Starkes v. Annucci
- Vincent Briccetti
- 7:19-cv-07270
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 4
In Starkes v. Annucci, Judge Briccetti dismissed the case with prejudice after Starkes failed to update his address or follow court orders.
Quentin Starkes’s case was dismissed with prejudice; C.O. Byrd, C.O. Nieves (Shield #1748), and C.O. Waal Rivera (Shield #1725) were affected because their pending motion to dismiss was terminated as moot.
What happened
In Starkes v. Annucci, Quentin Starkes sued C.O. Byrd, C.O. Nieves, and C.O. Waal Rivera. He was representing himself and had been told to notify the court of any address change.
Starkes stopped communicating with the court after December 2019. Several court notices sent to his former address were returned, and notices sent to a suspected new prison address were not returned, but Starkes still did not provide an updated address or respond to the defendants’ motion to dismiss.
Judge Vincent L. Briccetti ruled that Starkes had abandoned the case and dismissed it with prejudice for failing to prosecute or comply with court orders. The court treated the defendants’ motion to dismiss as moot and denied fee-free appeal status.
The detailed version
- Starkes v. Annucci · No. 7:19-cv-07270
- Vincent Briccetti
- Sept. 11, 2020
Background
Quentin Starkes filed the action on August 2, 2019, while incarcerated at Westchester County Jail. He proceeded without a lawyer and without paying the filing fee. In November 2019, he notified the court that his address had changed to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
The court’s December 11, 2019 order and its instructions for people without attorneys warned Starkes that he had to notify the court in writing of future address changes and that the case could be dismissed if he failed to do so. The defendants later moved to dismiss the amended complaint on March 31, 2020. Starkes did not timely oppose that motion, so the court extended his deadline to May 20, 2020. He did not file an opposition or request another extension, and the court deemed the motion fully submitted and unopposed on June 4, 2020.
The court then learned that Starkes was no longer at the Brooklyn facility. Information from the Federal Bureau of Prisons website suggested that he had been moved to USP Canaan in Waymart, Pennsylvania. The court ordered him to provide his current address by July 9, 2020, and later extended the deadline to August 27, 2020. Both orders warned that the case could be dismissed for failure to prosecute or comply with court orders. Although mail sent to the suspected USP Canaan address was not returned as undeliverable, Starkes never updated his address in writing. The opinion states that he last communicated with the court in December 2019.
Ruling
The court concluded that Starkes had abandoned the case. Applying the factors identified in Lucas v. Miles, the court dismissed the case with prejudice for failure to prosecute or comply with court orders under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(b).
The Clerk was directed to terminate the defendants’ pending motion to dismiss as moot and close the case. The court also certified that an appeal would not be taken in good faith and denied Starkes permission to appeal without paying the filing fee.
Effect of the Order
The action is closed, and the dismissal with prejudice bars refiling the dismissed case. The opinion does not decide the underlying allegations because the dismissal was based on Starkes’s failure to prosecute and comply with court orders.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.