Bonadies v. Town of Amenia

Background

Anthony Bonadies sued the Town of Amenia; Michael C. Segelken, a Town Code Enforcement Officer; and Victoria Perotti, the Town Supervisor. He brought claims under federal civil-rights laws, including 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981 and 1983, alleging violations of the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments, New York law, and the United Nations Charter.

Bonadies owned residential property in Amenia that originally contained one home. He later added a side addition and five apartments intended for low-income housing. In January 2015, a different Town Code Enforcement Officer, John Fenton, served him with two criminal summonses concerning alleged zoning and rubbish violations. In March 2016, Segelken served additional summonses concerning alleged building-without-a-permit and rubbish violations.

After a bench trial, Town Justice Norman Moore found Bonadies guilty of all five Town code and zoning violations. The judgment required him to pay fines and correct the violations. Bonadies and Justice Moore also signed an order of conditional discharge requiring him to comply with specified conditions. When Segelken reported that Bonadies had not corrected the violations by the deadline, Justice Moore found him in willful disobedience of the judgment and conditional-discharge order. Justice Moore later sentenced Bonadies to 30 days in jail for criminal contempt.

Bonadies alleged that Segelken had made disparaging remarks about his ethnicity during a 2004 inspection and later targeted him through code-enforcement actions. He claimed that the defendants’ alleged animus led to selective enforcement and caused him to lose personal liberty and use of his property.

Rule 12(b)(6) Standard and Judicial Notice

The defendants moved to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), which tests whether a complaint states a legally sufficient claim. The court accepted well-pleaded factual allegations as true for purposes of the motion but disregarded legal conclusions and conclusory statements. The allegations had to make liability plausible, not merely possible.

The court took judicial notice of documents from Bonadies’s criminal proceeding, including the summonses, trial decision, conviction judgment, conditional-discharge order, compliance filings, and related court orders. It declined to take judicial notice of a Dutchess County order concerning the habitability of apartments because that document was not incorporated into the complaint and did not concern the underlying criminal proceeding.

Abandoned Claims

The court deemed Bonadies’s First Amendment, United Nations Charter, and Section 1981 claims abandoned because he did not respond to the defendants’ arguments addressing those claims in his opposition papers.

The court also noted that the complaint did not clearly identify a First Amendment cause of action and contained only conclusory references to protected expression. Bonadies did not explain what protected speech was involved or how the defendants’ conduct allegedly chilled it. His United Nations Charter allegations failed to identify a private right to sue, and he did not oppose that argument. As to Section 1981, he did not contest that the complaint lacked plausible allegations of race- or ethnicity-based discrimination or interference with his ability to make or enforce contracts.

The court separately stated that any claims under the Fifth Amendment had to be dismissed because the Fifth Amendment applies to the federal government, and Bonadies had not sued the United States or a federal agent.

Equal Protection

The court dismissed Bonadies’s Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection claims under both selective-enforcement and class-of-one theories. A selective-enforcement claim requires plausible allegations that the plaintiff was treated differently from similarly situated people because of an improper consideration or a malicious or bad-faith intent to injure. A class-of-one claim requires plausible allegations that the plaintiff was intentionally treated differently from similarly situated people without a rational basis.

Bonadies claimed that he was the only Amenia resident prosecuted and jailed for Town building-code violations. The court explained that his jail sentence resulted from his failure to comply with Justice Moore’s conditional-discharge order, not directly from violating Town code. The court also found that Bonadies had not identified sufficiently similar people who were treated differently. An October 8, 2019, letter referenced photographic evidence of other properties, but the letter had no attachments and did not identify other violations that Town officials knew about but declined to prosecute. The letter also postdated the relevant enforcement actions by several years.

The court further found that Bonadies did not plausibly connect the 2004 exchange with Segelken to unlawful animus in 2016. The court rejected Bonadies’s reliance on cases involving unusually persistent or irrational harassment, finding that his allegations did not describe a comparable pattern of harassment, targeting, or enforcement without a legitimate governmental purpose.

Substantive Due Process

The court dismissed the substantive-due-process claim. Such a claim requires a constitutionally protected liberty or property interest and government action that is arbitrary, oppressive, or so extreme that it shocks the conscience. The court found that Bonadies’s allegations of purposeful discrimination and targeting were conclusory. He did not deny the alleged code and zoning violations, and the complaint contained no facts showing that the summonses, criminal proceeding, or jail sentence resulted from arbitrary or conscience-shocking conduct.

Malicious Abuse of Process and Malicious Prosecution

The court dismissed the malicious-abuse-of-process claim. Under New York law, that claim requires use of regularly issued legal process with intent to harm and to obtain a collateral objective outside the legitimate purpose of the process. The court found that Bonadies identified only the defendants’ initiation of the criminal proceedings. The defendants did not oversee the criminal proceeding, issue its orders, or determine its result, and initiating the proceeding alone was insufficient.

To the extent Bonadies attempted to plead malicious prosecution, the court dismissed that claim as well. The court found that the criminal proceeding had not ended in his favor: he had been found to have violated Town laws and later received a jail sentence for failing to correct the violations as required by the court’s order. The court also found no plausible allegation of actual malice. The 2004 interaction with Segelken did not plausibly show that the 2016 summonses were issued because of discriminatory animus, and Segelken’s testimony at trial did not establish malicious prosecution.

False Arrest

The court dismissed the false-arrest claim. Bonadies was not arrested or imprisoned at the defendants’ request for violating Town code. The summonses required him to answer the alleged violations but did not themselves unjustifiably confine him. His later 30-day jail sentence followed his failure to comply with Justice Moore’s conditional-discharge order, so the complaint did not plausibly allege that the defendants intentionally and unjustifiably confined him.

Perotti’s Personal Involvement

The court dismissed the claims against Perotti because Bonadies did not plausibly allege her personal involvement in any constitutional violation. The complaint contained no factual allegation specifically describing conduct by Perotti. General allegations that she had supervisory responsibilities, implemented policies, or failed to intervene were conclusory and insufficient under Section 1983, which requires personal participation rather than liability based only on a supervisory position.

Town’s Monell Claim

The court dismissed the claim against the Town under Monell v. Department of Social Services. A Monell claim requires an underlying constitutional violation caused by a municipal policy or custom. The court found no adequately pleaded underlying constitutional violation and found Bonadies’s allegations about the Town’s Building Department, Zoning Board, and Code Enforcement Officer too conclusory to show that the Town created or endorsed an unconstitutional policy or custom. The Town could not be held liable merely because it employed the individual defendants.

State-Law Claims and Disposition

After dismissing the federal claims, the court declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over Bonadies’s state-law claims. The court granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss, instructed the Clerk to terminate the motion, and closed the case. The opinion does not state that the dismissal was with or without prejudice.