Falls v. Arteta
- Laura Swain
- 1:23-cv-02301
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Falls v. Arteta, Judge Swain denied Falls’s duplicate detention petition without prejudice because a similar case was pending.
Raiquan K. Falls, whose duplicate detention petition was denied without prejudice; his separate pending case, No. 23-CV-0830 (LTS), was not resolved by this order.
What happened
In Falls v. Arteta, Raiquan K. Falls filed a petition challenging his ongoing state criminal proceedings and pretrial detention. He sought immediate release and represented himself.
Falls had already filed a substantially similar petition in another case pending before the same court, docket number 23-CV-0830 (LTS). The court said this case raised the same claims.
Judge Laura Taylor Swain denied the petition without prejudice because it duplicated the pending case. The court also terminated the other pending matters, declined to issue a certificate allowing an appeal, denied permission to appeal without paying court fees, and directed the clerk to enter judgment.
The detailed version
- Falls v. Arteta · No. 1:23-cv-02301
- Laura Swain
- Mar. 22, 2023
Background
Raiquan K. Falls, who was detained at the Orange County Jail and represented himself, filed a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2241, a federal law allowing certain challenges to detention. He challenged the constitutionality of his ongoing state-court criminal proceedings and pretrial detention and sought immediate release. The petition was captioned for the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, Second Department.
Falls had previously filed a substantially similar petition in a separate case pending before the court, No. 23-CV-0830 (LTS). The court had notified him in that earlier proceeding that his application would be treated as a § 2241 petition and directed him either to withdraw it or file an amended petition showing that he had fully pursued available state-court remedies.
Ruling
The court denied Falls’s § 2241 petition as duplicative of No. 23-CV-0830 (LTS), without prejudice to the pending case. It stated that filing and litigating this duplicate action would serve no useful purpose. The court also terminated all other pending matters in this case.
The court determined that the petition did not make a substantial showing that a constitutional right had been denied, so it declined to issue a certificate of appealability. It also certified that an appeal would not be taken in good faith and denied permission to appeal without paying the applicable court fees. The clerk was directed to enter judgment.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.