Cool Judicial Expressions

COOL JUDICIAL EXPRESSIONS

Let’s face it. Most court opinions are dull, unimaginative and pedantic. However, once in awhile you can find wonderful exceptions. In doing research for one of our police liability cases, I came an opinion written by the literate, colloquial and brilliant federal appeals judge, Richard Posner, that I thought was “way too cool” to ignore. The case, Gladney v. Pendleton Corr. Facility, 302 F. 3d 773 (7th Cir. 2002) involved the dismissal of a prisoner’s suit pursuant to the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which allows judges to dismiss “frivolous” claims. Judge Posner described the applicable law as follows:

Usually [prisoner] suits are dismissed as frivolous because
there is absolutely no legal basis for the plaintiff’s claim.
Sometimes, however, a suit is dismissed because the facts
alleged in the complaint are so nutty (“delusional” is the
polite word) that they’re unbelievable, even though there
has been no evidentiary hearing to determine their truth or
falsity.

Id. at 774.

In Gladney the prisoner plaintiff alleged that he had been drugged and raped while in three different prisoners and that “he slept through all these outrages and only discovered what had happened when one day he noticed a needle mark under his lip.” He further claimed that prison medical personnel told him that they did not see the mark “because they were trying to make him think that he was delusional”. Id. Judge Posner noted that these “are copycat allegations” from an earlier United States Supreme Court case.

Judge Posner was not writing on a clean slate in Gladney. Two years earlier he wrote the opinion in Lee v. Clinton , 209 F. 3d 1025 (7th Cir. 2000) where the prisoner plaintiff filed two “insane” complaints charging the United States and China with to a conspiracy to “bio-chemically and bio-technologically infect and invade various people with a mind reading and mental torture device” called “Mind Accessing and Torturing via Remote Energy Transferring (MATRET). Mr. Lee went on to claim that he had invented a number of space technologies, “oddly including an email system and nanny services” that will allow MATRET victims to relocate to MATRET-free planets. Not surprisingly the lower court had dismissed Mr. Lee’s suit as frivolous and Mr. Lee filed an appeal of the dismissal of his frivolous suit.

The technical legal issue, and there is always a technical legal issue in prisoner litigation, was what was the proper legal standard of review on the appeal of a suit that had been dismissed as frivolous but was technically made in “good faith” because the plaintiff was too loopy to be acting in “bad faith”, or as Judge Posner wrote:

The district court thought that because Lee does not appear
to be faking madness, … ala Hamlet, there was no ground
for supposing him to be acting in subjective bad faith in filing
his fantastic lawsuits.

Id. at 1026.

Judge Posner then engaged in several paragraphs of detailed statutory analysis that only appellate judges would find stimulating. However, he finally reached the following pithy and logical conclusion:

There is no reason why obviously frivolous appeals such as
Lee’s, appeals bound to dismisses as soon as the appellate
judges get hold of them, should have been authorized by
the district judge just because the appellant is a lunatic in
the literal sense of the word.

Judge Posner had a stylistically kindred spirit in former New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Robert Clifford who once complained about the majority’s “analytically-convenient but factually-hokum assertion to the contrary….” Salem Group v. Oliver, 128 N.J. 1, 9 (1992)(dissent). Now that’s telling ‘em what you really think! By the way, who even knows how to spell “hokum” much less use it?

So there you have it. Judicial opinions sparkling with common sense and common parlance that reach reasonable conclusions. Would we only have more of these to brighten our usually appallingly dull research efforts.

-Tom Barron

***The information included in this newsletter is not, nor is it intended to be, legal advice. You should consult an attorney for advice regarding your individual situation. We invite you to contact us and welcome your calls, letters and electronic mail. Contacting us does not create an attorney-client relationship. Please do not send any confidential information to us until such time as an attorney-client relationship has been established.