Judge Dismisses Incomprehensible, Pointless Pile of Papers

I guess that headline could apply to dozens or even hundreds of cases I’ve mentioned over the years, so I probably should have included quotation marks:

When is the incomprehensible motion for reconsideration due?

This comes from the Twitter feed of Detroit News reporter Robert Snell, who posted it this morning with the simple comment, “Ouch.”

And while no one would like having their lawsuit described as a “pile of papers,” in this case it seems to have been literally true, according to Snell:

Snell redacted the case number and the petitioner’s identifying information, and I can think of a couple of good reasons for doing that, which is why I haven’t looked harder to find the original. Based on the excerpts of the text that he did post, it seems likely that this is another “sovereign citizen” at work, though it could be a more generic kind of nut job.

As you likely know, sovereign citizens generally ascribe an almost magical significance to punctuation, as this person seems to, and claim the federal government is an illegitimate criminal enterprise. (Not saying I entirely disagree with that, but they should at least leave the Post Office out of it.) These people also generally contend that the law does not apply to them unless they specifically consent, that they are only subject to jurisdiction in special courts, that they don’t need to pay taxes, and they can create their very own currency and financial documents, just to name a few of their greatest hits.

On the other hand, at least one of them has apparently qualified for a Discover card, although that doesn’t seem to have impressed Judge Friedman.

See also, e.g., “The Cause of Action is Denied as Unintelligible” (Mar. 13, 2015), and of course the justly famous Order Denying Motion for Incomprehensibility, (W.D. Tex. Feb. 21, 2006).

        

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How to Avoid Jury Duty, #12: Be the Judge in That Case

Well, this category of posts needs some serious reorganization, which is something I just realized I’ve been promising to do since 2007 and yet none should doubt the continuing seriousness of my commitment to doing just that.

Part of the problem, I now recall, was that I liked some of the existing headlines I had come up with for the candidate posts and so was reluctant to change them. See, e.g., “I Pity the Fool Who Does Not Strike Mr. T From the Jury” (Apr. 29, 2009); “Just Couldn’t Take the Boredom, Says Juror Who Went Home” (May 27, 2009); and “Dog-Scrotum Observation Preferable to Jury Service, Declares Citizen” (May 1, 2009). But I also like the numbered format. See, e.g. “How to Avoid Jury Duty, #9: Leave Your Vote With the Foreman and Go to Cancún” (Aug. 28, 2012). So, that dilemma remains.

For now, let’s keep this as #12 in this occasional and quite poorly numbered series.

Like all other citizens (including presidents), judges are generally eligible for jury duty unless some statute exempts them. But as you might expect, there are many statutes of that kind, at least in the United States. Under federal law, for example, the names of judges and other state or federal public officers don’t go into the hopper at all, so long as they are “actively engaged in the performance of official duties.” Some states have similar laws, although some do not. So judges do sometimes have to report for jury duty just like everyone else. This is not to say they will actually be chosen to serve, something that is probably very rare just because most lawyers probably don’t want other lawyers—much less judges—on a jury panel.

Just FYI for lawyers, if you can honestly say, and also somehow manage to bring up during voir dire, that one of the tasks you regularly perform is drafting and arguing about jury instructions, you are likely to be excused almost immediately. I didn’t do this intentionally, you understand, I was just describing what I do, and I’m just telling you what happened.

Anyway, judges.

They may be summoned but will very rarely be chosen to serve. It must be extremely rare, however, for a judge to be summoned for jury duty in a case over which he or she will be presiding. But that happened in the UK not long ago—and the judge then had trouble getting out of it.

In England and Wales, at least, judges are not exempt from jury duty (only diplomats are). So Judge Keith Cutler presumably wasn’t too surprised to get a summons. But he did notice that the case involved was one over which he personally would be presiding. And yet he still had some trouble getting himself excused, according to The Guardian:

Cutler, the resident judge of Winchester and Salisbury since 2009, told a jury [during voir dire in a different case] he had to make several attempts before he managed to excuse himself from his public duty….

“I was selected for jury service here at Salisbury crown court for a trial starting 23 April,” he said. “I told the jury central summoning bureau that I thought I would be inappropriate, seeing I happened to be the judge and knew all the papers.”

“They wrote back to me. They picked up on the fact I was the judge but said ‘Your appeal for refusal has been rejected but you could apply to the resident judge’, but I told them, ‘I am the resident judge.’ I had to phone them up and they [eventually] realised it was a mistake.”

Emphasis added.

Judge Cutler said he would have been happy to serve on the jury had the circumstances been different. I would say the same. Although, to be completely honest, this is something that’s easy to say for someone who’s legally or as a practical matter exempt from serving on a jury. Not because such a person would want to be excused, you understand. I’m just telling you what could happen.

