Amy v. Curtis
- Laurel Beeler
- 3:19-cv-02184
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 3
In Amy v. Curtis, Judge Hamilton denied Curtis’s request to overturn a magistrate judge’s discovery ruling.
Randall Steven Curtis’s effort to obtain the requested discovery was rejected, and the plaintiffs were not compelled to provide it.
What happened
Amy v. Curtis concerned discovery requests that Randall Steven Curtis served on the day fact discovery closed. He sought documents and an interrogatory response from the plaintiffs, but they did not respond.
Curtis asked the court to set aside a magistrate judge’s decision not to compel the discovery. The court found that the requests and the motion were untimely under local rules and that the requested information was not relevant to a valid claim or defense.
Judge Hamilton denied Curtis’s motion for relief, leaving the magistrate judge’s discovery ruling in place.
The detailed version
- Amy v. Curtis · No. 3:19-cv-02184
- Laurel Beeler
- Mar. 8, 2021
Background
Fact discovery closed on October 29, 2020. On that date, Randall Steven Curtis served discovery requests seeking an interrogatory response and documents from the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs did not serve responses.
The parties later filed a joint discovery letter. Curtis sought communications between attorney James Marsh and members of Congress concerning the 2018 amendment to 18 U.S.C. § 2255. The plaintiffs opposed the requests. A magistrate judge issued a discovery order, and Curtis moved for relief from that nondispositive pretrial order.
Parties’ Arguments
Curtis argued that the magistrate judge erred by finding that the plaintiffs did not possess responsive documents, finding that James Marsh was not the plaintiffs’ agent for purposes of the requests, declining to treat the plaintiffs’ failure to respond on time as a waiver of objections, finding the requests irrelevant, and resolving factual issues without a hearing.
The plaintiffs argued that Curtis’s requests were untimely and unenforceable, that he lacked good cause to compel discovery about irrelevant correspondence, that the requests violated their First Amendment rights, and that he had no right to a hearing on the discovery dispute.
Court’s Analysis
A district court may modify or set aside a magistrate judge’s order on a nondispositive matter only if the order is clearly erroneous or contrary to law. The court stated that it did not need to decide whether the plaintiffs, through an agent, possessed responsive documents.
The court gave three reasons for overruling Curtis’s objections. First, the October 29, 2020 discovery requests were untimely under Civil Local Rule 37-3 because they sought responses after the discovery cutoff. Second, Curtis’s effort to compel responses was also untimely because he filed it more than seven days after the fact-discovery cutoff. Third, and most significantly, the requested information was not relevant to a claim or defense. The court relied on its order denying Curtis’s motion for judgment on the pleadings, which concluded that his assertion that the 2018 amendments to Section 2255 were a bill of attainder was not colorable.
Disposition
The court denied the defendant’s motion for relief from the magistrate judge’s nondispositive order. The opinion is signed by Phyllis J. Hamilton.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.