Villar v. Jaimison
- Laura Swain
- 1:23-cv-05782
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 3
In Villar v. Jaimison, Chief Judge Swain ordered Villar to provide an original signature within 30 days or face dismissal.
Yonathan L. Villar must provide an original signature within 30 days to avoid dismissal of the action. J.L. Jaimison was not required to answer at that time.
What happened
In Yonathan L. Villar v. J.L. Jaimison, the petitioner filed the petition without a signature and was representing himself. The opinion also includes a requested remedy concerning earned time credits for non-U.S. citizen inmates, but the court did not address that issue in this order.
The court directed Villar to resubmit the petition’s signature page with an original signature within 30 days. The court said no response from Jaimison was required at that time, and that the case would proceed through the Clerk’s Office if Villar complied. If he did not comply, the action would be dismissed.
Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain also ruled that an appeal from this order would not be taken in good faith and denied permission to proceed without paying the appeal filing fee. The court did not decide the petition’s underlying earned-time-credit request.
The detailed version
- Villar v. Jaimison · No. 1:23-cv-05782
- Laura Swain
- July 17, 2023
Background
Yonathan L. Villar brought the action without a lawyer. The petition submitted to the court did not contain a signature. The opinion’s attached signature page includes a request that the Bureau of Prisons not exclude non-U.S. citizen inmates from a one-year sentence reduction through the First Step Act’s Earned Time Credits Program, and that the court grant that reduction under the Equal Protection Clause. This order did not decide those requests.
Signature requirement
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11(a) and Local Civil Rule 11.1(a) require an unrepresented party to personally sign a pleading. The court explained that the signature must be an original handwritten signature or a mark placed by the person, rather than merely a reproduced copy.
Court’s action
The court directed Villar to resubmit the petition’s signature page with an original signature within 30 days of the order. No answer was required from J.L. Jaimison at that time. The court stated that, if Villar complied, the case would be processed under the Clerk’s Office procedures. If he failed to comply within the allowed time, the action would be dismissed.
The court also certified under 28 U.S.C. § 1915(a)(3) that any appeal from the order would not be taken in good faith. It therefore denied permission to proceed without paying the filing fee for an appeal. The order did not reach the merits of Villar’s earned-time-credit or equal-protection requests.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.