Perez v. Jetblue Airlines
- George Daniels
- 1:17-cv-09650
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 5
In Perez v. JetBlue Airlines, Judge Daniels denied Juana Perez’s motion to reopen, finding her nearly illegible filing failed to support amendment or reconsideration.
Juana Perez’s attempt to reopen, amend, or obtain reconsideration of her dismissed case was denied; JetBlue Airlines was the defendant.
What happened
Perez v. JetBlue Airlines involved Juana Perez’s claim seeking the return of the full price of a ticket, plus money she said she lost because the trip was for business. The court had previously dismissed her handwritten complaint for failing to state a claim but allowed her 60 days to file an amended complaint.
About 20 months later, Perez filed a motion to reopen the case. The court could not determine whether she wanted to amend her complaint or ask the court to reconsider its earlier decision because the motion was almost entirely unreadable. The court also noted that the deadline to amend had passed about 17 months earlier.
Judge George B. Daniels denied the motion. He concluded that the filing did not provide a usable basis for amendment, new evidence, a change in law, clear error, or serious unfairness, and directed the Clerk of Court to close the motion.
The detailed version
- Perez v. Jetblue Airlines · No. 1:17-cv-09650
- George Daniels
- Mar. 6, 2020
Background
Juana Perez, proceeding without a lawyer, sued JetBlue Airlines under the court’s diversity jurisdiction. Her handwritten complaint sought the return of the full price of a ticket purchased for an incident she identified as occurring on November 8, 2017, at John F. Kennedy International Airport. In her later filing, she added that she lost money because the trip was for business. The court noted that it was unclear whether the alleged incident occurred in the Southern District of New York; the airport is in Queens, which is in the Eastern District of New York.
On January 3, 2018, the court dismissed Perez’s complaint for failure to state a claim and gave her 60 days to file an amended complaint. The court encouraged her to type the amended complaint or obtain help with legibility and provided information about a legal clinic for people representing themselves.
About 20 months after the earlier order, Perez filed a motion described as a “motion to reopen case.” The court found that the motion was only slightly more legible than the original complaint and that most of it could not be understood.
Legal Standards
The court considered two possible readings of Perez’s filing. If it was a request to amend the complaint, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 15(a) generally allows amendment when fairness requires it, but a court may deny amendment for undue delay, prejudice, or futility. A proposed amendment is futile when it would not provide a legally sufficient claim.
If the filing was a request for reconsideration, Perez needed to identify controlling law or information the court had overlooked, newly available evidence, an intervening change in controlling law, clear error, or a need to prevent serious unfairness. Reconsideration is not a chance to relitigate old issues or present new theories that could have been raised earlier.
Ruling
The court reviewed the filing under both possible standards because Perez was representing herself. It held that the filing did not satisfy either standard. The deadline for amendment had expired about 17 months before Perez filed the motion, and the court could not evaluate her reasons for the delay because the motion was nearly indecipherable. Given the court’s earlier instructions and the filing’s continued illegibility, the court found that allowing amendment appeared futile.
The court also found no readable argument showing new law, new evidence, clear error, or serious unfairness in the earlier dismissal. The court stated that it could rely only on what Perez actually filed, rather than assumptions about what she may have intended. The motion was DENIED, and the Clerk of Court was directed to close the motion. The opinion did not add a “with prejudice” or “without prejudice” designation to the denial.
Read the full 5-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.