Opinion ID: 4534187
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Abandonment of Claims in the District Court

Text: The District Court dismissed Spagnuolo’s remaining state-law claims against police officers on the grounds that Spagnuolo abandoned these claims by failing to respond to the County Defendants’ argument that they must be dismissed because he did not identify them in his Notice of Claim. See N.Y. Gen. Mun. § 50-e(1). Spagnuolo now argues that dismissal with prejudice was improper because the County Defendants’ argument concerning the Notice of Claim was “hidden” and was not raised in their answer to his complaint. Spagnuolo is incorrect on both points. This argument was not “hidden”: it comprised two full paragraphs of the County Defendants’ memorandum in support of their motion for summary judgment. And the County Defendants raised this issue in paragraph 26 of their answer. Accordingly, the District Court did not err in concluding that Spagnuolo abandoned these claims. See Jackson v. Fed. Exp., 766 F.3d 189, 198 (2d Cir. 2014) (“[I]n the case of a counseled party, a court may, when appropriate, infer from a party’s partial opposition [to summary judgment] that relevant claims or defenses that are not defended have been abandoned.”). III. Claim Against Hubbard: Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress Finally, the remaining claim against Hubbard is a state-law claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Under New York law, a claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress requires, inter alia, “extreme and outrageous conduct.” Howell v. New York Post Co., 81 N.Y.2d 115, 121–22 (1993) (stating that the conduct must “go beyond all possible bounds of decency, and to be regarded as atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized community”). “A person may recover only where severe mental pain or anguish is inflicted through a deliberate and malicious campaign of harassment or intimidation.” Owen v. Leventritt, 174 A.D.2d 471, 472 (1st Dep’t 1991) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). Spagnuolo argues that the evidence established that Hubbard acted outrageously by identifying him when she knew that she was being coached by detectives, conforming her statement regarding the perpetrator’s car to match a car the detectives knew to be associated with Spagnuolo, changing Because the existence of arguable probable cause is dispositive, we do not reach the district 4 court’s alternative holding, with respect to Spagnuolo’s malicious prosecution claim, that he failed to rebut the presumption of probable cause arising from his grand jury indictment. 6 her statement regarding a cigarette butt, and untruthfully telling the detectives that she had given her phone number only to Spagnuolo. But he has not identified any evidence that Hubbard took any step with the intent to harm Spagnuolo, whom she had never met prior to this litigation, and with whom she had no prior connection. Nor is there evidence that, if the identification procedures were suggestive, Hubbard was ever aware that she was being guided to identify Spagnuolo or describe the car he owned. 5 There is no evidence that Hubbard changed her statements regarding the cigarette butt: she at one point told the detectives that a cigarette butt outside her house likely belonged to the perpetrator; she was later told that it did not result in a DNA match to Spagnuolo, but there is no evidence that she made a different statement at that time, or that any change was an intentional misstatement intended to harm Spagnuolo. And while her statement to the police that she had provided her phone number only to Spagnuolo was inaccurate—she had also provided it to the actual perpetrator and published it in an online advertisement for the ring that was stolen—there is no basis to conclude that she intentionally misled the police, particularly since, by granting the police access to her emails, she presented them with evidence contrary to her inaccurate statement. The District Court therefore did not err in granting summary judgment to the executor of Hubbard’s estate on Spagnuolo’s intentional infliction of emotional distress claim.