Department of Hous. Preservation & Dev. v. Ieraci

In Department of Hous. Preservation & Dev. v. Ieraci (156 Misc 2d 646 [Civ Ct, Kings County 1992]) the trial court held that the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (DHPD) was barred from seeking contempt based on violations which the Department knew of but did not include in a previous contempt petition which had been dismissed. In the first action, DHPD pleaded 33 violations, all of which were dismissed after trial. In its next effort, DHPD cited 33 "new" violations, which had in fact been known to it at the time of the first proceeding. In denying DHPD a proverbial "second bite of the apple," the trial court observed that (at 653-654), "successive contempt proceedings based on variations in evidence would subvert the efficient administration of justice and undermine both careful assessment of proper penalties and statutory limitations on penalties ... Each violation ... could be brought as a separate proceeding, allowing DHPD to bring successive proceedings until it obtained the result it wanted. Not only is this concept of perpetual trial offensive to a litigant's basic due process rights, it also results in intolerable hardships for an already overburdened Housing Court." Noting that, "In their most narrow and classical definitions, the doctrines of double jeopardy and res judicata would not be applicable to bar the [second contempt] proceeding" the court in Ieraci concluded that "the petitioner would still be barred from pursuing its civil contempt claims under the transactional analysis of the res judicata doctrine now favored in New York" (at 649, 651.) The court in that case explained that " 'In deciding res judicata issues, we have moved to a more pragmatic test, which sees a claim or cause of action as "coterminus with the transaction regardless of the number of substantive theories or variant forms of relief ... available to the plaintiff" ... What "factual grouping" constitutes a "transaction" or "series of transactions" depends on how "the facts are related in time, space, origin, or motivation, whether they form a convenient trial unit, and whether ... their treatment as a unit conforms to the parties' expectations or business understanding or usage" ' " (Ieraci, at 652, citing Restatement [Second] of Judgments [Tent Draft No. 1] 61).