Granados v. Gavin
- Laura Swain
- 1:24-cv-06932
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 3
In Granados v. Galvin, Judge Swain denied an unnecessary appeal-extension motion and denied appeal fee-waiver requests because the appeal was timely and not certified in good faith.
Delia Granados’s appeal-related requests; the order denied her request for additional appeal time and her requests to proceed without paying appellate fees.
What happened
In Granados v. Galvin, the court had already dismissed Delia Granados’s self-represented case without prejudice, with the judgment entered on January 7, 2025. Granados filed a notice of appeal on January 16, 2025.
Granados asked for more time to appeal and asked to proceed without paying appellate filing fees. The court determined that her notice of appeal was already timely because the 30-day deadline was February 6, 2025. It also relied on its earlier finding that an appeal would not be taken in good faith.
The court denied the request for more time as unnecessary and denied both requests to proceed without paying appellate fees. Judge Laura Taylor Swain also certified that an appeal from this order would not be taken in good faith.
The detailed version
- Granados v. Gavin · No. 1:24-cv-06932
- Laura Swain
- Feb. 10, 2025
Background
The court previously dismissed Delia Granados’s self-represented action without prejudice in an order dated January 6, 2025, entered January 7, 2025. The judgment was also dated and entered January 7, 2025. On January 16, 2025, Granados filed a notice of appeal, a motion for an extension of time to appeal under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(5), and requests to proceed on appeal without prepaying court fees. The court refers to this fee-waiver status as proceeding in forma pauperis, or IFP.
Appeal deadline
Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(1)(A) generally gives a party 30 days after entry of the challenged order or judgment to file a notice of appeal. Because the judgment was entered on January 7, 2025, the court calculated the deadline as February 6, 2025. Granados’s January 16 notice of appeal was therefore timely. The court denied her Rule 4(a)(5) motion for an extension of time as unnecessary.
Appeal-fee requests
Under 28 U.S.C. § 1915(a)(3), a trial court may deny IFP status for an appeal if it certifies in writing that the appeal would not be taken in good faith. The court stated that its earlier order and judgment had already made that certification. It therefore denied Granados’s motion for leave to proceed IFP on appeal and her application to appeal IFP.
Disposition
The court denied Granados’s motion for an extension of time to file a notice of appeal as unnecessary because the notice was timely. It also denied her motion for leave to proceed IFP on appeal and her application for leave to appeal IFP. The court separately certified under § 1915(a)(3) that an appeal from this order would not be taken in good faith and denied IFP status for that appeal.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.