Mays v. Bloomington Police Department
- Susan Nelson
- 0:21-cv-00665
- U.S. District Court · District of Minnesota
- 4
In Mays v. Bloomington Police Department, Judge Nelson granted Mays’s appeal-fee application, requiring a $13.12 initial payment and installments for the remaining fee.
Otis Mays, who must pay $13.12 immediately and the remaining appellate filing fee through installments from his prison trust account.
What happened
In Mays v. Bloomington Police Department, Otis Mays, a prisoner, asked to pursue his appeal without paying the full filing fee upfront. The court found that he qualified financially and that his appeal was not frivolous.
The court granted Mays’s application, but required him to pay an initial partial filing fee of $13.12 immediately. The remaining $505 appellate filing fee must be collected from his prison account in installments, regardless of the appeal’s outcome.
Judge Susan Richard Nelson issued the order on October 26, 2021. The order addressed only payment of the appellate filing fee and did not decide whether Mays’s underlying case was correctly dismissed.
The detailed version
- Mays v. Bloomington Police Department · No. 0:21-cv-00665
- Susan Nelson
- Oct. 26, 2021
Background
Otis Mays applied to proceed on appeal without paying the entire appellate filing fee in advance. The court stated that Mays qualified financially for this status and that, although it continued to believe his action had been correctly dismissed, his appeal was not frivolous under the Supreme Court’s definition.
Because Mays is a prisoner, the Prison Litigation Reform Act requires him to pay the appellate filing fee in full through installments rather than excusing the fee. The statute requires an initial partial payment equal to 20 percent of the greater of the prisoner’s average monthly deposits or average monthly balance during the preceding six months. It then requires monthly payments from the prisoner’s account until the fee is paid.
Ruling
The court calculated Mays’s initial partial filing fee as $13.12, based on an average monthly balance of $65.51. The order states that the remaining $505.00 appellate filing fee must be paid through installments from Mays’s trust account.
The court ordered Mays to pay the $13.12 initial partial filing fee immediately and granted his motion and affidavit for permission to appeal without prepaying the full fee, subject to that payment. The order did not resolve the merits of Mays’s appeal or revisit the dismissal of his underlying action.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.