# Appendix — Mann v. Brown > Briefs, arguments, decisions, and more. URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/documents/brief%3Amicro_IA40386009_0878%3A2 ## Record - **Collection:** Supreme Court brief - **Document type:** Appendix - **Published:** January 1, 2002 - **Citation:** 534 U.S. 1131 ## Text IN THE OF SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES OCTOBER TERM, 2001 BEVERLY B. MANN, Petitioner, Vv. DOROTHY BROWN, AS CLERK OF THE CIRCUIT COURT OF COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS, AND COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS, Respondents. APPENDIX TO PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT Beverly B. Mann Petitioner Pro Se 7261 North Campbell Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60645 (773) 465-4587 i PLEASE NOTE: A few of the items below are identified in the Petition as different appendices than they actually are; e.g., three documents are identified in the Petition as App. G, but only one of them actually appears as App. G. (The other two appear respectively as Apps. X and Y.) Also, many of the documents below, while referenced in the Petition, are not identified in the Petition as appearing in the appendix. This is because Petitioner planned initially to appeal only from the Sept. 19 and Oct. 16 orders and not from the portion of the Aug. 31 order that became final on that date, preferring instead to invoke Illinois’ “savings” statute and refile the case in state court. She will do that shortly but decided only very recently to appeal to this Court from the final portions of the Aug. 31 order also. Thus to file it by (on) the deadline, she filed it without refining, proofreading and editing it. This also is why she bound only the August 31 order and her response to the “show cause” portion with her Petition; she couldn’t compile and reformat the remainder in time to include them. INDEX TO APPENDICES Document: Appendix: Order, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Ps IE tdvnedoderscvenracdacdaiiinddinionten seen App. A Order, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, PR FEO Fak sadtvepischdstantcuticaciuuisececeies App. A(a) Order, Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, in Beverly Mann v. The Upjohn Co, entered by Circuit Judge Susan Zwick, Nov. 20, 1998 ...... App. A(b) li Document: Appendix Order, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, WON TB j BOGE ive deccresssctincchnacassene eters App. B Order, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, UE BE OE wc dniseis décisvccvsdévesdedensecetiaviiveiion App. C United States District Court Judgment, Hon. Harry D. Leinenweber, Oct. 19, 2001........... App. D (Corrected) Response to Rule to Show Cause, Beverly B. Mann, Sept. 19, 2001................... ...App. E United States District Court Memorandum Opinion and Order, Hon. Harry D. Leinenweber, RES DO evi Gini bade App. F Four-Page Excerpt of Petition to the Illinois Supreme Court in Mann v. The Upjohn Company, filed Sept. 18, 2001.............02secececeees App. G (Corrected) Motion for Stay of Issuance of Mandate so as to Enable the Filing of, and Ruling Upon, a Motion for Rehearing (and Rehearing en banc) re: September 19, 2001 Sanctions Order, Shed Dent. ZO, DOO sa ic detidcnvcssiensiaiseeneiens akin App. H Emergency Motion for Clarification Concerning The Motion to Stay Issuance of Mandate and, Alternatively, Motion to Recall the Mandate, FIO COE, FB k.cecskaeccccdnsrssegvaesiterccaiensans App. I Article by Beverly Mann Published in December 8, 1994, edition of the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, referenced in the Petition in a footnote on p. 22....App. J ili Document: Appendix: Order, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Circuit Judge Frank H. Easterbrook, rs re reich as cebuieebeebesddoredesvescese App. K Unpublished Article by Beverly Mann, Motion Pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 60(b)(5) and (6) to Vacate the Final Judgments Entered in [Mann v. City of Chicago, et al., 84 C 110200] on Feb. 10, Pe EE Be CO inccsacescsecvecseoety secon App. M Designation of District Judge for Service in Another District Within His Circuit, issued in Mann vy. City of Chicago, et al., 84 C 110200, by Frank H. Easterbrook, Acting Chief Judge, Seventh Circuit, Jan. 25, 2001 ............... cece eee App. N United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Order of the Executive Committee, issued Feb. 21, 2001 in Mann v. City of Chicago, I, A Sua kc cde edddeve veer eovedeeve App. O Note of Beverly Mann memorializing conversa- tions re: Apps. N and O, Mar. 1, 