Jama v. City of Denver

304 F.R.D. 289, 2014 WL 2610015, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 81255
CourtDistrict Court, D. Colorado
DecidedJune 6, 2014
DocketCivil Action No. 08-cv-01693-MSK-KLM
StatusPublished
Cited by27 cases

This text of 304 F.R.D. 289 (Jama v. City of Denver) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, D. Colorado primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Jama v. City of Denver, 304 F.R.D. 289, 2014 WL 2610015, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 81255 (D. Colo. 2014).

Opinion

OPINION AND ORDER OVERRULING OBJECTIONS AND ADOPTING MAGISTRATE JUDGE’S ORDER

Marcia S. Krieger, Chief United States District Judge

THIS MATTER comes before the Court pursuant to the Plaintiffs’ Objections (# 491) to the Magistrate Judge’s February 8, 2012 Order (#487) granting in part the Defendant’s Motion to Strike (# 451), and the Defendant’s response (# 498).1

FACTS

As presently postured, the Plaintiffs in this action assert claims against the Defendant, [292]*292the City and County of Denver (“Denver”), alleging that Denver’s police department engaged in customs or policies that facilitated the mistaken arrest of individuals, in violation of their 4th Amendment rights as secured by 42 U.S.C. § 1983.

A. Procedural history

The instant Objections relate to the timeliness of certain discovery disclosures by the Plaintiffs, and thus, it is necessary to address the lengthy history of this case. As amended (# 116), the Scheduling Order provided for a discovery cutoff of July 1, 2009. Nevertheless, it appears from the docket that various discovery disputes persisted for several additional months. For example, a September 3, 2009 Minute Entry (# 281) from a discovery hearing before the Magistrate Judge recites various items of discovery that remain to be produced and sets a schedule for such production. Of particular interest in that Minute Entry is a directive to Denver to conduct a database search to “identify other non-plaintiff mistaken identity arrests/detentions,” and for the parties to engage in a process by which the Plaintiffs would identify specific individuals within such search results for whom the Plaintiffs would request, and Denver would produce, additional information about that individual’s arrest or detention. It appears that the Magistrate Judge anticipated that this process would be complete by late October 2009. A September 22, 2009 joint motion (# 294) seeking to extend the dispositive motions deadline confirms that “Defendants estimate they will be searching ... and producing materials for several more months.”

On November 6, 2009, Denver filed a motion for summary judgment (#333) on the certain claims by one of the Plaintiffs,2 including a Monell claim against Denver itself. On December 29, 2009, the Plaintiffs sought relief (# 349) under then-Rule 56(f)3, explaining that “Denver is in the midst of producing voluminous discovery that bears directly on Plaintiffs’ Monell theories” including “hundreds of pages” of logs that “show many dozens of occasions when the wrong person was arrested based on mistaken identity.” The Plaintiffs’ motion indicated that “Denver ... may be able to complete production of many of the above documents by early January,” stated that “Plaintiffs’ counsel have been diligently analyzing the documents as they ai’e produced,” and posited that the Plaintiffs “expect they will need 30 days following completion of the production to evaluate the documents” sufficiently to respond to Denver’s summary judgment motion.

On February 21, 2010, the parties filed a joint Motion to Continue Pretrial Conference (# 373). That motion recited the current status of the parties’ discovery exchanges, including the fact that Denver had conducted the database search] that the Plaintiffs had identified “approximately 237 cases with potential identification issues involving non-plaintiffs,” and that Denver was “expending significant resources in determining what records exist relevant to each of these 237 non-plaintiff cases.” The parties stated that they anticipated that Denver would complete its production of the relevant material within 60 days.

By July 2010, it appears that Denver had completed its production. In a July 12, 2010 motion (#400) pursuant to Rule 56(f), the Plaintiffs noted that “Denver has produced [the relevant material] from 2002 to September 2009,” but was refusing to produce similar records for periods after 2009. (The Plaintiffs argued that such post-litigation records were relevant to the question of whether prospective equitable relief was appropriate.) This Court’s Order (# 418) of August 4, 2010, granting in part and denying in part the Plaintiffs’ Rule 56(f) requests, reflects the Court’s understanding that the relevant-discovery had now been produced by Denver: “Plaintiffs have since filed the second motion ... which contains no indication that the [293]*293information that was subject to discovery has not been disclosed.”

On September 15, 2011, Denver—the only remaining Defendant in the case—filed another summary judgment motion (# 439), directly attacking the sufficiency of the Plaintiffs’ showing with regard to the remaining Monell claims against it. Shortly thereafter, the Plaintiffs filed a motion (# 443) requesting an extension of time to respond to Denver’s summary judgment motion. The Plaintiffs’ request pointed out that the Plaintiffs’ counsel “had not prepared a response to any of Denver’s [earlier] motions for summary judgment, in part, because Plaintiffs were awaiting supplemental discovery that counsel believed would be material to the Monell claims.” The request further stated that, as of September 2011, Plaintiffs’ counsel had recently “returned ... from a three-month leave [and u]ntil he returned and began reviewing papers in preparation for drafting a response to Denver’s motion for summary judgment, undersigned counsel had not reviewed any materials in this case for many months.”

B. The instant dispute

On November 8, 2011, the Plaintiffs filed the document that is at the core of the instant issue, the Plaintiffs Fourth Supplemental Disclosures (# 447). That document purported to supplement the Plaintiffs’ Rule 26(a)(1) disclosures by identifying 108 (presumably) new witnesses, each of whom was alleged to have “facts relating to arrest based on mistaken identity, including communications to and from law enforcement officers, court proceedings, circumstances of arrest, and length of detention.” (The supplemental disclosures also identified certain documents the Plaintiffs intended to present.)

On December 13, 2011, Denver moved to strike (#451) the Plaintiffs’ Fourth Supplemental Disclosures. Denver argued that any outstanding discovery matters were resolved, at the latest, by this Court’s August 4, 2010 Order denying the Plaintiffs’ Rule 56(f) requests; that the Plaintiffs were required to supplement their Rule 26(a)(1) disclosures on a timely basis; and that the late disclosure contained within the Fourth Supplemental Disclosures was prejudicial to Denver, coming after Denver had filed its summary judgment motion.

The Plaintiffs responded (#483), arguing that “all the witnesses [in the Fourth Supplemental Disclosures] have been previously disclosed, albeit not formally.” In other words, the Plaintiffs contended that the various individuals mentioned in the disclosures “were first identified by Denver in its own ... document productions” to the Plaintiffs. Re-latedly, the Plaintiffs argued that eonclusory statements in their prior disclosures, purporting to identify “any persons who were the subject of a mistaken-identification arrest or detention” was sufficient to encompass the particular individuals identified in the Fourth Supplemental Disclosures.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
304 F.R.D. 289, 2014 WL 2610015, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 81255, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/jama-v-city-of-denver-cod-2014.