2024. The court did not rule on the motion to dismiss, and the Clerk was directed to close the Government’s discovery-stay motion.