A Superior Court judge dismissed a civil complaint that challenged the Boston Municipal Court’s denial of the complainant’s applications for criminal complaints. The complainant then filed a mandamus petition seeking reversal of that dismissal and also challenged the judge’s refusal to recuse himself.
The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the single justice’s denial of the mandamus petition. Mandamus and certiorari are not proper substitutes for ordinary appellate procedure when an adequate alternative remedy exists. Here, the complainant had a plainly adequate remedy: an appeal to the Appeals Court from the Superior Court’s dismissal. The complainant could also have raised the recusal claim on that same appeal.
The decision reaffirms the well-settled principle that extraordinary writs are inappropriate when a party can pursue a direct appeal.
The full text of the opinion follows below. Slip opinions are subject to formal revision; the official version is published in the official reports.
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SJC-12190
KYL V. MYRICK vs. SUPERIOR COURT DEPARTMENT.[1]
April 18, 2018.
Mandamus. Practice, Civil, Action in nature of mandamus. Supreme Judicial Court, Superintendence of inferior courts.
Kyl V. Myrick appeals from a judgment of a single justice of this court denying his petition for relief in the nature of mandamus. Myrick’s petition sought the reversal of a Superior Court judgment dismissing a civil complaint that he had filed in that court. That complaint concerned the denial of his applications for criminal complaints in the Boston Municipal Court Department. In his petition to the single justice, Myrick also challenged the Superior Court judge’s declining to recuse himself from the matter. The single justice correctly denied both the petition and Myrick’s subsequent request for reconsideration.
“It would be hard to find any principle more fully established in our practice than the principle that neither mandamus nor certiorari is to be used as a substitute for ordinary appellate procedure or used at any time when there is another adequate remedy.” Rines v. Justices of the Superior Court, 330 Mass. 368, 371 (1953). See, e.g., Ardon v. Committee for Pub. Counsel Servs., 464 Mass. 1001 (2012). There was, as the single justice recognized, a plainly adequate alternative remedy for Myrick to pursue after his complaint in the Superior Court was dismissed, namely, an appeal to the Appeals Court from the judgment of the Superior Court dismissing the complaint. See Mass. R. A. P. 4 (a), as amended, 464 Mass. 1601 (2013). As for Myrick’s claim that the Superior Court judge should have recused himself, that claim also could have been raised on appeal to the Appeals Court. See Bloise v. Bloise, 437 Mass. 1010, 1010 (2002), citing Doten v. Plymouth Div. of the Probate & Family Court Dep’t, 395 Mass. 1001, 1001 (1985). See also Ewing v. Commonwealth, 451 Mass. 1005, 1006 (2008).
Judgment affirmed.
Kyl V. Myrick, pro se.
Eric A. Haskell, Assistant Attorney General, for the defendant.
[1] The real party in interest, the defendant named in the complaint filed in the Superior Court Department, was not made a party to these proceedings.