Lee v. City of Troy

• Decision Date: 16 February 2021
• Docket Number: 1:19-CV-473
• Citation: 520 F.Supp.3d 191
• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of New York
• Parties: Lamont LEE and Tymel Kornegay, Plaintiffs, v. The CITY OF TROY; Patrolman Christopher Parker; Patrolman Louis Perfetti; Patrolman Justin Ashe; Patrolman Kyle Jones; Patrolman "John" Morris; and Sergeant "John" Barker, Defendants.

520 F.Supp.3d 191

Lamont LEE and Tymel Kornegay, Plaintiffs,

v.The CITY OF TROY; Patrolman Christopher Parker; Patrolman Louis Perfetti; Patrolman Justin Ashe; Patrolman Kyle Jones; Patrolman "John" Morris; and Sergeant "John" Barker, Defendants.

1:19-CV-473

United States District Court, N.D. New York.

Signed February 16, 2021

OF COUNSEL: EDWARD SIVIN, ESQ., GLENN D. MILLER, ESQ., SIVIN, MILLER & ROCHE LLP, Attorneys for Plaintiffs, 20 Vesey Street, Suite 1400, New York, New York 10007.

OF COUNSEL: MICHAEL E. GINSBERG, ESQ., RHIANNON INEVA SPENCER, ESQ., PATTISON, SAMPSON LAW FIRM, Attorneys for Defendants, P.O. Box 208, 22 First Street, Troy, New York 12181.

OF COUNSEL: RICHARD T. MORRISSEY, ESQ., OFFICE OF RICHARD T. MORRISSEY, Attorneys for Defendants, 64 Second Street, Troy, New York 12180.

MEMORANDUM–DECISION and ORDER

DAVID N. HURD, United States District Judge

I. INTRODUCTION

On the night of March 3, 2018, plaintiff Lamont Lee ("Lee") was arrested outside a bar in the City of Troy, New York ("Troy" or the "city") by several of the city's police officers. It is undisputed that the arresting officers used force to enact that arrest. However, and perhaps predictably, the parties do dispute whether that use of force was reasonable.

But there is more. On April 24, 2018, Lee and his grandson, plaintiff Tymel Kornegay ("Kornegay" and together with Lee "plaintiffs") had their car stopped by a different group of Troy police officers. The officers had received two tips, one anonymous and one face-to-face, that a car of a roughly similar description to plaintiffs’ carried two men who had just committed a robbery and were allegedly about to commit murder. The investigating officers patted plaintiffs down and searched their car, which plaintiffs contend was an unreasonable search and seizure in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights.

On April 22, 2019, plaintiffs filed a complaint in the Northern District of New York alleging several claims for civil rights violations against Troy and the officers involved in those altercations: Christopher Parker ("Parker"); Louis Perfetti ("Perfetti"); Justin Ashe ("Ashe"); Kyle Jones ("Jones"); Jeremy "John" Morris ("Morris") and Steven "John" Barker ("Barker" together with the city and the other officers "defendants").¹ On October 20, 2020, defendants moved for summary judgment against all of plaintiffs’ claims under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure ("Rule") 56. On November 30, 2020, plaintiffs cross-moved for summary judgment in their favor under the same rule as to their own unreasonable search and seizure claims arising out of the April 24, 2018 stop. Those motions having been fully briefed, they will now be decided on the basis of the parties’ submissions without oral argument.

II. BACKGROUND

This case involves two distinct but—according to plaintiffs—connected encounters between plaintiffs and the Troy police department. The first took place on March 3, 2018 (the "March 3 incident"), while the second took place on April 24, 2018 (the "April 24 incident"). However, before the Court can properly flesh out either incident, it must address some of the parties’ missteps in presenting this case's factual universe.

A. Defendants’ Objections to Plaintiffs’ Statement of Disputed Facts.

According to Local Rule of the Northern District of New York ("Local Rule") 56.1(b), a party opposing a motion for summary judgment must admit or deny each paragraph of the movant's statement of material facts. Because a naked denial of a fact the movant claims to be undisputed would do little to help the Court, the opposing party must support every denial with a citation to record evidence supporting a genuine dispute of material fact. Id. If the opposing party fails to provide that support, the Court may deem that fact admitted. Id.

Defendants object to dozens of paragraphs of plaintiffs’ response statement of material facts. Those objections are best considered as falling into three loose categories. Among the first, plaintiffs denied facts in which defendants only noted that an officer swore to a certain fact. The second category includes paragraphs in which defendants contend plaintiffs injected arguments into paragraphs they functionally admitted, thus defeating the purpose of the admit/deny format mandated by Local Rule 56.1(b). Third and finally, for a great many paragraphs, plaintiffs objected that video evidence defendants purported to submit to the Court could not accurately capture the entirety of Lee's interaction with police during the March 3 incident.

