Ortiz v. United States
- Laura Swain
- 1:25-cv-06721
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Nathaniel Ortiz v. United States, Chief Judge Swain ordered Ortiz’s petition filed in the criminal case and closed the civil action.
Nathaniel Ortiz, whose petition was transferred for filing in his federal criminal case; the civil action was closed without a ruling on the petition’s merits.
What happened
Nathaniel Ortiz v. United States concerns Ortiz’s petition asking the court to correct a state conviction whose sentence had been served. Ortiz said the conviction was affecting his federal sentence, prison security points, program eligibility, sentence credits, and housing.
The Clerk’s Office opened the petition as a new civil case, but the court decided it belonged in Ortiz’s closed federal criminal case because Ortiz challenged the conviction’s use to increase his federal sentence. The court did not decide whether the state conviction was valid or whether the Bureau of Prisons acted lawfully.
Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain ordered the Clerk to file the petition and a copy of the order in the criminal case, terminate any motions in the civil case, and close that civil action. The court also noted that a challenge to the Bureau of Prisons’ administration of the sentence may be brought under a different federal procedure after the required administrative steps.
The detailed version
- Ortiz v. United States · No. 1:25-cv-06721
- Laura Swain
- Oct. 2, 2025
Background
On August 12, 2025, the Clerk’s Office received Nathaniel Ortiz’s petition for a writ of error coram nobis, a procedure used to ask a court to correct an error in its own earlier judgment. Ortiz was a defendant in a closed federal criminal case, United States v. Ortiz, No. 08-CR-0548-1 (DC). The Clerk’s Office opened the petition as a new civil action, No. 25-CV-6721.
Ortiz sought to challenge the validity of a state-court conviction for which he said the sentence had been served. He asserted that the conviction was being used to increase Bureau of Prisons security points, his pattern score for education, behavioral, reading, and rehabilitation programs, his ability to earn federal sentence credits, his housing, and his federal sentence.
Court’s Analysis
The court explained that, when a defendant challenges a federal conviction, federal courts generally handle the error-correction petition in the underlying criminal case. Because Ortiz challenged the use of his state-court conviction to increase his federal sentence, the court concluded that the petition should be addressed in Ortiz’s criminal case. The order did not decide the validity of the state conviction or the merits of Ortiz’s claims about the Bureau of Prisons.
The court noted that if Ortiz seeks to challenge the Bureau of Prisons’ decisions about executing his federal sentence, he may do so through a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2241. The court also noted that federal prisoners must first raise such a challenge with the Bureau of Prisons before seeking judicial review.
Disposition
Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain directed the Clerk to file Ortiz’s petition in the criminal case, United States v. Ortiz, No. 08-CR-0548-1 (DC), and to file a copy of the order there. The court also directed the Clerk to terminate any motions in the civil case and close the matter. This order addressed where the petition should be filed; it did not rule on whether Ortiz was entitled to the requested relief.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.