ROBERT WHITE, et al. v. DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, et al.
- Laura Swain
- 1:25-cv-09124
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 10
In White v. Department of Corrections, Judge Swain severed 27 prisoners’ claims into separate cases and left Robert White as sole plaintiff.
Robert White remains the sole plaintiff in the original case. The other 27 named prisoners will each have a separate civil action opened, and the Department of Corrections and other defendants will receive the complaint in each new case.
What happened
In White v. Department of Corrections, Robert White and 27 other prisoners were listed as plaintiffs in a complaint about alleged forced strip searches at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center. Only White signed the complaint and filed the required application to proceed without paying filing fees.
The court ordered the claims of the other 27 prisoners separated from White’s case under Rule 21. The clerk must open a separate case for each prisoner and place copies of the complaint and order in those cases. The court said the separate cases could later be treated as related or combined if appropriate, but it did not decide whether the allegations were valid.
Judge Laura Taylor Swain kept White as the sole plaintiff in this case, denied fee-free status for any appeal, and directed that the order be mailed to each plaintiff.
The detailed version
- ROBERT WHITE, et al. v. DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, et al. · No. 1:25-cv-09124
- Laura Swain
- Oct. 30, 2025
Background
Robert White filed this action without a lawyer while held at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers Island. The complaint appears to allege that White and 27 other prisoners were subjected to forced, mandatory, and random or orchestrated strip searches during an incident allegedly occurring on August 29, 2025. The complaint listed all 28 prisoners as plaintiffs, but only White signed it. White was also the only prisoner who filed a signed application to proceed without paying filing fees and a prisoner authorization; the court had granted White that status.
Rules and analysis
Rule 20 allows multiple plaintiffs to join one action when their claims arise from the same transaction, occurrence, or series of occurrences and share a question of law or fact. Rule 21 allows a court to separate claims when doing so serves fairness, efficiency, and judicial economy, even without finding that the claims were improperly joined.
The court concluded that the practical difficulties of managing a multi-prisoner case justified separation. Each unrepresented plaintiff could appear only for himself, so White could not represent the other 27 prisoners. Each plaintiff would also have to personally sign future filings, but prisoners could be released or transferred and become unable to sign. In addition, security restrictions would sharply limit the prisoners’ ability to discuss strategy, share discovery, or exchange court filings, creating risks of piecemeal submissions, delays, and missed deadlines.
Order
The court severed under Rule 21 all claims of the plaintiffs other than White’s. White will proceed as the sole plaintiff in this action. The clerk must open a separate civil action, with a new docket number, for each of the other 27 listed plaintiffs and file a copy of the complaint and this order in each new case. Those cases will proceed independently unless the court later orders otherwise. The court did not decide whether the new cases should be treated as related or consolidated, and it did not decide the merits of the alleged searches.
The court also certified that an appeal from this order would not be taken in good faith and denied permission to proceed without paying fees for purposes of an appeal. It directed the clerk to mail the order to each plaintiff at the address of record.
Read the full 10-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.