Harris v. Atchley
- Edward Chen
- 3:20-cv-07899
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 2
Harris v. Atchley was dismissed with prejudice as duplicative and frivolous, Judge Chen ruled.
Michael Jay Harris’s second action against M. Atchley and the other named defendants was dismissed with prejudice; the opinion states that his earlier related action remained pending.
What happened
In Harris v. Atchley, Michael Jay Harris, a prisoner representing himself, sued prison officials under a federal civil-rights law. He said officials failed to give him paper needed to prepare a legal document.
The court found that this case repeated the same claim Harris had made in an earlier case that was still pending. It dismissed this action with prejudice because it was duplicative and frivolous, and ordered the clerk to close the file.
Judge Edward M. Chen issued the dismissal on February 1, 2021. The order did not decide the underlying claim about the paper; it ended this second, duplicative case.
The detailed version
- Harris v. Atchley · No. 3:20-cv-07899
- Edward Chen
- Feb. 1, 2021
Background
Michael Jay Harris filed a prisoner civil-rights action without a lawyer under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. He alleged that prison officials failed to provide paper he needed to prepare a legal document.
The court stated that Harris’s complaint repeated the claim in an earlier action, Harris v. Atchley, Case No. 20-cv-3883 EMC. The earlier action was still pending when Harris filed this case.
Court’s reasoning
The court held that this action was frivolous because it duplicated the earlier complaint. It relied on authority stating that duplicative or repetitive litigation may be dismissed under 28 U.S.C. § 1915 as malicious, and that a plaintiff generally may not maintain two separate actions involving the same subject matter at the same time in the same court against the same defendant.
Disposition
The action was dismissed with prejudice because it was frivolous. The clerk was ordered to close the file. The order addressed the duplication of the lawsuit and did not reach the merits of whether prison officials improperly failed to provide the paper. Judge Edward M. Chen signed the order.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.