        

 

 

Assorted Stupidity #123

 

• A comedian with no political experience who stars in a sitcom in which he plays someone with no political experience who is elected president of Ukraine was elected president of Ukraine on Sunday. He got 73 percent of the vote, in fact, according to exit polls.

• How do leaders who had popular TV shows but no political experience fare against Vladimir Putin? I guess we’ll find out!

• Grease thefts are a “gigantic problem” in this country, according to the lawyer for a company that gets paid to dispose of grease. He was responding to a report that on April 4, police in Annandale, Virginia, caught a guy in the process of stealing hundreds of gallons of the stuff, for which he said he got paid 25 cents a gallon by the head of the grease-stealing ring. (It can apparently be recycled into bio-fuel.) The lawyer told ABC7 News he’s “seen several hundred grease thefts” in the northern Virginia area alone, although he probably didn’t mean that literally.

• Olivia Jade Gianulli, who is a “product influencer” on Instagram and the daughter of Lori Laughlin, who allegedly paid half a million dollars to make sure her product-influencing daughter could get into USC, had a trademark application rejected last month partly because of improper punctuation. The problem involved those pesky commas and semicolons, according to the examiner. To be fair, Olivia Jade almost certainly didn’t do her own work on the trademark application, either.

• Speaking of product influencers, people keep saying that Kim Kardashian is planning on becoming a lawyer, as she told Vogue magazine in a recent interview. She’s not going to law school, but says she’s doing a four-year apprenticeship with a San Francisco firm, after which she would take the bar in 2022. You don’t have to have a law degree to take the California bar, or even a college degree, which is good because she doesn’t have one of those either. But almost no one who doesn’t have those things passes. Will she be one of the extremely tiny percentage who does? “The reading is what really gets me. It’s so time-consuming,” she told Vogue, so no.

• Brevard County, Florida, was within an hour of being destroyed by an army of turtles recently, according to the man who claimed to be their leader. Local media reported that the man was arrested a couple of weeks ago for disturbing the peace after citizens called to say he was making threats and yelling obscenities. The man, who called himself “the saint,” told citizens and then police that his “turtle army” would “destroy them” within the hour for unspecified transgressions. “Leave now,” he told police, “or you will all be sorry you f***ed with the saint!” The turtle army has apparently been delayed, but you can probably expect it about the same time Kim Kardashian passes the California bar.

• As Matt Levine pointed out (writing for Bloomberg, citing this Law360 report), you should not destroy evidence, but if you do, you shouldn’t do it in a way that others might find amusing. And if you do destroy evidence in a way that others might find amusing, you shouldn’t tell anyone about it. Because they might later testify that you, for example, claimed to have thrown a cellphone off the side of a mountain during a ski trip in order to destroy the evidence it contained, and internet jokesters who find that amusing would make sure others knew about it.

• That was just one of several bizarre revelations during the Insys Therapeutics trial, in which several executives are charged with allegedly bribing doctors to prescribe opioids. (A former VP’s appearance in a music video that sales reps made about “getting patients on the highest dose possible” was another one, so that’s another lesson right there.) After 10 weeks of testimony, jury deliberations are set to begin Monday.

        

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Third Man Beaten With Own Leg by Leg-Wielding Girlfriend

Based on my data—and I’m fairly confident I have the most comprehensive data available on cases in which a man has been beaten with his own prosthetic leg by an angry girlfriend—this happens approximately once every seven years.

This phenomenon first came to my attention way back in 2005, when it happened in Michigan. See “Man Beaten With Own Leg by Leg-Wielding Girlfriend” (Aug. 17, 2005). I was then, as I am today, sensitive to the fact that despite the alignment of the parties, this sort of thing is still domestic violence, something that is not funny except in extremely limited circumstances. In that case, I listed one of the required criteria as “the leg is a spare one, so he can still flee and thus avoid serious injury.” As you will see, I later decided that one isn’t absolutely required, but the circumstances are still pretty limited.

Almost exactly seven years later, a second case occurred in Florida. See “Second Man Beaten With Own Leg by Leg-Wielding Girlfriend” (Sept. 12, 2012). In that one, the gentleman’s ex-girlfriend (still counts) showed up at his home demanding custody of their two-year-old son, of whom he likely had custody because she was a convicted felon. And she plainly had not become less felonious since their relationship ended. She grabbed the boy out of a window and put him in her car, and when the man leapt into the back seat to recover the child, he unwisely left his legs sticking out of the door. This allowed his ex to seize the weapon thus presented and commence beating him with it.

He really should have known better, because as he told reporters, this was not the first time she had beaten him with his own leg. “Probably two or three times she’s done it,” he said. “Just a way to get the upper hand,” he continued, apparently in all seriousness.