On the first point, a number of defendants’ material facts amount to a statement that one of the officers swore to a certain fact in their affidavits. For example, one paragraph of defendants’ statement of material facts claimed: "Ashe, ... Jones[,] and ... Perfetti attest that they did not hear ... Lee state or warn that he was reaching into his pocket to obtain medication." See, Dkt. 33-21, Defendants’ Statement of Material Facts ("DSMF"), ¶ 22. In response to that paragraph, plaintiffs responded: "[p]laintiff[s] den[y] inasmuch as defendants Ashe, Jones, and Perfetti's not hearing plaintiff Lee state or warn that he was reaching into his pocket to obtain medication amounts to an undisputed material fact that plaintiff did not in fact do so." Dkt. 38-2, Plaintiffs’ Statement of Material Facts ("PSMF"), ¶ 22. The same pattern repeats itself among several similarly framed paragraphs. See, e.g. , DSMF ¶¶ 18, 22, 29, 30, 32-37, 61; PSMF ¶¶ 18, 22, 29, 30, 32-37, 60.²

As this Court has been forced to note all too frequently, the best practice would have been for plaintiffs to simply admit the fact and move on, trusting the Court to realize that plaintiffs were only admitting that the officers’ affidavits made those claims, rather than admitting the truth of what the officers were claiming. See Crawley v. City of Syracuse , 496 F. Supp. 3d 718, 725 (N.D.N.Y. Oct. 21, 2020) ("If the material fact proffered by the movant is (1) accurate and (2) supported by the citation on which it is based, the non-movant should just admit the statement and move on."). Instead, plaintiffs muddied the present motion practice by denying claims that they truly admit to repeatedly argue that the underlying factual events are still in dispute.

Plaintiffs were welcome to—and did—provide their own facts as evidence of a dispute as to what happened on the night of March 3 and the morning of April 24. See PSMF pp. 26-32. That was the proper time and place to advance plaintiffs’ own narrative of the events at the heart of this case, not in response to defendants’ own statement. Accordingly, to the extent that plaintiffs deny paragraphs 18, 22, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, and 61 for the sole purpose of disputing the truth of an attestation described in those paragraphs, the Court will disregard those denials and deem those paragraphs admitted.

Defendants’ second objection is similarly valid. Throughout their statement of material facts, plaintiffs repeatedly quibble with ancillary details in defendants’ statement of material facts or else make argument instead of actually disputing the fact itself. For example, in one paragraph plaintiffs admit that plaintiff Kornegay testified as defendants’ statement of material facts described, but plaintiffs interject that Kornegay said more than defendants quoted. PSMF ¶ 72 ("Plaintiffs admit that Kor[ne]gay testified to the above-mentioned events but denies that this constituted the full extent of his testimony concerning what he was instructed to do and/or what was done to him.").

In one notable paragraph, plaintiffs object to defendants acknowledging that Lee was speaking in a hypothetical because defendants did not satisfactorily convey—by plaintiffs’ standards—the degree to which Lee was speaking hypothetically. PSMF ¶ 67 ("Plaintiffs deny that Lee testified that he believed there ‘could have been a possible early morning raid on somebody's home’ in a purely literal sense; rather, he testified that his observation of the number of armed officers caused him to surmise that the scene ‘was looking like it could have been a possible early morning raid on somebody's home,’ in a figurative sense. " (emphasis added)). Once again, there are many similar examples. PSMF ¶¶ 18, 19, 21, 31, 55, 60-61, 69-70, 74.

It is not the purpose of a statement of material facts to allow the parties a battleground to fight over the phrasing of claimed facts. The purpose is to clarify the issues in dispute for the Court to focus on the heart of the parties’ disagreement. See Holtz v. Rockefeller & Co. , 258 F.3d 62, 74 (2d Cir. 2001). The Court will therefore disregard plaintiffs’ ancillary arguments in paragraphs 18, 19, 21, 31, 55, 60, 61, 67, 69, 70, 72, and 74, and will only consider their statement of material facts to the extent that they properly deny a fact defendants claim to be undisputed. See, e.g. , Baity v. Kralik , 51 F. Supp. 3d 414, 418 (S.D.N.Y. 2014) (admonishing plaintiff for interjecting arguments into statement of material facts and exceeding proper scope of Rule 56.1(b) statement).

Yet there is one more category of denials to which defendants object that must be addressed. In quite a few paragraphs, plaintiffs deny that the surveillance video of the March 3 incident, one of the most important pieces of evidence at the parties’ disposal, depicts the events of the March 3 incident accurately enough to support defendants’ claims. PSMF ¶¶ 11-14, 17-19, 23-28, 31-37, 43. Once again, rather than repeating a sizeable boilerplate about the video's inability to completely and accurately portray the March 3 incident, plaintiffs should have provided a citation to record evidence indicating that defendants’ narrative was disputed or else admitted the fact supported by the video. For example, plaintiffs could have cited to Lee's deposition testimony where it contradicted defendants’ framing of the facts. Alternatively, plaintiffs could have...