Monahan v. City of New York

Background

The plaintiffs moved for reconsideration of the court’s March 30, 2022 decision granting summary judgment to the City of New York on municipal liability. Their claim was that, when they were arrested in 2012, the City was deliberately indifferent to a failure to train police officers on probable-cause standards for disorderly-conduct arrests, causing their allegedly false arrests.

In the earlier decision, the court assumed for purposes of analysis that the plaintiffs had been falsely arrested in violation of the Fourth Amendment. It nevertheless concluded that no reasonable fact-finder could determine that the arrests resulted from the City’s deliberate indifference to officer training. The court found that the plaintiffs had not identified evidence showing that the City was on notice that New York City police officers were making unconstitutional disorderly-conduct arrests on a sufficiently widespread basis, or identified a specific training deficiency closely connected to their injuries.

Arguments for Reconsideration

The plaintiffs argued that the court had improperly applied controlling precedent, used the wrong summary-judgment standard, and failed to consider the opinion of their expert, Robert E. Brown.

The court rejected the argument that it applied a notice standard stricter than the standard in Connick v. Thompson. It explained that a municipality’s failure to train amounts to deliberate indifference when the municipality has actual or constructive notice of a particular training deficiency and that deficiency causes employees to violate constitutional rights. A pattern of similar constitutional violations by untrained employees is ordinarily necessary to show deliberate indifference. The court also explained why it applied Connick and related Supreme Court precedent directly rather than relying on the earlier three-factor framework discussed in Walker v. City of New York.

The court also rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that it improperly decided factual issues at summary judgment. It stated that it drew every reasonable inference in favor of the plaintiffs and considered whether a reasonable fact-finder could rule for them. The court reviewed evidence concerning notice of training problems, including letters from elected officials, community viewpoints, earlier civil proceedings, prosecutorial decisions, an earlier report concerning protests, and later protests following George Floyd’s death. It also reviewed evidence concerning the alleged connection between any training deficiency and the plaintiffs’ injuries, including training materials, police witnesses’ testimony, materials concerning Occupy Wall Street, and a legal bulletin concerning disorderly-conduct arrests.

Expert Reports

The court ruled that Brown’s October 23, 2018 and January 26, 2021 letters were inadmissible for use against the summary-judgment motion. The plaintiffs had submitted the letters, but Brown’s April 19, 2019 declaration did not authenticate or validate the opinions in them. The declaration also came before the later letter and therefore could not address it. The court stated that unsworn expert reports generally cannot be used to defeat summary judgment without supporting affidavit evidence, and that the reports also contained opinions about protected speech and probable cause—issues the court said were not proper subjects for expert testimony in this case.

The court further held that even if it considered the reports, excluding the opinions about probable cause and protected speech, they would not change the result. The reports largely reviewed evidence that the court had already considered. The court found the reports’ references to training conclusory and said they did not account for the possibility that the arrests resulted from mistakes by individual officers or supervisors rather than a City training failure.

Disposition

The court concluded that the plaintiffs had not identified a material matter that it overlooked or that would change its earlier conclusion that the evidence could not allow a reasonable jury to find in their favor. The motion for reconsideration, docket entry 100, was DENIED. The court noted that its summary-judgment decision had not reached the City’s alternative argument that executive officers’ presence at the arrests and access to real-time legal advice severed the causal connection between any training lapses and the plaintiffs’ injuries.