Tony N. Leung
How Judge Leung decides
Patterns drawn from this judge's own signed orders. Every observation links to the order it came from.
Procedural preferences
On prisoner civil suits attacking a still-valid conviction or sentence, Leung applies the Heck v. Humphrey favorable-termination bar at the 1915A screening stage: if a judgment for the plaintiff would necessarily imply the conviction or sentence is invalid, and the plaintiff cannot show it was already invalidated, the complaint is recommended dismissed without reaching the merits -- and he treats claims against federal officials as Bivens (not 1983) claims, then bars them by absolute prosecutorial immunity and the no-Bivens-against-a-federal-agency rule.
“Construed as including civil claims, Spencer's Complaint fails under the doctrine announced in Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994). ... Prosecutors are absolutely immune from civil suits for damages based on actions they take to prosecute a case.”
Leung's R&Rs are reliably adopted: across the five district-judge orders read this pass (authored by four different Article III judges -- Frank, Brasel, Wright, Tostrud), every Leung R&R was adopted or accepted, whether on clear-error review (no objection) or de novo review (objection overruled). This is a high recommendation-to-adoption signal, though N is small.
“Finding no clear error, and based on all the files, records, and proceedings ... The Report and Recommendation [ECF No. 16] is ACCEPTED”
Motion outcomes
Counted from classified signed orders only. Percentages are shown only where the sample is large enough to be meaningful; smaller samples are reported as raw counts.
| Summary judgment N = 1 |
Granted: 1 | counts only |
| Motion to suppress N = 1 |
Denied: 1 | counts only |
| Motions to dismiss N = 1 |
Granted: 1 | counts only |
| Habeas petition N = 1 |
Denied: 1 | counts only |
A "1 of 1" is one ruling, not a tendency. Treat small samples as illustrative, not predictive.
Signed rulings
A grounded sample of orders signed by this judge, with the verbatim dispositive language.
“Defendants' Motion for Summary Judgment (Doc. No. [95]) is GRANTED.”
“Shawn Ray Brtek's Motion to Suppress Tangible Evidence & Statements Due to Fourth Amendment Violations (Doc. No. [33]) is DENIED.”
“Defendant Daniel Basile's motion to dismiss, (Dkt. 29), is GRANTED.”
“Petitioner's Petition for a Writ of Habeas Corpus under 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2241 [ECF No. 1] is DENIED; and 3. The action is DISMISSED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.”
Document read is District Judge Nancy E. Brasel's Order accepting Magistrate Judge Leung's December 22, 2020 R&R (ECF 8). This is a 28 U.S.C. 1915A prisoner-complaint screening dismissal -- NOT a ruling on a party motion -- so it is recorded as order_type=screening, motions=[], excluded_from_stats=true. The plaintiff (a federal prisoner) objected; Brasel conducted de novo review and ACCEPTED the R&R, dismissing the complaint without prejudice. Reasoning worth capturing: Leung (and Brasel) held the civil claims barred by Heck v. Humphrey (a judgment for the plaintiff would imply his conviction/sentence were invalid), alternatively barred by absolute prosecutorial immunity and the rule that a Bivens claim cannot run against a federal agency; and any habeas theory was barred because his 28 U.S.C. 2255 motion had already been denied by the sentencing court. Counts as an order read, not toward motion stats.
Caseload & timing
From public federal docket records for this judge.
Leung-assigned consent dockets confirmed via search_dockets (sampled 2026-06-03, not exhaustive): consumer-credit/FDCPA matters (Broberg v. Debt Arbitrators 480; Hupperts v. APOGEE Retail 480, a class settlement). His far larger referral workload (captioned -TNL under a district judge) spans criminal suppression (US v. Brtek), prisoner/Bivens screening (Spencer v. DOJ), 2241 habeas (Gallegos v. Rardin), civil-rights MSJ (Benson v. Piper), and pro se civil dismissals (Gregg v. Basile) -- all surfaced in the GovInfo reasoning layer. Not exhaustive; durations not tabulated this thin pass.