Bonilla v. Marin County Superior Court
- Phyllis Hamilton
- 4:23-cv-02021
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 2
In Bonilla v. Case et al., Judge Hamilton dismissed seven nearly identical civil-rights cases with prejudice after finding no imminent danger and identifying multiple legal bars.
Steven Wayne Bonilla’s seven § 1983 cases were dismissed with prejudice. The named state judges and court employees were affected because the claims against them were closed, although the court did not adjudicate the underlying claims on their merits.
What happened
In Steven Wayne Bonilla v. Leonard L. Case et al., Bonilla, a state prisoner, filed several nearly identical civil-rights lawsuits against state judges and court employees. He challenged his conviction and the handling of other cases by state and federal courts.
Bonilla sought to proceed without paying the filing fees. The court said he was barred from doing so because he had previously been disqualified from that status and had not shown that he faced an immediate risk of serious physical injury when he filed these cases.
The court also said the lawsuits would be barred by several legal rules even if Bonilla had been allowed to proceed without paying fees. Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton dismissed the cases with prejudice, closed them, ended all pending motions, and directed the clerk to return future documents submitted in those cases without filing them.
The detailed version
- Bonilla v. Marin County Superior Court · No. 4:23-cv-02021
- Phyllis Hamilton
- May 26, 2023
Background
Steven Wayne Bonilla, identified as a state prisoner and a condemned prisoner, filed multiple lawsuits without a lawyer under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a federal civil-rights law. The complaints were nearly identical. They named various state judges and court employees as defendants and sought relief concerning Bonilla’s underlying conviction or the handling of his other cases by state and federal courts.
The opinion also states that Bonilla had a pending federal petition challenging his custody in the same court with appointed counsel and was represented by counsel in state-court proceedings concerning that petition.
Ruling
The court ruled that Bonilla could not proceed without paying the filing fees under 28 U.S.C. § 1915(g). That statute generally bars a prisoner who has accumulated qualifying prior dismissals from proceeding without paying fees unless the prisoner was facing imminent danger of serious physical injury when the complaint was filed. The court found that the allegations did not show such danger.
The court further stated that, even if an application to proceed without paying fees were granted, the lawsuits would be barred under the legal rules identified in Heck v. Humphrey, Younger v. Harris, Demos v. U.S. District Court, and Mullis v. U.S. Bankruptcy Court. The opinion did not separately explain how each rule applied to each complaint.
Disposition and effect
The court dismissed the cases with prejudice. It directed the clerk to terminate all pending motions and close the cases, and to return without filing any further documents Bonilla submitted in those closed cases. Because the court disposed of the cases based on filing-fee eligibility and other threshold legal bars rather than deciding the underlying civil-rights claims, this is a procedural order.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.