2001.......... App. O(a) United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Order of the Executive Committee, issued Mar. 12, 2001 in Mann v. City of Chicago, an 6 ON eg cca ian akicn tuculicevdebecawetnes App. P Note of Beverly Mann memorializing conversa- tions re: App. P, Mar. 23, 2001...............00 App. P(a) iV Document: Appendix: Article by Michael Sneed, Chicago Sun-Times, POY, DA, Deer vaciacsWidledinevétoinkdintvtieneses App. Q Motion Pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 291 and the Guidelines for the Intercircuit Judicial Assignment for Certificate of Necessity of Assignment to an Intercircuit Visiting Judge, filed by Beverly Mann in Mann vy. City of Chicago, et al., 84 C 11020, Jun. 5, 2001...... App. R Order of Acting Chief Circuit Judge Frank H. Easterbrook re: Motion Pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 291 and the Guidelines for the Intercircuit Judicial Assignment for Certificate of Necessity of Assignment to an Intercircuit Visiting Judge, filed by Beverly Mann in Mann v. City of Chicago, et al., 84 C 11020, CN sivccadesveddocstisveniauseiairedabunnees App. R(a) Response of Beverly Mann to dismissal of judicial misconduct Complaint re: Circuit Judge Ilana D. Rovner, Nov, 28, 2000...............++- App. S Order, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Circuit Judge Frank H. Easterbrook, OID, DOE nccnknsevesévesssndeesseusecbespexeuians App. T Motion for Assignment to Three-Judge Panel, filed by Beverly Mann in Mann v. Pucinski (i.e., Mann v. Brown), Nos. 99-1750 and DD. SINS, MAN, FF yj Me cacciccctvedeiarcssetionse App. U Unpublished Article by Beverly Mann, ARE. BE esctrivcccsmincntitdimminannie App. V Document: Appendix: Article published in the New York Times, PRE, Wy ee for decevbnsdssnseccvsasvivessecton App. V(a) United States District Court Memorandum Opinion and Order issued in Mann v. City of Chicago, et al., 84 C 11020, Hon. G. Patrick RE, FUR, Wil NEM crabschdcsenecassssiasinsss App. W Petition for Writ of Mandamus and Prohibition filed in Mann v. Pucinski, No. 98-8004, NN its Ii pi cae deen cde a App. X Transcript of District Court Proceedings before Hon. Harry D. Leinenweber in Mann v. Pucinski, No. 98-8004, Sep. 30, 1999.................066. App. Y Response to Notice to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and [Response to Request for Leave to File Rule to Show Cause, filed by Beverly Mann in Mann v. Brown, Nos. 99-1750 and 99-3593, Se Bey ME incidetevesdisindehndseiesccbesies App. Z App. A- 1 2001 U.S. App. LEXIS 19829, * BEVERLY B. MANN, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. DOROTHY BROWN, Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, and COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS, Defendants-Appellees. Nos. 99-1750 & 99-3595 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT 2001 U.S. App. LEXIS 19829 August 15, 2001 *, Submitted * After an examination of the briefs and the records, we have concluded that oral argument is unnecessary, and the appeals are submitted for decision. See Fed. R. App. P. 34(a); Cir. R. 34(f). August 31, 2001, Decided NOTICE: [*1] RULES OF THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS MAY LIMIT CITATION TO UNPUBLISHED OPINIONS. PLEASE REFER TO THE RULES OF THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THIS CIRCUIT. PRIOR HISTORY: Appeals from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 98 C 8004. Harry D. Leinenweber, Judge. DISPOSITION: Appeal No. 99-1750 dismissed as moot. On appeal No. 99-3595, the judgment of the district court vacated, and the case remanded with instructions to abstain. An order ~ App. A - 2 to show cause entered, returnable within 14 days. COUNSEL: BEVERLY B. MANN, Plaintiff - Appellant (99- 1750, 99-3595), Pro se, Chicago, IL USA. For COOK COUNTY, DOROTHY BROWN, Defendants - Appellees (99-1750, 99-3595): Mary D. Mallo, OFFICE OF THE STATE'S ATTORNEY OF COOK COUNTY, Chicago, IL USA. JUDGES: Before Hon. FRANK H. EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge, Hon. DANIEL A. MANION, Circuit Judge, Hon. MICHAEL S. KANNE, Circuit Judge. OPINION: Order This is the culmination of an absurd, and absurdly protracted, effort by a lawyer who filed a tort suit in state court to litigate particular issues in federal court. Beverly Mann filed a products-liability suit against Upjohn Company. After dismissing that suit in [*2] 1992 to avoid the judge's order that she submit to discovery, Mann filed again in 1993, and again failed to provide information in discovery despite judicial orders requiring her to do so. Mann took the position that she alone would decide what information Upjohn