Opinion
No. 02 C 1160
May 14, 2002
MEMORANDUM ORDER
Chicago Park District ("District") has filed its Answer and Affirmative Defenses ("ADS") to the Amended Complaint ("AC") filed by Johanna Santiago ("Santiago") against District and three of its employees, including Leo Pulido ("Pulido"). This memorandum order is issued sua sponte to require the correction of some obvious flaws in that responsive pleading.
To begin with, it is always distressing when any lawyer fails to adhere to clearly-marked-out pleading requirements — and even though this reaction may not have any basis in logic, any such failures on the part of government lawyers are particularly distressing. In this instance, despite the plain and precise teaching of the second sentence of Fed.R.Civ.P. ("Rule") 8(b) as to what a pleader must state to become entitled to the benefit of a deemed denial, District's responsive pleading is instead shot through (Answer ¶¶ 5, 9, 15, 20, 21, 26-29, 46-48 and 57-62) with statements that District "is without sufficient information or belief" as to the corresponding allegations of Santiago's AC. All such assertions are stricken, but without prejudice to District's opportunity to replead in those respects.
When phrased in that way, the response implicitly poses the question "sufficient for what?"
This Court is also troubled by what appears to be District's cavalier use of outright denials of many of Santiago's allegations. For example. AC ¶¶ 1 and 23 set out in extraordinarily graphic detail (replete with particularized allegations and dates) the asserted conduct of Pulido in allegedly hitting on Santiago in an appalling way. Does District reallyknow that those charges are untrue, so that it can flat out deny them in good conscience, or is it rather opting to believe Pulido in a situation in which only the two protagonists know the real facts? And the same type of question may be posed as to the unvarnished denials of a great many of Santiago's other allegations. As long as District's counsel must return to the drawing board in any event, she should give careful consideration to each responsive paragraph to avoid the rote repetition of outright denials where they are inappropriate.
Finally, each of District's three ADs is problematic and must be either recast or dropped. After all, it is really meaningless to say that a plaintiff may not recover "to the extent" that some defect may exist, without in any way identifying how that hypothetical possibility relates to the case at hand. That goes for AD 1 (which speaks in hypothetical terms "to the extent plaintiff did not mitigate her damages"), AD 2 (which is equally hypothetical, speaking in terms of "to the extent plaintiff's claims fail to state a claim upon which relief may be granted") and AD 3 (which also speaks in hypothetical terms "to the extent that Plaintiff did not file her claims within the limitations period"). All three present ADs are therefore stricken, and if District chooses to reassert any AD it must do so in a manner that provides Santiago (and this Court) with real notice of the actual basis for any Rule 8(c) defense.
To avoid a patchwork pleading that would require resort to more than one responsive pleading to see what is being placed at issue and what is not, the entire present Answer and ADs are stricken. Leave is granted to District to file a self-contained amended Answer (including any appropriate ADs) in this Court's chambers, with a copy of course being transmitted to Santiago's counsel, on or before May 24, 2002.