IN RE: NEW YORK CITY POLICING DURING SUMMER 2020 DEMONSTRATIONS

Background

The dispute concerned plaintiffs’ requests for admissions, or written requests asking the opposing party to admit or deny particular facts or the authenticity of documents. Plaintiffs had served almost 300 requests while discovery was still underway. The City objected to or otherwise responded to many of them. The court considered the requests and responses identified in Docket numbers 721, 790, and 793.

Court’s analysis

The court explained that requests for admissions are most useful when they eliminate the need to prove uncontested matters at trial. At this stage of discovery, however, the court found it unlikely that responses to the existing large set of requests would eliminate discovery on substantive issues. The court therefore emphasized proportionality and avoiding undue burden.

The court directed plaintiffs to serve a new, much smaller set of requests. Those requests should generally address document authenticity and basic factual matters for which plaintiffs had a good-faith basis to believe that an admission would eliminate the need for further discovery. New requests should avoid compound questions and should cite readily available supporting evidence when appropriate.

The court also made several rulings about the existing objections and responses:

- The City need not listen to recordings to verify every statement made at a press conference or other proceeding unless the recording is unintelligible or garbled. Requests could instead ask the City to admit that a particular recording or transcript depicts a particular speaker on a particular date. - Requests concerning facts contained in documents could sometimes be better framed as requests to admit the documents’ authenticity. The court said the City had improperly called certain document descriptions vague. - The City could not object merely because a request concerned a fact disputed for trial. The federal rules allow requests addressing genuine issues for trial; the City could deny a request it disputed. - The court overruled objections that requests sought statements taken out of context or required a narrative response. If a statement was made and the request was clear and not burdensome to investigate, the City had to respond under the permitted admission, denial, or qualified-response options. - Some City responses explaining that information could not be obtained after a reasonable inquiry were sufficiently detailed, but other responses were improper because they gave no further explanation. The City also could not rely on the need to examine information from third parties alone as a basis for objecting. - The City could not object simply because a request also concerned a separate pending lawsuit. It could raise a relevance objection if the request did not relate to the consolidated lawsuits. - The court found objections to certain requests as improper contention interrogatories were not well-founded, although it noted that the City had responded to some of those requests. - Objections that a request was “improper under Rule 36,” an “improper use of Rule 36,” or contained improper “phraseology” were insufficiently specific and were overruled. - The court said it would likely sustain an objection to the request concerning probable cause for an arrest because of uncertainty about how that legal standard applied, but it did not decide the issue because the request would not eliminate the need for discovery and was not expected to be served again at this stage. - Requests asking defendants to admit a set of facts generally could not be answered merely by referring to deposition testimony. But such a request could be objectionable during this stage if the defendants had not completed their investigation, an immediate response would not materially affect discovery, and requiring an investigation before discovery ended would be unreasonable. - Document Request No. 1 and Interrogatory No. 1 were overbroad and disproportionate because plaintiffs were already conducting extensive discovery on the same subjects. The court directed plaintiffs to wait for responses to the new requests and, if necessary, serve requests addressing documents or information not previously sought.

Ruling

The court directed plaintiffs to serve a new, smaller set of requests for admissions and ruled that the City should not reassert objections that the order had rejected. The court denied plaintiffs’ request for attorney’s fees because, although some City objections were unfounded, the City’s overall response was substantively justified given the number of requests. The court also declined to find that the City had waived any objections. Any relief not specifically addressed in the order was denied. Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein entered the order.