Mutton v. Google LLC

Background

William Aaron Mutton filed this action without a lawyer on or about April 12, 2022, while he was an inmate at Two Rivers Correctional Institution. The court dismissed the action with prejudice during initial screening on April 29, 2022, and closed the case. Mutton appealed, but the Ninth Circuit dismissed the appeal at his request for voluntary dismissal.

Mutton then filed his eighth motion for reconsideration, asking the court to revisit the dismissal under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b). He argued that he had discovered new evidence: he claimed a Google employee deliberately misclassified an image sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as an “A1” image. He also argued that the court wrongly denied him permission to amend his complaint and should have told him what was deficient and given him an opportunity to fix it.

Court’s analysis

The court rejected the motion. It noted that Mutton had raised similar arguments in earlier reconsideration motions, which the court had denied in earlier orders.

The court explained that it had dismissed the action with prejudice for failure to state a claim because the named defendants were private actors, and the First Amendment does not prohibit private abridgment of speech. It further held that amendment could not cure the identified deficiency: whether Mutton could state a First Amendment claim against Google based on its flagging an image and forwarding it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The alleged new evidence about the Google employee’s actions did not cure that deficiency.

Disposition

The court DENIED Mutton’s eighth motion for reconsideration. The case remains closed. The court stated that any future reconsideration motions raising arguments previously presented will be summarily denied, and it terminated the motion identified as ECF No. 43.