Hoffer v. Tellone
- Court
- Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (Federal circuit court)
- Decided
- 2025
- Citation
- 128 F.4th 433 (2d Cir. 2025)
- Standard applied
- FRCP 37(e)(2) — burden of proof on intent to deprive
What the court held
To impose sanctions under Rule 37(e)(2) a court or jury must find by a preponderance of the evidence that a party acted with intent to deprive another party of the lost information. The lesser “culpable state of mind” standard of Residential Funding, which encompassed negligence, does not apply to Rule 37(e)(2) sanctions. Applying that standard, the denial of an adverse-inference instruction over a missing video of a taser deployment was affirmed.
Why
The court resolved a dispute the parties had framed directly: what quantum of proof governs a request for an adverse-inference instruction after the 2015 amendment. It held the amended rule displaced the circuit's earlier negligence-based standard for the severe measures in subdivision (e)(2), and then found no error in the district court's refusal to instruct the jury on an adverse inference on this record.
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
This is the cleanest recent statement of how much the 2015 amendment changed practice in the circuit that had been most favourable to spoliation movants: Residential Funding no longer supplies the standard for the severest measures. Practitioners citing pre-2015 Second Circuit spoliation authority should check whether the proposition survives. The case is also a reminder that missing police video is analysed under the same rule as missing corporate e-mail.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: Rule 37(e)(2) · preponderance · adverse inference · body-worn video
Cited 26times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
Other decisions on spoliation & sanctions
- Pegasus Aviation I, Inc. v. Varig Logistica S.A.New York Court of Appeals · 2015A party's failure to institute a litigation hold is not gross negligence per se; it is one factor among many in assessing the spoliator's culpable state of mind…
- Victor Stanley, Inc. v. Creative Pipe, Inc.District Court, D. Maryland · 2010After finding a sustained pattern of deletion, use of wiping software, and failure to preserve devices, the court granted the sanctions motion in part: it recom…
- Brookshire Brothers, Ltd. v. AldridgeTexas Supreme Court · 2014A spoliation analysis is a two-step judicial process: the trial court decides as a question of law whether a party spoliated evidence, and if so assesses an app…
- Rimkus Consulting Group, Inc. v. CammarataDistrict Court, S.D. Texas · 2010The court granted the sanctions motion in part: the jury would hear evidence of the defendants' deletion of e-mails and attachments and of their inconsistent te…
- Barbera v. Pearson Education, Inc.Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit · 2018Where an employer lost a key e-mail exchange, the magistrate judge cured the prejudice by barring the employer from disputing the plaintiff's description of the…
- Goodman v. Praxair Services, Inc.District Court, D. Maryland · 2009The court found a breach of the duty to preserve relevant e-mail and documents and imposed a permissive adverse-inference instruction — one allowing but not req…
Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.