received. Ensuing sanctions hampered her ability to present evidence at trial. Mann turned to federal court, asking for an order compelling the state court to grant a continuance. That quest was unavailing. When the case was called for trial in April 1998, Mann, a member of the bar representing herself, refused to proceed. The judge dismissed the suit for want of prosecution, and Mann appealed. Under 705 ILCS 105/27.2a(k)(4) she had to pay a record-preparation fee of $ 150 plus 25 [cents] for each page over 200. This was no more acceptable to Mann than the discovery rulings had been. She was willing to pay $ 150 for preparing the whole record App. A - 3 (which weighed in at over 6,000 pages) but no more. Supreme Court Rule 298 provides for full or partial waiver of the fee for those who are unable to pay it. Mann, who concedes ability to pay, contends only that paying the fee would be a "hardship." Abjuring the means provided by state [*3] law for relief, Mann asked the judge in the state case to declare § 105/27.2a(k)(4) unconstitutional as a violation of the equal protection clause in the fourteenth amendment and as a "hidden tax" in violation of the state's constitution, Art. I § 12 of which provides for access to the courts. This provision reads: "Every person shall find a certain remedy in the laws for all injuries and wrongs which he receives to his person, privacy, property or reputation. He shall obtain justice by law, freely, completely, and promptly." Mann's theory is that the charge exceeds the cost of preparing the record, is deposited in the county treasury, and thus is a "tax" on litigation that abridges the right of access. After the trial judge denied Mann's request for relief, she did not appeal within the state system. Instead she filed a federal suit (No. 98 C 6078) under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, making the same constitutional arguments that had been presented to the state triai judge. This was dismissed under the Rooker- Feldman doctrine after the district judge concluded that it was just a (poorly) disguised attack on the decision of the state trial judge. See Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co., 263 U.S. 413, 68 L. Ed. 362, 44 S. Ct. 149 (1923); [*4] District of Columbia Court of Appeals v. Feldman, 460 U.S. 462, 75 L. Ed. 2d 206, 103 S. Ct. 1303 (1983). Mann's next step was to file an original action in the Supreme Court of Illinois--seeking to invoke not Rule 298 (a request that should have been addressed to the trial or appellate courts) but Supreme Court Rule 381, which deals with challenges to revenue statutes. That court promptly denied Mann's request for leave to commence an original action. Mann also presented a new request to the trial judge in the products-liability case. That App. A-4 judge made it clear that the earlier decision had been, not on the merits, but procedural: The judge viewed Mann's motion as an inappropriate effort to convert the products-liability case into some new constitutional claim. Mann could have appealed that decision within the state's hierarchy but did not. Instead she returned to federal court, first by filing a Rule 60(b) motion in No. 98 C 6078 and, after that failed, by commencing a few federal suit, which was docketed as No. 98 C 8004. (She did not appeal the final decision in No. 98 C 6078.) In this new proceeding--Mann's third federal suit arising out of a single state action--Mann [*5] demanded an injunction, a writ of prohibition, and other relief against the state's implementation of § 105/27.2a(k)(4). This suit could have been dismissed on preclusion grounds; a disappointed litigant must appeal rather than file another suit, even if developments after entry of the first judgment show that the decision was incorrect. See Federated Department Stores, Inc. v. Moitie, 452 U.S. 394, 69 L. Ed. 2d 103, 101 S. Ct. 2424 (1981). But the defendants did not invoke the law of claim preclusion (res judicata). Instead they defended on the merits. The district judge concluded that the state judge's explanation lifted the Rooker-Feldman doctrine. Now, the federal judge believed, Mann was attacking § 105/27.2a(k)(4) itself rather than the state court's decision. (This is a doubtful proposition; Mann's only grievance is the state judicial system's application of § 105/27.2a(k)(4) to her appeal. But just as the Supreme Court avoided the Rooker-Feldman issue in Pennzoil Co. v. Texaco Inc., 481 U.S. 1, 95 L. Ed. 2d 1, 107 S. Ct. 1519 (1987), we need not consider it here.) Nonetheless, this did Mann no good, because the district judge concluded [*6] that she is very unlikely to prevail on the merits and declined to afford interlocutory equitabie relief. 