Unlike the previous victim, this gentleman managed to recover his leg from the assailant, but she then escalated the matter significantly by producing a shotgun. Consistent with the criteria mentioned above, the humorous part of the incident ends at that point. But happily, no one was seriously injured, and police quickly located and returned the boy.

The most recent incident is a few months ahead of schedule, which I’m going to attribute to global warming rather than some flaw in my seven-year-cycle theory.

This one takes us to Louisiana, where last week a 58-year-old woman was charged with aggravated battery of a boyfriend with the boyfriend’s prosthetic leg, or maybe those are the aggravating circumstances rather than a definition of the offense. According to the report, the two had been engaged in an “off-and-on” relationship for several years, and it appeared to be “on” for the evening of February 11. The couple went to the woman’s home, where they began drinking gin. At some point, police said, the man told her that he wanted to end their relationship and date another woman. He then decided—and this decision can only be explained by gin—to go to sleep in a bedroom of the home belonging to the angry, intoxicated woman with whom he had just broken up, presumably after removing a roughly club-shaped prosthetic appendage and leaving it next to the bed where someone who came in to glare at his unconscious form could easily see it.

Did he later wake up with injuries? Yes he did. But he woke up, which to be honest is probably more than a man who has made such a poor decision has any right to expect.

I was a little concerned for my seven-year theory upon finding this article, in which the author lists 10 other incidents between 1998 and 2014 in which prosthetic limbs had been used as weapons. But after reviewing them, I was relieved to find that none of them meet my criteria. In fact, most of them involved someone using his or her own prosthetic limb as a weapon, or at least trying to. And while one of the incidents sounds pretty funny—at least if you think a drunken Scottish woman angrily swinging her artificial leg around in the cabin of a plane after the crew refused to give her a parachute is funny, and I do—that’s still a different category.

We will discuss this subject again in 2026, assuming I am still the official chronicler of such incidents at that time.

        

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Plaintiff Alleges Boss Insisted He Get an Exorcism

If you’re traveling through eastern Kentucky, and are worried about demons, you might consider staying at the Hampton Inn in Perry County. According to a recent lawsuit, the management there tries hard to keep the place demon-free.

In the complaint, at which you can marvel here, Jason Fields alleges that he started working at Hampton Inn as a front-desk employee in June 2016, but quickly ran into issues with his manager. When she discovered he was going through a divorce, she explained to him that “the reason for his marital problems was that he had demons.” (Because she used the plural I assume she wasn’t talking about his wife.) And having determined that he had demons, she allegedly began to insist that if he wanted to continue working for her, he would need to be “cleansed.”

The complaint doesn’t explain exactly what this procedure would entail, but it says the manager told Fields it was “similar to an exorcism.” She had personal knowledge of this, she said, because “she had been cleansed three or four times,” according to the complaint. (It didn’t say what for.)

The manager also gave Fields a packet that contained one page of instructions, a two-page “release and indemnity agreement,” and a nine-page questionnaire that he was to fill out and return to her. It isn’t clear whether this was an official part of the cleansorcism itself or something the manager had put together on her own, but I am pretty sure it’s not part of the standard Hampton Inn employment packet. Not only did it ask Fields about his religious beliefs, which is not at all okay in an employment setting, it got real weird real fast:

h) Were you a planned child?
i) Were you conceived out of wedlock?
j) Have you personally ever had psychiatric counseling?
k) Have you, your parents or grandparents been in any cults?
l) Have you ever made a pact with the devil?
m) Have you ever been involved in Eastern religion?
n) Have you ever visited heathen temples?
o) Do you have any witches, such as “good luck kitchen witches,” in your home?

Obviously these are ridiculous questions, because who doesn’t have a few good luck kitchen witches running around the house? But it continued to get weirder, veering off after this into questions apparently designed to ferret out what the manager considers sexual deviance (or the demons that cause it). You can read those for yourself, but I’ll just mention two reasons those questions are problematic: (1) she didn’t define what she meant by “frequently,” and (2) the answer to the question “was their [sic] evidence of lust in your family line” is always going to be “yes,” since that’s how you get a family line started in the first place. That’s my understanding, at least.

The questions are problematic for other reasons too, I suppose.

Fields alleges that he ultimately did fill out the questionnaire, but then decided not to hand it over to her because the questions, or rather the answers, were quite personal. He also did not agree to be “cleansed.” He alleges that after this, the manager threatened to fire him and took adverse employment actions like changing his shift and not allowing him to take vacation. He’s suing for religious discrimination, constructive discharge, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, although Kentucky calls that last one the “tort of outrage,” which is way better.

A representative for Hampton Inn said the company was aware of the lawsuit and was looking into the allegations, which I assume does not mean they’re trying to find out just how many witches the plaintiff might have been keeping at home.

        

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