Federal judge says lawyer and client must pay $19K for filing baseless civil rights suit
The plaintiff’s lawyer should have known that the purported facts on which a civil rights suit against the New York City police department was predicated weren’t true, a Manhattan federal judge says.
So both attorney and client are on the hook for over $19,000 in sanctions, to help offset the city’s expenses for defending the baseless litigation.
In order to credit the suit’s claims that plaintiff Patricio Jimenez was falsely arrested for domestic abuse in December 2012, “this court would need to accept that the ambulance driver, the emergency room staff, the volunteer domestic violence advocate, and no fewer than three police offices all acted in concert, and without any apparent motive, to fabricate several official documents each telling essentially the same story,” U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin held last week. Justia provides a copy of the written opinion.
Scheindlin called the idea of such a “motiveless” conspiracy to fabricate a criminal assault case against Patricio Jimenez “too fantastic to be credible” and said the plaintiff’s wife, Maribel Mosso-Gonzalez Jimenez, “very likely … committed perjury” in signing an affidavit drafted by her husband’s attorney, Gregory Mouton, that denied the domestic abuse.
Courthouse News, the New York Daily News and the New York Law Journal (sub. req.) have stories.
Scheindlin said Mouton may not have known that the affidavit by his client’s wife was false but nonetheless engaged in conduct warranting sanctions: “Assuming—without determining—that plaintiff’s counsel did not have actual knowledge that Mrs. Jimenez’s affidavit was false, this willful blindness to the obvious and fatal flaws in Mrs. Jimenez’s story rises to the level of egregious behavior requiring a finding of bad faith in submitting the affidavit to this court,” the judge wrote.
A previous criminal case against Patricio Jimenez went nowhere after his wife recanted her story and said no domestic assault occurred. Scheindlin granted a summary judgment motion and dismissed his civil case against the city earlier this year.
The city initially had sought $100,000 in reimbursement of its legal expenses but Scheindlin awarded less because Patricio Jimenez, who works as a cook, couldn’t afford to pay that much, the Daily News reports.
“We are hopeful that the court’s decision granting our motion for monetary sanctions against the plaintiff and his attorney will discourage the filing of frivolous lawsuits based on false or inadequately investigated allegations,” said senior counsel Tobias Zimmerman of the city’s law department in a written statement.
The newspaper says it couldn’t reach Mouton and the Jimenez family for comment.