Joyriding plaintiff cannot name John Doe defendants after the statute of limitations expires

Another lesson learned on when you can and cannot name John Doe defendants in police misconduct cases. The plaintiff waited too long to name them, and any claims against a John Doe defendant is dismissed.

The case is Gudanowski v. Burrell, a summary order issued on July 31. The case began when plaintiff was joyriding someone's tow truck and the police, following a high-speed chase, pulled him out of the vehicle and subdued him to the ground. Plaintiff claims the officers used excessive force.

As an initial point, there is such a thing as excessive force even if the police have the right to subdue someone. The joyriding does not make plaintiff a sympathetic litigant, but the law says the police have to use restraint when restraint is called for. Anyway, plaintiff did not know the names of the offending officers, so he named them as John Doe defendants. That is a common tactic, but the rule is you have to learn their names and identify them in the lawsuit within the statute of limitations, which is three years in New York.

At some point, plaintiff did get the names of the officers who were on the scene. But when he brought the lawsuit pro se, he did not name the officers as defendants and instead identified them as John Doe defendants. He says he proceeded this way because when he filed the case, he was in jail, and a prison law librarian told him that he could be sanctioned by the court if he accused people of wrongdoing without being sure of their culpability. This made plaintiff nervous, because the officers denied any misconduct.

While plaintiff eventually hired a lawyer who identified the John Doe defendants, the federal court said it was too late, and the case was dismissed. The Court of Appeals affirms the dismissal ruling, holding that plaintiff did, within the statute of limitations, know which officers had pulled him from the tow truck, subdued him, or both, and he therefore was in a position to name them in the excessive force lawsuit. It was not enough for plaintiff to accept at face value the officers' statements denying the use of excessive force. Since he named the officers after the three year statute of limitations expired, the case is dismissed against those officers.

What about the legal advice from the prison law librarian? The Court (Menashi, Lee and Nathan) holds that is no excuse for not naming the John Doe officers within the three-year window. You can excuse an untimely filing under the "mistaken identity" provided for in the federal rules, but the Court of Appeals holds that the librarian's advise is not the kind of mistake contemplated under the federal rules, as the mistake has to relate to the identify of the defendants, and not mistaken legal advice.