New York asks federal court to dismiss Mott's lawsuit

The New York Attorney General has asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the trainer Bill Mott, arguing that Mott can resolve his case through state courts and administrative proceedings without federal interference.

The state’s motion to dismiss, filed on Friday, is the latest filing in a case that has become more and more convoluted as the opposing sides dig in their heels. Filed in April earlier this year, Mott’s federal lawsuit – the suit the state is asking to be dismissed – had asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York to throw out a 15-day suspension the state gambling commission had issued against him earlier this year. Mott has appealed the suspension and received a stay while he pursues his appeal.

The case revolves around Mott’s contention that a blood sample taken from a horse that tested for illegal concentrations of two therapeutic medications did not contain enough residue to allow for a split sample to be tested. Though nearly every racing jurisdiction in the U.S. requires that regulators draw enough blood for a split sample, New York does not have such a rule, at least where blood is concerned.

Mott’s attorney, Drew Mollica, has argued that the absence of the split sample represents a de facto violation of due process, while the state has argued that licensees charged with drug violations are given ample opportunity to defend themselves without the existence of the split sample. The state repeated that argument in its Friday motion to dismiss; Mollica repeated his own arguments in a response to the motion also filed on Friday.

The state’s motion to dismiss was written by Ralph Pernick, an assistant attorney general for the New York Attorney General’s office.

In his response, Mollica argued that the state has known about complaints arising from its lack of a split-sample requirement for 20 years and has refused to amend the regulations because of the advantage it confers in prosecuting medication violations. Mollica’s response includes an affidavit from the trainer Richard Violette, the president of the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association since 2007, claiming that horsemen had been “repeatedly and uniformly rebuffed” by New York’s regulators when asking for the split-sample rule to be aligned with other states.

“[B]y ensuring absence of meaningful referee analysis, the state has insulated [New York’s drug-testing laboratory] from meaningful scientific inquiry,” Mollica wrote in his response. “The one tool that the commission has refused to give to Mr. Mott and consistently refused to provide others, is meaningful referee testing via a sufficient blood residual or split sampling at the time of specimen collection. This will be chalked up to lab error, good faith mistake, or something other than what it is, bad faith and a clear violation of due process.”