HARRIS v. RUBIN
Filing
6
MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER REOPENING CASE; directing the Clerk to serve this memorandum opinion and order upon pltf. by regular mail, enclosing one blank Section 2241 habeas petition form; one blank section 2254 habeas petition form; one blank application informa pauperis form; and closing case. Signed by Judge Susan D. Wigenton on 1/9/2012. (nr, )
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF NEW JERSEY
_______________________________
:
:
:
Plaintiff,
:
:
v.
:
:
ANN R. RUBIN,
:
:
Defendant.
:
_______________________________:
ANTONIO CLIFFORD HARRIS,
Civil Action No.
09-4368 (SDW)
MEMORANDUM OPINION
AND ORDER
IT APPEARING THAT:
1.
On August 24, 2009, Plaintiff submitted his § 1983 complaint
and his application to proceed in the instant matter in
forma pauperis.
2.
See Docket Entry No. 1.
On April 1, 2010, this Court granted Plaintiff in
forma pauperis status and dismissed his complaint.
Docket Entry No. 2.
See
Some Plaintiff’s claims were dismissed
with prejudice, as barred by prosecutorial immunity and
untimely, while other Plaintiff’s claims were dismissed
without prejudice, pursuant to the workings of Rules 18 and
20, with a clarification that such claims could be raised by
Plaintiff in new and separate complaints.
3.
See id.
More than twenty months went by, and Plaintiff filed his
instant application seeking his release from confinement.
See Docket Entry No. 5.
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4.
The Court construes Plaintiff’s instant application as his
motion for reconsideration of the Court’s prior
determination.
5.
Motions for reconsideration in this District are governed by
Local Civil Rule 7.1(i).
See U.S. v. Compaction Sys. Corp.,
88 F. Supp. 2d 339, 345 (D.N.J. 1999).
The Rule requires
that motions for reconsideration be served and filed “within
14 days after the entry of the order or judgment on the
original motion by the Judge.” L. Civ. R. 7.1(I).
Here,
Plaintiff submitted his motion with a twenty-month delay.
Therefore, Plaintiff’s motion should be denied, as facially
untimely.
6.
Even if the Court were to overlook this twenty-month delay,
Plaintiff’s application is without merit.
A motion for
reconsideration is a device of limited utility.
There are
only four grounds upon which a motion for reconsideration
might be granted: (a) to correct manifest errors of law or
fact upon which the judgment was based; (b) to present
newly-discovered or previously unavailable evidence; (c) to
prevent manifest injustice; and (d) to accord the decision
to an intervening change in prevailing law.
See 11 Charles
A. Wright, Arthur R. Miller & Mary Kay Kane, Federal
Practice and Procedure § 2810.1 (2d ed. 1995); see also
Harsco Corp. v. Zlotnicki, 779 F.2d 906, 909 (3d Cir. 1985),
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cert. denied, 476 U.S. 1171 (1986) (purpose of motion for
reconsideration is to correct manifest errors of law or fact
or to present newly discovered evidence).
“To support
reargument, a moving party must show that dispositive
factual matters or controlling decisions of law were
overlooked by the court in reaching its prior decision.”
Assisted Living Associates of Moorestown, L.L.C., v.
Moorestown Tp., 996 F. Supp. 409, 442 (D.N.J. 1998).
In
contrast, mere disagreement with the district court's
decision is an inappropriate ground for a motion for
reconsideration: such disagreement should be raised through
the appellate process.
See id. (citing Bermingham v. Sony
Corp. of America, Inc., 820 F. Supp. 834, 859 n.8 (D.N.J.
1992), aff'd, 37 F.3d 1485 (3d Cir. 1994); G-69 v. Degnan,
748 F. Supp. 274, 275 (D.N.J. 1990)); see also Drysdale v.
Woerth, 153 F. Supp. 2d 678, 682 (E.D. Pa. 2001) (a motion
for reconsideration may not be used as a means to reargue
unsuccessful theories).
Consequently, “[t]he Court will
only entertain such a motion where the overlooked matters,
if considered by the Court, might reasonably have resulted
in a different conclusion.”
Assisted Living, 996 F. Supp.
at 442; see also Continental Cas. Co. v. Diversified Indus.,
Inc., 884 F. Supp. 937, 943 (E.D. Pa. 1995) (“[M]otions for
reconsideration should be granted sparingly”); Edward H.
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Bohlin, Co. v. Banning Co., Inc., 6 F.3d 350, 355 (5th Cir.
1993) (a district court “has considerable discretion in
deciding whether to reopen a case under Rule 59(e)”).
7.
Here, Plaintiff’s instant submission does not assert any
errors of law or fact upon which the Court’s prior judgment
was based, nor does it present any newly-discovered or
previously unavailable evidence; it does not state grounds
showing manifest injustice, nor does it refer the Court’s
attention to any intervening change in prevailing law.
All
Plaintiff asserts is his demand for release for confinement;
however, Plaintiff’s demands to that effect cannot provide
the Court with a valid basis for reconsideration of its
prior determination.
Therefore, Plaintiff’s instant
application is without merit and shall be denied.
8.
Moreover, Plaintiff’s now-submitted request for release from
incarceration is not cognizable in a civil rights action.
Federal law provides two avenues of relief to prisoners: a
petition for habeas corpus and a civil rights complaint.
See Muhammad v. Close, 540 U.S. 749, 750 (2004).
