Group P.C. v. The City Of New York
- Edgardo Ramos
- 1:17-cv-08413
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 4
In C. v. City of New York, Judge Ramos directed defendants to respond to plaintiff’s discovery arguments without deciding whether discovery must be produced.
The plaintiff and the defendants in the civil-rights lawsuit, including the defendants from whom the plaintiff sought disciplinary and related records.
What happened
In C. v. The City of New York, the plaintiff’s lawyer asked the court to require defendants to provide discovery in a civil-rights lawsuit involving the plaintiff’s alleged shoulder injury from excessive force.
The plaintiff identified five disputes: disciplinary-action lists, command-level discipline, downgraded charges, unsubstantiated allegations, and underlying disciplinary files. The plaintiff argued that these materials could lead to evidence relevant to the case, while defendants had declined to produce the requested information.
Judge Edgardo Ramos did not decide the discovery dispute in this order. He directed defendants to respond to the arguments in the plaintiff’s letter by letter of no more than three pages by December 4, 2020.
The detailed version
- Group P.C. v. The City Of New York · No. 1:17-cv-08413
- Edgardo Ramos
- Dec. 2, 2020
Background
The plaintiff’s attorney asked for a pre-motion conference concerning defendants’ alleged failure to provide discovery responses to requests served in May 2019. The letter states that the lawsuit is a civil-rights case arising from the plaintiff’s fracturing his shoulder because of what he describes as defendants’ excessive use of force. After a prior conference, the parties met and conferred but remained unable to resolve their dispute.
Discovery Disputes
The plaintiff identified five areas of disagreement:
- The plaintiff requested a list of disciplinary actions that defendants had withheld as irrelevant, and argued that the list was needed to evaluate defendants’ relevancy decisions.
- The plaintiff sought information about command-level discipline available to New York City Police Department officers, including “A” and “B” charges and information retained in the department’s database.
- The plaintiff sought information about charges that allegedly had been downgraded to less serious administrative charges.
- The plaintiff argued that defendants should produce unsubstantiated disciplinary charges, not only substantiated ones, because the files might contain witness names and information relevant to the case.
- The plaintiff requested the underlying files for disciplinary histories and argued that defendants had not shown that producing them would be burdensome.
The letter cited Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(1), which generally permits discovery of nonprivileged information relevant to a claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case. The plaintiff also cited decisions concerning discovery of police misconduct and disciplinary files.
What the Court Did
Judge Edgardo Ramos directed defendants to respond to the arguments in the plaintiff’s letter, identified as Doc. 74, by letter of no more than three pages by Friday, December 4, 2020. The order does not grant or deny a motion to compel, decide whether any requested materials must be produced, or rule on costs or fees. The opinion text does not show any later ruling on the discovery request.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.