Holmes v. Kraker
- Susan Nelson
- 0:20-cv-01313
- U.S. District Court · District of Minnesota
- 5
In Holmes v. Kraker, Judge Nelson dismissed Holmes’s amended complaint without prejudice because it did not identify conduct by individual defendants.
Ambakisye Holmes and the 17 individual defendants named in the amended complaint.
What happened
In Holmes v. Kraker, Ambakisye Holmes alleged that the defendants harmed him by starting and continuing a criminal prosecution that ended in an acquittal. He represented himself and named 17 defendants individually.
The court reviewed the amended complaint under a law requiring review of complaints filed by people proceeding without paying filing fees. It found that Holmes did not identify what any particular defendant did to violate his rights. His other claims involved false arrest and imprisonment, fraud, and negligence.
Judge Susan Richard Nelson dismissed the constitutional claim without prejudice for failure to state a claim. She declined to consider the remaining state-law claims because the federal claim was dismissed, and the court dismissed the amended complaint without prejudice.
The detailed version
- Holmes v. Kraker · No. 0:20-cv-01313
- Susan Nelson
- July 30, 2021
Background
Ambakisye Holmes filed an amended complaint against 17 defendants in their individual capacities. He alleged that the defendants harmed him by initiating and maintaining a criminal prosecution in 2016 that ended in an acquittal at trial. Holmes represented himself. The court stated that his original complaint had been dismissed because he had not named a defendant properly subject to suit under the legal theories he identified.
Holmes did not file a new application to proceed without paying the filing fee, but the court assumed that he still intended to do so. The court therefore screened the amended complaint under 28 U.S.C. § 1915(e)(2)(B), which requires dismissal of a complaint that is frivolous or fails to state a claim for relief.
Count 1: Civil-rights claim
Count 1 relied on 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a statute allowing claims for violations of federal constitutional rights by government employees acting under state authority. To proceed, Holmes had to allege facts showing what each defendant personally did that violated his rights.
The court found that Holmes had not identified any actions by any individual defendant that caused him harm. Instead, he alleged generally that the defendants continued prosecuting him and pressured him to plead guilty, causing him to be incarcerated longer than necessary. The court held that these general allegations did not give the defendants adequate notice of the claims against them. It dismissed Count 1 without prejudice for failure to state a claim.
Counts 2 through 4: State-law claims
Counts 2, 3, and 4 alleged the common-law torts of false arrest and imprisonment, fraud, and negligence or gross negligence. The court described its authority to consider those claims as supplemental jurisdiction, meaning authority to hear related state-law claims alongside a federal claim. Because it dismissed the only claim over which it had original federal jurisdiction—the § 1983 claim—the court declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over Counts 2, 3, and 4.
Disposition
Judge Susan Richard Nelson ordered that Holmes’s amended complaint be dismissed without prejudice for failure to state a claim under 28 U.S.C. § 1915(e)(2)(B)(ii). The order did not state that Counts 2 through 4 were separately decided on their merits; it stated that the court declined supplemental jurisdiction over them.
Read the full 5-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.