Mays v. Bloomington Police Department

Background

Otis Mays sent the court a letter received on June 19, 2020. He asked the court to require the Bloomington Police Department and the Hennepin County Adult Detention Center to preserve evidence that he believed would support his claims, including camera footage and phone logs.

Reasoning

The court ruled that the requests were premature because the defendants had not yet been served. Mays had not paid the filing fee, and as a result summonses had not been served in the action. Without service of process—or a defendant’s waiver of service—a court ordinarily cannot exercise authority over a named defendant. The court therefore stated that it lacked personal jurisdiction over the defendants and could not order them to preserve evidence at that time.

The court nevertheless noted that a party’s obligation to preserve evidence begins when the party knows or should know that the evidence is relevant to current or future litigation. It expected all parties to follow their evidence-preservation and other discovery-related duties under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, including the rule addressing failures to preserve electronically stored information.

Disposition

Judge Becky R. Thorson ordered that Mays’s requests in the June 19 letter were DENIED WITHOUT PREJUDICE. The opinion did not decide the underlying claims.