Torres v. Boyer
- Robert Lehrburger
- 1:21-cv-07865
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 7
In Torres v. Boyer, Judge Ramos denied Torres’s motion to remand his negligence case to state court because the request was unauthorized and late.
Torres and the three defendants; the case was not remanded and was scheduled to proceed in federal court.
What happened
In Torres v. Boyer, Hiram Torres sued Westley D. Boyer, Jr., EF Corporation doing business as West Motor Freight of PA, and Evans Delivery Company, Inc., alleging negligence after a vehicle accident. The defendants removed the case from New York state court to federal court based on the parties’ different citizenships.
Torres asked the federal court to send the case back to state court so he could join Raymundo Morales, a passenger in the vehicle, and combine the cases. Torres said this would avoid repeated testimony and inconsistent verdicts. The defendants opposed the request.
Judge Ramos denied the motion. He ruled that the statute Torres relied on allows remand after adding a non-diverse defendant, not a non-diverse plaintiff, and that Torres filed the motion about eight months after removal—well beyond the 30-day deadline for non-jurisdictional removal defects. The court directed the parties to attend an initial pretrial conference.
The detailed version
- Torres v. Boyer · No. 1:21-cv-07865
- Robert Lehrburger
- Dec. 30, 2022
Background
Hiram Torres sued Westley D. Boyer, Jr., EF Corporation doing business as West Motor Freight of PA, and Evans Delivery Company, Inc. He alleged negligence arising from an October 18, 2018, motor vehicle accident. The opinion states that Torres was driving eastbound on Interstate 278 in Queens when the defendants’ vehicle, driven by Boyer, struck his car. Raymundo Morales was a passenger in Torres’s car.
Torres filed the case in Bronx Supreme Court on October 19, 2020. The defendants removed it to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on September 21, 2021, based on diversity jurisdiction. The court stated that complete diversity existed when the case was removed: Torres was a citizen of New York, and all defendants were citizens of Pennsylvania. The court also stated that Torres met the amount-in-controversy requirement.
Morales filed a separate case against the defendants, Torres, and Maritza Sanchez in Bronx Supreme Court the day after removal. Torres later said he wanted to join Morales to the federal case and have both matters returned to state court. He argued that combining the cases would avoid duplicative testimony and inconsistent verdicts.
Torres’s Motion
Torres moved to remand the case under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1447(c) and 1447(e). Section 1447(e) permits a federal court, in certain circumstances, to deny the addition of a non-diverse defendant or allow that defendant to be added and remand the case. Section 1447(c) requires a motion based on a non-jurisdictional defect in removal to be filed within 30 days after the notice of removal.
Court’s Analysis
The court held that Section 1447(e) did not apply because Torres sought to add a non-diverse plaintiff, not a non-diverse defendant. The court read the statute as limited to requests to join additional defendants and concluded that it had no authority under that provision to remand the case for the proposed joinder of Morales.
The court separately rejected Torres’s reliance on Section 1447(c). Because complete diversity and the amount-in-controversy requirement existed, the court found no subject-matter jurisdiction defect. Torres did not identify another removal defect in his briefing. The court added that any such non-jurisdictional argument would be untimely because Torres filed his remand motion on May 20, 2022, approximately eight months after the September 21, 2021 removal.
Because of these conclusions, the court did not consider Torres’s arguments concerning discretionary factors such as delay, prejudice, the risk of multiple litigation, and his reason for seeking joinder.
Disposition
Judge Edgardo Ramos denied Torres’s motion to remand. The clerk was directed to terminate the motion, and the parties were directed to appear by telephone for an initial pretrial conference on January 17, 2023. The opinion did not decide whether the alleged negligence occurred or whether any party was liable for the accident.
Read the full 7-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.