Cratty v. City of Wyandotte

296 F. Supp. 3d 854
CourtDistrict Court, E.D. Michigan
DecidedNovember 8, 2017
DocketCivil Action No.: 17–10377
StatusPublished
Cited by11 cases

This text of 296 F. Supp. 3d 854 (Cratty v. City of Wyandotte) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, E.D. Michigan primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Cratty v. City of Wyandotte, 296 F. Supp. 3d 854 (E.D. Mich. 2017).

Opinion

ELIZABETH A. STAFFORD, United States Magistrate Judge

I. Introduction

Plaintiff Charles Patrick Cratty sues the City of Wyandotte under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging malicious prosecution, abuse of process, conspiracy and conversion. [ECF No. 2]. Before the Court are the City's motion for protective order to bar the deposition of Mayor Joseph Peterson, and Cratty's motion to compel discovery responses. [ECF No. 16, 21]. The Court held a hearing on November 7, 2017. For the reasons stated on the record and below, the Court DENIES the City's motion for protective order and GRANTS IN PART AND DENIES IN PART Cratty's motion to compel and to extend discovery.

II. Analysis

A.

In its motion for protective order, the City sought to preclude the deposition of Mayor Peterson, stating that there was no discovery suggesting that Peterson had relevant factual knowledge about the lawsuit, and that he is privileged from testifying under legislative and deliberate process privileges. [ECF No. 16]. In his response, Cratty noted that he had testified to discussing his case with Mayor Peterson in 2010, and that Peterson told Cratty that he would have cases against him (Cratty) dismissed. [ECF No. 19]. The City replied that it would withdraw its request to bar Mayor Peterson's deposition with respect to his discussions with Cratty, but that Peterson is otherwise entitled to legislative and deliberate process privileges. [ECF No. 22]. The City asks the Court to order that Mayor Peterson's deposition be "confined to topics solely related to his alleged interactions with Plaintiff and the relevant citations, arrests, and prosecutions at issue." [Id. , PageID 444]. This request wrongly presupposes that all topics outside of those specified by the City are protected by a privilege.

Testimonial exclusionary rules and privileges contravene the fundamental principle that the public has a right to every man's evidence. As such, they must be strictly construed and accepted only to the very limited extent that permitting a refusal to testify or excluding relevant evidence has a public good transcending the normally predominant principle of utilizing all rational means for ascertaining truth.

Trammel v. United States , 445 U.S. 40, 50, 100 S.Ct. 906, 63 L.Ed.2d 186 (1980) (citations, internal quotation marks and ellipses omitted). Not all governmental acts are legislative in nature, and the legislative privilege applies only to actions that bear the hallmarks of traditional legislation, including discretionary policy making. Lilly Inv., LLC v. City of Rochester , No. 14-CV-10712, 2015 WL 753491, at *11-12 (E.D. Mich. Feb. 23, 2015). In the same vein, the deliberative process privilege applies only to documents or testimony that are predecisional and deliberative in nature.

*858E.E.O.C. v. Burlington N. & Santa Fe Ry. Co. , 621 F.Supp.2d 603, 606 (W.D. Tenn. 2009).

Given the strict construction of these privileges, the Court will not preemptively determine that a privilege protects Mayor Peterson from testifying about matters other than his alleged interactions with Cratty, the relevant citations, arrests or prosecutions at issue. The City may object to testimony that is covered by a privilege. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 30(c)(2). But the City is warned that it bears the burden of establishing that a privilege applies, Lilly , 2015 WL 753491 at *13, so its attorneys should act with care if they instruct Peterson not to answer a question.1

B.

Turning to Cratty's motion to compel, his attorney stated at the hearing that the issues that remained unresolved pertained to: (1) his requests for production of documents with respect to traffic tickets written by specific officers in 2007 and 2008; (2) his deposition questioning of Officer Daniel Torolski's opinion regarding whether having five Wyandotte officers listed as witnesses on a suspended driver's license case was excessive; and (3) his deposition questioning of Officer Michael Sadowski's note-taking during a unrelated firearms arrest in about July 2017. The Court will address each issue in turn below.

1.

Cratty requested that the City produce copies of all "fail to signal turn" tickets issued by Officer T. Scheitz from October 2007 through March 2008, and all "tinted window" tickets issued by Officers Robert Fitzpatrick, Neil Hunter and Jim Kresin in 2007. [ECF No. 21-2, PageID 384-85]. The City responded with boilerplate objections, first stating that each request for vague, overly broad and lacking specificity. [Id. ]. But there is nothing vague or unspecific about these requests, and the City does not explain how they are overly broad.

The City's boilerplate objections next stated that the requests were "not relevant to the subject matter involved in the pending action," were not "likely to lead to discoverable evidence," and had "no tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of this action more probable or less probable than it would without the requested information." [Id. ]. The first and third of these objections are redundant because they both address relevance.2 And the objections that the requested evidence was not relevant to the "subject matter" and would not "lead to admissible evidence" refer to an outdated version of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(1). See Cole's Wexford Hotel, Inc. v. Highmark Inc. , 209 F.Supp.3d 810, 821 (W.D. Pa. 2016) ("The current and amended version of Rule 26(b)(1), does not contain any reference to the subject matter of the action.");

*859Fischer v. Forrest , No. 14CIV1304PAEAJP, 2017 WL 773694, at *2 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 28, 2017) ("reasonably calculated to lead to admissible evidence" language no longer in Rule 26(b)(1), and use of language in objection is improper).

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Bluebook (online)
296 F. Supp. 3d 854, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/cratty-v-city-of-wyandotte-mied-2017.