Court Opinion

ID: 9800352
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 08:12:19.820182+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:42:28.126214
License: Public Domain

*454Saxe, J.,
dissents in a memorandum as follows: I would deny summary judgment and grant plaintiffs cross motion for spoliation sanctions to the extent of directing that an adverse inference charge be given at trial with regard to the destroyed surveillance tapes.
Plaintiff slipped and fell while shopping at defendant’s supermarket on August 8, 2009, as she was approaching a cashier’s station to pay for some tomatoes. Plaintiff’s attorneys sent a notice to defendant just one week after her accident, directing defendant “to preserve any and all video recordings/surveillance tapes/still photos of any nature that depict the subject slip and fall accident that took place on the above referenced date, time and location[,] [and] not to reuse, erase and/or destroy the aforesaid video recordings/surveillance tapes/still photos.” The notice was received by Nilka Bermudez, the employee in charge of those recordings, who, according to her deposition testimony, reviewed all the recordings made by the store’s 32 surveillance cameras that morning. Bermudez did not forward the notice to the store’s insurer or attorney, and she preserved only an 84-second recording that, in its last 24 seconds, showed plaintiff, from the back, approaching the cash registers and turning into one cashier’s lane, only to immediately slip and fall. The angle of the recording does not show the portion of the floor on which plaintiff slipped.
Except for that 84-second clip, the remainder of the surveillance camera recordings from that day were either recorded over after three weeks or discarded when the system broke down and was replaced.
When defendant moved for summary judgment dismissing the complaint, plaintiff cross-moved to strike defendant’s answer, contending that the destruction of the video recordings other than the saved 84 seconds constituted spoliation of relevant evidence. The motion court rejected plaintiffs contention, finding that defendant’s conduct as to the surveillance footage was not wilful or contumacious or contrary to a court order, and accordingly was not spoliation. I disagree.
New York’s common-law doctrine of spoliation authorizes the imposition of sanctions even when the failure to prevent the automatic overwriting of recordings was negligent rather than willful, as long as the alleged spoliator was on notice that those recordings would be relevant to anticipated litigation (see Strong v City of New York, 112 AD3d 15, 22 [2013]). In Strong, the plaintiff demonstrated that the City had negligently failed to take active steps to halt the process of automatically deleting audio recordings, despite having notice of impending litigation *455for which a specific audio recording would be relevant (id.). Similarly, in Suazo v Linden Plaza Assoc., L.P. (102 AD3d 570 [1st Dept 2013]), spoliation was found based on the defendant’s failure to preserve surveillance video for anticipated litigation despite notice that litigation would probably ensue. And, in Gogos v Modell's Sporting Goods, Inc. (87 AD3d 248 [1st Dept 2011]), an adverse inference charge was directed where the defendant destroyed store surveillance tapes despite having been put on notice to preserve and produce them.
While severe sanctions such as striking pleadings or an order of preclusion may be excessive where the spoliation was merely negligent, other, less severe sanctions such as an adverse inference charge may nevertheless be appropriate. The charge allows, but does not require the jury to infer that relevant evidence against the spoliator’s interest was present on the erased recording, if the explanation for its destruction is not reasonable (see Gogos, 87 AD3d at 255; PJI 1:77.1).
Defendant suggests that based on the phrasing of plaintiffs notice, it was reasonable for it to limit its retrieval and retention to only that portion of the footage that actually showed plaintiff falling. However, defendant’s obligation upon receipt of plaintiffs notice was not so narrow.
This Court held in Gogos that “[p]laintiffs were entitled to inspect the tapes to determine for themselves whether the area of the accident was depicted. They should not be compelled to accept defendant’s self-serving statement concerning the contents of the destroyed tapes” (87 AD3d at 251). This reasonable rule is equally applicable here.
The rule in Gogos does not require property owners to “preserve hours of tapes indefinitely each time an incident occurs on its premises in anticipation of a plaintiffs request for them,” as the majority protests. It does, however, impose a reasonable preservation obligation. After a person is injured an accident, service of a notice to preserve recordings of that day’s events imposes on the property owner an important obligation, and should be handled carefully. People who slip and fall are often too injured or too flustered to carefully examine their surroundings or to determine whether there were eyewitnesses to their accident. The images contained on any video recordings made on that day and around that time by surveillance cameras may well be critical in assisting the injured person in establishing exactly what occurred and why. Since it is often standard procedure for these recordings to be overwritten or recorded over in a matter of weeks or a few months, timely service of a notice on the property owner to preserve any such recordings *456must create an obligation on the part of that property owner to preserve all potentially relevant recordings. The property owner is not free to extract from such recordings a short clip depicting that one moment at that one location from only one angle and to assert that nothing else on its recordings is relevant — especially when the preserved portion of the recording does not even depict the condition of the floor on which the slip and fall occurred.
Nor may a defendant be permitted to avoid the obligations that arise through service of a notice to preserve by the expedient of failing to make its employee familiar with those obligations. The question is not whether defendant’s employee, Nilka Bermudez, acted in good faith when she reviewed all the surveillance footage and determined that, in her estimation, only the 84-second clip she saved needed to be preserved. The question is what defendant should have done upon receipt of plaintiff’s demand. If defendant, acting through its employee, failed to fulfill its legal obligations, its employee’s lack of knowledge renders defendant answerable for that failure.
There was more than one failure here for which defendant is answerable. The first was Bermudez’s failure to retrieve and preserve other footage, from other angles, showing the condition of the floor where plaintiff fell, and activities in that area during the time preceding the accident. The seconds of footage Bermudez retrieved for preservation did not even show the spot on the floor on which plaintiff slipped. Since Bermudez’s deposition testimony acknowledged that other cameras, recording from other angles, would have captured any spilled items on the floor of the store, there would have been footage from another surveillance camera that recorded the condition of the floor before and at the time of plaintiffs fall.
The second was the failure of defendant’s insurer or its attorney, who are chargeable with the knowledge that the store’s legal obligation included not only the preservation of that single 84-second clip, but any recording by any of the store’s surveillance cameras from the period leading up to plaintiffs fall showing the area of the floor on which she fell. We would expect counsel to recognize the applicability of the rule of Gogos requiring preservation of tapes for inspection, and to ensure that defendant’s employee properly fulfilled that obligation. The wording of plaintiff’s demand for “any and all video recordings/ surveillance tapes/still photos of any nature that depict the subject slip and fall accident” does not justify the employee’s reading plaintiffs demand so narrowly as to limit her task to copying only one clip of footage that recorded plaintiff falling.
*457Given the possibility that the jury could find that the destroyed recordings would have supported plaintiffs claim of a hazardous condition on the floor that was present long enough to give defendant notice of it, I would deny defendant’s motion for summary judgment dismissing the complaint. The evidence defendant relied on to establish that there was no hazardous condition on the area of the floor on which plaintiff slipped did not establish as a matter of law a lack of a hazard or a lack of notice.