Copes v. The City Of New York

Background

The plaintiff's attorney asked the court for a pre-motion conference concerning a request to compel discovery. The attorney stated that the defendants had not supplemented discovery first served in May 2019 and had not provided all requested records concerning the individual defendant. The requested materials included internal records, command-level disciplinary records, Internal Affairs Bureau records, complaints, lawsuits, arrests, and other disciplinary matters.

The letter argued that the requested information was relevant or could lead to admissible evidence in the plaintiff's civil-rights lawsuit, which the letter described as involving excessive-force allegations. It also argued that state-law privilege rules should not prevent disclosure in a federal civil-rights case and referred to the repeal of Section 50-a of New York's General Municipal Law. These were the plaintiff's arguments; the order did not resolve them.

Court's Action

The court granted the request for a pre-motion conference. It directed the parties to appear by telephone on October 29, 2020, at 10:30 a.m. It also directed the defendants to respond to the arguments in Plaintiff's Document 71 by a letter of no more than three pages, due October 16, 2020. The Clerk was directed to terminate the motion identified as Document 71. The order did not require production of the requested discovery or decide the parties' underlying discovery dispute.