Dickey v. City of Albuquerque et al

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF NEW MEXICO
DEMEATRI DE’SEAN DICKEY,
Plaintiff,
v. 	1:24-cv-01287 GBW-JMR
CITY OF ALBUQUERQUE, CHIEF HAROLD
MEDINA, JOSE LUIS GOMEZ, DESIRAY MAEZ,
LEAH ACATA, NICHOLAS DICKERSON
CRAWFORD, and THOMAS VIGIL,
Defendants.
ORDER GRANTING MOTION FOR STAY OF DISCOVERY
THIS MATTER comes before the Court on Defendants City of Albuquerque, Chief
Harold Medina, Jose Luis Gomez, and Nicholas Dickerson Crawford’s Motion for Stay of
Discovery. Doc. 51. Plaintiff filed a response. Doc. 58. Defendants filed a reply. Doc. 61. Having
reviewed the parties’ briefing and the relevant law, the Court will GRANT the motion.
Discovery is hereby stayed until the Court decides the Defendants’ Motion for Summary
Judgment (Doc. 49).
I. 	The Parties’ Requests
Defendants request to stay discovery until the Court decides their pending Motion for
Summary Judgment (Doc. 49) because officers Gomez and Dickerson Crawford raised qualified
immunity as a defense. Doc. 51. Plaintiff opposes a discovery stay as to claims for which
qualified immunity is not a defense. Doc. 58. In lieu, Plaintiff proposes “a tailored, claim- and
party-specific approach,” to discovery. Id. at 1. Plaintiff wishes to pursue discovery as to the
Monell claims, state-law claims, official capacity claims, and equitable claims. Id. at 5.
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II. 	Discussion
The Court hereby grants Defendants’ request to stay all discovery and denies Plaintiff’s
request for more tailored discovery.
“Qualified immunity is ‘an entitlement not to stand trial or face the other burdens of
litigation.’ . . . The privilege ‘is an immunity from suit rather than a mere defense to liability.’”
Jiron v. City of Lakewood, 392 F.3d 410, 414 (10th Cir. 2004) (quoting Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472
U.S. 511, 526 (1985)); Workman v. Jordan, 958 F.2d 332, 336 (10th Cir. 1992) (citing Siegert v.
Gilley, 500 U.S. 226, 231–33 (1991)). The doctrine of qualified immunity protects government
officials not only from the costs associated with trial, but also from “the other burdens of
litigation,” including “the burdens of broad-reaching discovery.” Mitchell, 472 U.S. at 526. The
Supreme Court has “repeatedly . . . stressed the importance of resolving immunity questions at
the earliest possible stage in litigation.” Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 232 (2009). “[T]he
driving force behind [the] creation of the qualified immunity doctrine was a desire to ensure that
insubstantial claims against government officials will be resolved prior to discovery.” Id. at 231
(quotations and brackets omitted). Thus, “if the defendant does plead the immunity defense, the
district court should resolve that threshold question before permitting discovery.” Crawford-El v.
Britton, 523 U.S. 574, 598 (1998).
Nonetheless, there are circumstances where discovery is appropriate even when qualified
immunity is raised as a defense. “The court may grant pre-discovery summary judgment on the
basis of qualified immunity if the plaintiffs cannot explain ‘how discovery will enable them to
rebut a defendant’s showing of objective reasonableness.’” Stonecipher v. Valles, 759 F.3d 1134,
1149 (10th Cir. 2014) (quoting Jones v. City & Cnty. of Denver, 854 F.2d 1206, 1211 (10th Cir.
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1988)). Stated differently, a plaintiff seeking discovery “bears the burden of demonstrating ‘how
[such] discovery will raise a genuine fact issue as to the defendants’ qualified immunity claim.’”
Martin v. Cnty. of Santa Fe, 626 F. App’x 736, 740 (10th Cir. 2015) (quoting Cole v. Ruidoso
Mun. Sch., 43 F.3d 1373, 1387 (10th Cir. 1994)).
As Defendants note, the standard practice in this district is to stay all discovery when any
defendant asserts a qualified immunity defense. See Doc. 61 at 7 (citing Higgins v. Saavedra,
No. 1:17-CV-00234-WPl-LF, 2017 WL 1437317, at *2 (D.N.M. Apr. 21, 2017); B.T. v. Davis,
557 F. Supp. 2d 1262, 1286 (D.N.M. 2007); Martin v. City of Albuquerque, 219 F. Supp. 3d
1081 (D.N.M. 2015); Rancho Del Oso Pardo, Inc. v. N.M. Dep’t of Game and Fish, No. CV 20-
427-SCY-KK, 2020 WL 3606755 (D.N.M. July 2, 2020), Herrera v. Santa Fe Pub. Sch., No.
CIV 11-0422 JB/KBM, 2012 WL 6846393 (D.N.M. Dec. 20, 2012), Rock v. Levinski, No. 13-
652 KBM-LFG, 2013 WL 12329164 (D.N.M. Oct. 22, 2013), Ayala v. Wexford Health Sources,
Inc., Civ. 24-110 MV/SCY, 2024 WL 1540579 (D.N.M. April 9, 2024)). However, the Court is
not united in this practice. See, e.g., Cruz v. City of Deming, 687 F. Supp. 3d 1155 (D.N.M.