“Challenges to the validity of any confinement or to
particulars affecting its duration are the province of
habeas corpus . . . [while] requests for relief turning on
circumstances of confinement [fall within the realm of] a §
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1983 action.”1
Id.
As § 1983 action applies only to state
actions, it is not available to federal prisoners; the
federal counterpart is an action under Bivens alleging
deprivation of a constitutional right.
See Brown v. Philip
Morris, Inc., 250 F.3d 789, 801 (3d Cir. 2001) (“A Bivens
action . . . is the federal equivalent of the § 1983 cause
of action against state actors, [it] will lie where the
defendant has violated the plaintiff's rights under color of
federal law”).
The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
explained the distinction between the availability of civil
rights relief and the availability of habeas relief as
follows:
[W]henever the challenge ultimately attacks the
“core of habeas” - the validity of the continued
conviction or the fact or length of the sentence a challenge, however denominated and regardless of
the relief sought, must be brought by way of a
habeas corpus petition. Conversely, when the
challenge is to a condition of confinement such
that a finding in plaintiff's favor would not
1
In a series of cases beginning with Preiser v. Rodriguez,
411 U.S. 475 (1973), the Supreme Court analyzed the intersection
of civil rights and habeas corpus. In Preiser, state prisoners
who had been deprived of good-conduct-time credits by the New
York State Department of Correctional Services as a result of
disciplinary proceedings brought a § 1983 action seeking
injunctive relief to compel restoration of the credits, which
would have resulted in their immediate or speedier release. See
id. at 476. The prisoners did not seek compensatory damages for
the loss of their credits. See id. at 494. Assessing the
prisoners’ challenge, the Supreme Court held that a prisoner must
bring a suit for equitable relief that, effectively, challenges
“the fact or duration of confinement” as a habeas corpus
petition. See id. at 500.
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alter his sentence or undo his conviction, an
action under § 1983 is appropriate.
Leamer v. Fauver, 288 F.3d 532, 542 (3d Cir. 2002).
Therefore, a prisoner is entitled to a writ of habeas corpus
when he “seek[s] to invalidate the duration of [his]
confinement - either directly through an injunction
compelling speedier release or indirectly through a judicial
determination that necessarily implies the unlawfulness of
the [government's] custody.”
U.S. 74, 81 (2005).
See Wilkinson v. Dotson, 544
In contrast, if a judgment in the
prisoner's favor would not affect the fact or duration of
the prisoner's incarceration, habeas relief is unavailable.
See, e.g., Ganim v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 235 Fed.
App’x 882 (3rd Cir. 2007) (holding that district court lacks
jurisdiction under § 2241 to entertain prisoner's challenge
to his transfer between federal prisons); Bronson v.
Demming, 56 Fed. App’x 551, 553-54 (3rd Cir. 2002) (habeas
relief was unavailable to inmate seeking release from
disciplinary segregation to general population, and district
court properly dismissed habeas petition without prejudice
to any right to assert claims in properly filed civil rights
complaint).
9.
Here, Plaintiff seeks, in no ambiguous terms, release from
confinement, which is a claim falling within the core of
habeas relief.
Therefore, to the extent Plaintiff wishes to
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obtain such remedy, his challenges should be raised by means
of a habeas petition.2
Simply put, the Court has no
jurisdiction in this civil rights matter allowing the Court
to entertain Plaintiff’s habeas claims.
IT IS, therefore, on this 9th day of January, 2012,
ORDERED that the Clerk shall reopen this matter for the
purposes of this Court’s examination of Plaintiff’s application
seeking release from confinement, Docket Entry No. 5, by making a
new and separate entry on the docket reading, “CIVIL CASE
REOPENED”; and it is further
ORDERED that Plaintiff’s application, Docket Entry No. 5, is
construed as Plaintiff’s motion seeking reconsideration of the
Court’s prior determination; and it is further
ORDERED that Plaintiff’s application, Docket Entry No. 5, is
granted in form and denied in substance;3 and it is further
2
No statement in this Memorandum Opinion and Order shall be
construed as expressing this Court’s opinion as to substantive or
procedural validity or invalidity of Petitioner’s habeas
challenges in the event such challenges are filed.
3
The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
guided that a litigant’s motion for reconsideration should be
deemed granted in form when the court (the decision of which the
litigant is seeking a reconsideration of) addresses the merits —
rather than the mere procedural propriety or lack thereof- of
that motion. See Pena-Ruiz v. Solorzano, 281 Fed. App'x 110,
2008 U.S. App. LEXIS 12436, at *2-3, n.1 (3d Cir. 2008).
However, the very fact of the court's review does not prevent the
court performing such reconsideration analysis (of the original
application, as supplanted by the points raised in the motion for
reconsideration) from reaching a disposition identical — either
in its rationale or in its outcome, or in both regards — to the
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ORDERED that the Clerk shall serve this Memorandum Opinion
and Order upon Plaintiff by regular U.S. mail, inclosing in said
mailing: (a) one blank Section 2241 habeas petition form; (b) one
blank Section 2254 habeas petition form; and (c) one blank
application for incarcerated individuals seeking to prosecute a
habeas action in forma pauperis; it is finally
ORDERED that the Clerk shall close this action by making a
new and separate entry on the docket reading, "CIVIL CASE
CLOSED."
s/Susan D. Wigenton
Susan D. Wigenton,
United States District Judge
court's decision previously reached upon examination of the
original application. See id.
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