1999 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2804 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 2, 1999). Mann's appeal from this decision has been docketed as No. 99-1750. While that appeal was being briefed, the district court App. A - 5 dismissed Mann's complaint on the merits. 1999 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13426 (N.D. Ill. Aug. 3, 1999). The court ruled that a fee for record preparation in an ordinary civil lawsuit is not subject to the special rules for criminal litigation by indigents, exemplified by cases such as Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U.S. 12, 100 L. Ed. 891, 76 S. Ct. 585 (1956), but is more l*"e the filing fee in bankruptcy, see United States v. Kras, 409 U.S. 434, 34 L. Ed. 2d 626, 93 S. Ct. 631 (1973). The Supreme Court held in Kras that a filing fee for bankruptcy is not unconstitutional even if set so high that some people cannot afford it; and if one can be too poor to go bankrupt, the district judge concluded, there is no possible constitutional objection to a fee in litigation that imposes a "hardship" on one who is | able to pay. Mann's appeal from this decision has [*7] been docketed as No. 99-3595. Meanwhile the state appeal proceeded, and the judgment dismissing the suit has been affirmed. Mann v. Upjohn Co., 2001 Ill. App. LEXIS 531 (1st Dist. June 29, 2001). Either Mann paid the fee under protest or the state court decided to overlook the nonpayment. In neither event is the federal case moot. If Mann paid, she could get the money back if she were to prevail; and if Mann did not pay, the state may dun her for the money, or the lack of payment may impede review by the Supreme Court of Illinois (or future appeals Mann may pursue, for she is a frequent filer). Defendants contend that the district court's judgment on the merits moots appeal No. 99-1750. For her part, Mann insists that the district court lacked jurisdiction to adjudicate the merits while No. 99-1750 was pending. Mann's position is incorrect. Although an appeal usually deprives the district court of jurisdiction to proceed, an appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(a)(1) from the denial of an interlocutory injunction is an exception to that norm. See Thomas v. Board of Education, 607 F.2d 1043 (2d Cir. 1979); Abramson v. University of Hawaii, 594 F.2d 202 (9th Cir. 1979). [*8] So No. 99-1750 no longer matters, and that appeal is dismissed as moot. (Because the final judgment automatically supersedes the App. A - 6 denial of interlocutory relief, it is unnecessary to vacate the earlier decision under United States v. Munsingwear, Inc., 340 US. 36, 95 L. Ed. 36, 71 S. Ct. 104 (1950).) As for No. 99-3595: We decline the parties' request to reach the merits. This case has no business being in federal court and should have been dismissed immediately after its filing. One reason is the Tax Injunction Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1341. Mann characterizes the charge as a "tax," and if that is correct then § ~ 1341 bars any federal interference if a plain and speedy remedy is available in state court. Supreme Court Rule 298 offers one such remedy; asking the state's court of appeals for relief from the charge is another. Mann pursued neither. If, however, the charge is not a "tax" (and it hardly seems like one; Mann does not contend that the congeries of fees charged to litigants, including all filing and record-preparation charges, is a net money-raiser for the state after all expenses of running the judicial system have been accounted for) then [*9] § 1341 does not apply--but much of Mann's substantive argument is sunk. So far as the federal Constitution is concerned, it makes no difference whether fees go into the state (or county) treasury, which then underwrites the judicial system, or instead are deposited into a separate fund under the control of the courts. Whether the fee is a "tax" does not matter in the end, however, because the district court should have abstained. This suit is a replay of Pennzoil, in which Texaco, having suffered a large judgment at trial in a state court, asked a federal court for relief against the bond that state law required as a condition of appeal. Texaco contended that the bond would serve as an absolute bar to appeal under the circumstances, a more grievous injury than the "hardship" of which Mann complains, and the source of a better constitutional argument. See Lindsey v. Normet, 405 U.S. 56, 31 L. Ed. 2d 36, 92 S. Ct. 862 (1972). Still, the Supreme Court held, it would be inappropriate for a federal tribunal to