2023) (Strickland, J.) (denying motion to reconsider order implementing a tailored discovery
stay, as opposed to a global discovery stay); see also Garcia & Bach, Iqbal is not a Game
Changer for Discovery in Civil Rights Cases, 42 N.M.L. Rev. 329 (2012) (arguing that courts
should “take a peek” at the dispositive motion to determine (1) whether the motion is likely to be
meritorious, and (2) whether discovery can continue and be refocused in a way that does not
involve the defendants moving for a stay based on qualified immunity).
Plaintiff urges this Court to use the tailored approach to a qualified immunity-based
discovery stay used in Cruz v. City of Deming, 687 F. Supp. 3d 1155 (D.N.M. 2023). In Cruz,
Plaintiff sued twelve defendants asserting just one claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against just one
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defendant for failure to intervene in an officer-involved shooting. Id. at 1159. This claim was the
only claim eligible for a qualified immunity defense. Judge Strickland found that the Cruz
defendants had “not presented the Court with good cause to impose upon all defendants a stay
based on a defense that has only been invoked by a single defendant.” Id. In Cruz, Judge
Strickland provided a well-reasoned, detailed argument regarding why, in some contexts, courts
should not globally stay discovery for all parties and all claims when a defendant raises a
qualified immunity defense. She also emphasized that “the Court retains its discretion in
implementing discovery stays in Section 1983 cases.” Id. at 1169.
Here, the Court exercises its discretion by staying all discovery until Defendant’s Motion
for Summary Judgment (Doc. 49) is decided. This Court sees no reason to deviate from its
standard practice of staying discovery entirely until a preliminary dispositive motion based on
qualified immunity is resolved. See, e.g., Higgins, 2017 WL 1437317, at *2. It is commonplace
for this Court to stay discovery until a preliminary dispositive motion is decided, even when
qualified immunity is not raised as a defense. This practice preserves both judicial and attorney
resources by ensuring that the scope of the claims are settled before the parties engage in costly
discovery, which in turn sometimes leads to costly discovery disputes.
Plaintiff requests to proceed to discovery as to the “Monell issues,” “State-law claims,”
and the “Official-capacity and equitable claims,” but not as to the “individual-capacity § 1983
claims that present the [qualified immunity] issue.” Doc. 58 at 5. However, Plaintiff’s request
rings hollow because there is virtually no discovery that would be relevant to the qualified
immunity claims that is not also relevant to one of Plaintiff’s other claims. Plaintiff is pursuing
eighteen counts against the Defendants under various legal theories and statutes. Doc. 1-1 at 10–
29. Each count revolves around the same events—Plaintiff’s February 11, 2024, arrest and
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subsequent prosecution. Id. at 4. Defendants Gomez and Dickerson Crawford seek qualified
immunity as to Count III (Fourth Amendment, Unlawful Detention and Arrest), Count IV
(Fourth Amendment, Malicious Prosecution), and Count VII (Fourteenth Amendment, Equal
Protection). See Doc. 49 at 18. Yet, the Court would be hard pressed to distinguish between
discovery that is related to those three counts and discovery that is related to Plaintiff’s roughly
equivalent state law counts against the same Defendants, Count IX (New Mexico Constitution,
Equal Protection), Count XV (New Mexico Tort Claims Act, Malicious Abuse of Process),
Count XVI (New Mexico Tort Claims Act, False Arrest), Count XVII (New Mexico Tort Claims
Act, False Imprisonment). To allow discovery on these state law claims would essentially render
any discovery stay as to the constitutional claims moot. Practically speaking, the facts
surrounding the constitutional claims are inseparable from those surrounding the state law
claims. To give meaning to the Supreme Court’s mandate that qualified immunity is an
“entitlement not to stand trial or face the other burdens of litigation,” Jiron, 392 F.3d at 414, this
Court must deny Plaintiff’s requested scope of discovery.
While this Court sees wisdom in Cruz’s tailored approach to discovery in that particular
circumstance, this case is factually distinct. In Cruz, an officer requested qualified immunity for
failure to intervene in an officer-involved shooting. It is easy to imagine how discovery could
proceed as to facts surrounding the shooting without infringing on the one officer’s potential
immunity from suit for a failure to intervene. While the failure to intervene claim was
meaningful, it was plainly ancillary to Cruz’s claims against the officers who directly shot and
killed the decedent. Here, officers Gomez and Dickerson Crawford—two of the four
defendants—request qualified immunity for Plaintiff’s unlawful detention and arrest, malicious
prosecution, and equal protection claims. Unlike the failure to intervene claim in Cruz, these
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claims are at the heart of Plaintiff’s complaint, which revolves entirely around Plaintiff’s arrest
and prosecution. As discussed in the preceding paragraph, these claims are inseparable from
Plaintiff’s state law claims.
Notably, Plaintiff does not request discovery in order to defend against Defendants’
qualified immunity claims, which is the only form of pre-summary judgment discovery the Tenth
Circuit has explicitly authorized when qualified immunity has been raised. See Stonecipher, 759
F.3d at 1149.
For these reasons, the Court will grant Defendants’ request to stay all discovery until the
Court decides the pending Motion for Summary Judgment (Doc. 49). The Court will reset the
case management deadlines after the discovery stay is lifted.
_________________________________
JENNIFER M. ROZZONI
United States Magistrate Judge
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