Torres v. NYC Police Department
- Ronnie Abrams
- 1:16-cv-02362
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 7
In Torres v. NYC Police Department, Judge Abrams granted BSA summary judgment, dismissed remaining claims, and denied Torres’s sanctions and disbarment motion.
Wilfredo Torres’s remaining claims were ended. Bellevue South Associates received summary judgment; the City of New York and the four individual defendants—Kevin Wahligh, John Pepe, James Scordus, and Daniel Barvels—were no longer required to defend the remaining claims. Defense counsel faced no sanctions or disbarment as a result of the denied motion.
What happened
In Torres v. NYC Police Department, Wilfredo Torres, who was representing himself, sued over two incidents involving police officers and firefighters entering his home, detaining and questioning him, and taking him to a hospital. The remaining defendants included Bellevue South Associates, New York City, and four officers or firefighters.
The court relied on earlier rulings that Bellevue South Associates was a private entity not acting under state authority and that the City’s actions were justified under the emergency-aid exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. The court also said Torres’s claims in the two related cases were materially the same and that he had already had opportunities to present his arguments.
Judge Ronnie Abrams granted summary judgment for Bellevue South Associates in one case, dismissed the remaining claims against the City and four individual defendants, and denied Torres’s motion to impose sanctions and remove defense counsel from the case. The court also denied further permission to amend the complaint and directed the clerk to close both cases.
The detailed version
- Torres v. NYC Police Department · No. 1:16-cv-02362
- Ronnie Abrams
- Mar. 31, 2021
Background
Wilfredo Torres brought four related actions concerning events on September 28, 2015, and April 28, 2016. Two actions had already been fully terminated, and the two actions addressed in this order had been terminated in large part. Torres represented himself. The remaining claims were against Officer Kevin Wahligh, Firefighter John Pepe, Lieutenant James Scordus, and Firefighter Daniel Barvels in case 16-CV-2362, and against Bellevue South Associates (BSA) and the City of New York in case 16-CV-3437. The docket in the 3437 Action still listed the New York City Police Department, but the court said an earlier order required treating the defendant as the City of New York.
BSA Claims
BSA had previously moved for summary judgment, which asks the court to rule because the evidence shows no genuine dispute requiring a trial. The court had already accepted a report and recommendation concluding that BSA was a private entity and was not acting under state authority, so it could not be held liable for the alleged constitutional violations. In this order, the court granted BSA’s request to apply that earlier summary-judgment motion to the 3437 Action because the claims and facts in the two actions were substantively identical and Torres had been given an opportunity to respond. The court therefore granted summary judgment for BSA in the 3437 Action for the reasons stated in its June 18, 2020 opinion.
City Claims
The court had previously granted summary judgment to the City based on its conclusion that the police officers and firefighters were acting under the emergency-aid doctrine. That doctrine is an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s usual warrant requirement when officials act to provide emergency assistance. The court found that Torres’s claims against the City in the 3437 Action were substantively identical to claims already decided in the 2362 Action. Because Torres was proceeding without paying filing fees, the court applied 28 U.S.C. § 1915(e)(2)(B)(i), which requires dismissal when the action is legally insufficient or otherwise meets the statute’s dismissal standards. The court dismissed the 3437 Action against the City under that provision. It also noted that Torres had never served the City in that action, which independently supported dismissal under the service rule cited in the order.
Claims Against the Four Individual Defendants
The earlier summary-judgment ruling found that the actions alleged against the police officers and firefighters were justified under the emergency-aid doctrine and did not violate Torres’s constitutional rights. The court said that conclusion applied equally to Wahligh, Pepe, Scordus, and Barvels, even though they had not been included in the earlier summary-judgment decision. Because Torres had received an opportunity to present his arguments and the court considered the claims legally insufficient under 28 U.S.C. § 1915(e)(2)(B)(i), it dismissed the 2362 Action against those four defendants.
Amendment, Sanctions, and Disposition
The court denied further permission to amend the complaint, finding that Torres had already received multiple opportunities to amend and that additional amendment would be futile. Torres also asked the court to remove defense lawyers from the case and impose monetary sanctions based on allegations involving the Central Intelligence Agency and other federal agencies. The court found those allegations speculative and unsupported by credible facts, and it denied both the sanctions motion and the motion to disbar defense counsel.
The order dismissed Torres’s remaining claims against Wahligh, Pepe, Scordus, and Barvels in the 2362 Action and against BSA and the New York City Police Department in the 3437 Action. It granted summary judgment for BSA, dismissed the other identified claims under the filing-fee statute, denied the sanctions and disbarment motion, and directed the clerk to close case numbers 16-CV-2362 and 16-CV-3437.
Read the full 7-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.