In Denis v. Home Depot, U.S.A., the Eastern District of New York recently permitted plaintiff to amend his complaint to add a claim for punitive damages. Plaintiff alleged that he sustained personal injuries resulting from a false arrest at a Nanuet, NY Home Depot store for attempted shoplifting.
Here are the pertinent facts, as summarized by the court:
On February 13, 2009, the Plaintiff was shopping at Home Depot and was allegedly observed by Home Depot Asset Manager Hau Tran (“Tran”) speaking with other customers who were putting items into a white vanity cabinet box in order to avoid paying for those items, a process known as “box stuffing.” The Plaintiff alleges that he went to the store to purchase tools for a construction project and did not purchase a white vanity box or speak with any other customers while at the Home Depot.After allegedly observing the Plaintiff engage in “box stuffing,” Tran contacted the police to report the Plaintiff. In the interim, the Plaintiff purchased tools for which he received a receipt and left the store. After exiting the store, the Plaintiff was met by police officers and Tran. After Tran identified the Plaintiff as a participant in the alleged larceny, the Plaintiff[] was arrested.
Here, in determining that plaintiff demonstrated “good cause” for granting leave to amend his complaint, the court reasoned:
[A] party fails to show good cause when the proposed amendment rests on information that the party knew, or should have known, in advance of the deadline.
Here, the Plaintiff’s proposed punitive damages claim is based, in part, on Tran’s alleged failure to follow the Defendant’s operating procedures for dealing with suspected shop lifters. These policies, which the Plaintiff represents consisted of “hundreds of pages” of documents, were not produced until April 1, 2014.
[A] delay of three months is reasonable under these circumstances, especially where, as here, the Defendant belatedly produced supplemental responses and hundreds of pages of documents in response to the Plaintiff’s discovery requests.
Next, the court found that defendant failed to demonstrate prejudice resulting from the amendment, reasoning that:
Although the Plaintiff’s proposed amendment relies on new documents recently produced by the Defendant, the proposed amended complaint does not rely on new witnesses and is largely derivative of the original complaint. Therefore, the addition of punitive damages as a remedy will not require the Defendant to expend a significant amount of addition resources in discovery or preparing for trial.
Finally, the court rejected defendant’s argument that the amendment would be “futile”. “Under New York law, [p]unitive damages are permitted when the defendant’s wrongdoing is not simply intentional but evince[s] a high degree of moral turpitude and demonstrate[s] such wanton dishonesty as to imply a criminal indifference to civil obligations.” Since “[p]unitive damages are not a separate cause of action,” the court found the defendant’s futility argument to be “procedurally premature.”