interfere with ongoing state litigation. See, App. A -7 e.g., Younger v. Harris, 401 U.S. 37, 27 L. Ed. 2d 669, 91 S. Ct. 746 (1971); 28 U.S.C. § 2283. [*10] Texaco had to present its constitutional arguments to the state judiciary, with the option to seek review in the Supreme Court under 28 U.S.C. § 1257. Mann should have proceeded in the same way. After the state's trial judge rejected her contention, she should have sought review within the state system and then, if necessary, by the Supreme Court of the United States. Instead she bolted to federal district court, which under Pennzoil can offer no relief. Defendants have not sought abstention under Younger and Pennzoil, but federal courts are entitled to abstain on their own--not only to protect states from errors by their lawyers (the State's Attorney of Cook County, representing the defendants in this case, may not have the interests of the whole State at heart), and to avoid unnecessary decisions on constitutional questions, but also to protect themselves from impositions of the kind that Mann has perpetrated. See Mazanec v. North Judson-San Pierre School Corp., 763 F.2d 845 (7th Cir. 1985). Mann contends that the fee violates the Constitution of Illinois as well as the Constitution of the United States. That argument, presented [*11] to a state court, could have avoided any need for federal decision, even by the Supreme Court on certiorari under § 1257. Moreover, the fact that the appeal in the state case has concluded does not lift the abstention doctrine; one may not avoid a state forum by waiting until its process has concluded. See Nelson v. Murphy, 44 F.3d 497 (7th Cir. 1995). 5 These proceedings not only imposed on the federal courts (and the defendants) but also appear to come within the scope of 28 U.S.C. § 1927: Any attorney or other person admitted to conduct cases in any court of the United States or any Territory thereof who so multiplies the App. A -8 proceedings in any case unreasonably and vexatiously may be required by the court to satisfy personally the excess costs, expenses, and attorneys’ fees reasonably incurred because of such conduct. Mann, an attorney, has multiplied these proceedings unreasonably and, in an objective sense, vexatiously. See Jn re TCI Lid., 769 F.2d 441 (7th Cir. 1985). The tort suit was filed, dismissed, refiled, and lasted for five more years before it was dismissed, on the date set for trial, because Mann [*12] _ refused to participate. Proceedings were marred by Mann's failure to follow judicial orders concerning discovery and by her generally inappropriate conduct. The state's appellate court rebuked Mann for "inexcusable" abuse of opposing counsel as well as "lack of cooperation ... in obeying court orders, indifference to the trial court's advice and admonishments, repeated attempts to delay the proceedings, and a failure to follow the rules of proper procedure." The state portion of this litigation included, in addition to the main case (filed twice and unduly dragged out) and the original action in the Supreme Court of Illinois, repeated efforts to disqualify a judge. The federal portion has included the three suits we have mentioned plus additional motions to disqualify, requests for sanctions (Mann's motions were denied and she was ordered to pay $ 100 to the defendants under Fed. R. Civ. P. 11), and the two appeals from No. 98 C 8004 plus post-judgment motions practice in No. 98 C 6078. One suit has been turned into six, each characterized by needless contretemps. We therefore direct Mann to show cause, if any she has, why she should not be ordered "to satisfy personally the excess [*13] costs, expenses, and attorneys’ fees reasonably incurred because of such conduct." We limit this order to costs and expenses the defendants have incurred in the federal portion of the litigation. Mann may file her response within 14 days. Within the same time, defendants should file with the court an App. A-9 estimate of the total expenses they have incurred in both the district court and this court. This should include an estimate of the market value of the services provided by their in-house legal staffs. See Central States Pension Fund v. Central Cartage Co., 76 F.3d 114 (7th Cir. 1996). Appeal No. 99-1750 is dismissed as moot. On appeal No. 99- 3595, the judgment of the district court is vacated, and the case is remanded with instructions to abstain. An order to show cause will be entered, returnable within 14 days. App. A(a) -1 BEVERLY B. MANN, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. DOROTHY BROWN, Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, and COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS, Defendants-Appellees. Nos. 99-1750 & 99-3595 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT August 31, 2001 Before: Hon. Frank H. Easterbrook, Circuit Judge Hon. Daniel A. Manion, Circuit Judge Hon. Michael S. Kanne, Circuit Judge Pursuant to this court’s unpublished final order issued on this date, appellant Beverly B. Mann is directed to show cause, if any she has, why she should not be ordered "to satisfy personally the excess [*13] costs, expenses, and attorneys’ fees reasonably incurred because of such conduct." We limit this order to costs and expenses the defendants have incurred in the federal portion of the litigation. Mann may file her response within 14 days. Within the same time, defendants should file with the court an estimate of the total expenses they have incurred in both the district court and this court. This should include an estimate of the market value of the services provided by their in-house legal staffs. See Central States Pension Fund v. Central Cartage Co., 76 F.3d 114 (7th Cir. 1996). App. A(b) — 1 This is the state-court order upon which much of the federal appeals court’s orders were premised. The order incorrectly identifies 705 ILCS 105/27.2a(k)(4) as 735 ILCS 105/27.2a(k)(4). Beverly Mann, Plaintiff, v. No. 92 L 13054 The Upjohn Company, Defendant. ORDER This cause coming on to be heard on plaintiff's motion for leave by the parties to jointly remove most documents from the court record, or, alternatively, to find unconstitutional subsection (k)(4) of the Illinois Clerk of Court’s Act, 735 ILCS 105/27.2a(k)(4), it is ordered that: 1. The court states that it is reiterating that it is declining to hear the constitutional challenge because the constitutional challenge was not part of, and is collateral to, the underlying products liability lawsuit. 2. The motion to remove document from the record is denied on the basis that the court lacks the authority to allow it. Atty No.: 99500 Enter: Judge Susan Zwick Nov. 20, 1998 Name: B. Mann Circuit Court — 1617 Attorney for: Plaintiff Judge Judge’s No. Address: 7261 N. Campbell City /Zip: Chgo 60645 Telephone: 773-465-4587 App. B -1 BEVERLY B. MANN, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. DOROTHY BROWN, Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, and COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS, Defendants-Appellees. Nos. 99-1750 & 99-3595 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT September 19, 2001 Before: Hon. Frank H. Easterbrook, Circuit Judge Hon. Daniel A. Manion, Circuit Judge Hon. Michael S. Kanne, Circuit Judge Order The response to our order to show cause spends a great deal of time expressing dissatisfaction with the rulings of both state And federal courts in this case, but it does very little to justify the filing of three Federal lawsuits seeking review of decisions made in, or matters, affecting, a products-liability case ongoing instate court. To the extent the response offers explanations (such as ignorance of Pennzoil and the Tax Injunction Act), these are not justifications. Counsel is obliged to research the law before filing suits. We therefore conclude, for reasons narrated in our order of August 31, 2001, that attorney Mann has multiplied the litigations unreasonably and vexatiously, and must personally pay the costs and legal fees that resulted. The statement of costs and fees submitted by the defendants is modest. They seek compensation for only 28 App. B - 2 hours of legal work, which covers proceedings in both the district and this court. The hourly fee requested, $185, is appropriate to practice in Chicago. Accordingly, and on the authority of 28 U.S.C. § 1927, Beverly Mann is ordered to pay $5,180.00 to the Office of the State’s Attorney of Cook County. This amount must be paid within 14 days, and proof of payment must be filed with the clerk of this court. App. C -1 BEVERLY B. MANN, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. DOROTHY BROWN, Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, and COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS, Defendants-Appellees. Nos. 99-1750 & 99-3595 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT October 16, 2001 Before: Hon. Frank H. Easterbrook, Circuit Judge Hon. Daniel A. Manion, Circuit Judge Hon. Michael S. Kanne, Circuit Judge ORDER The following are before the court: 1. NOTICE TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT AND/OR REQUEST FOR LEAVE TO FILE RULE TO SHOW CAUSE, FILED ON OCTOBER 11, BY COUNSEL FOR THE APPELLEES. 2. RESPONSE TO NOTICE TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT AND/OR REQUEST FOR LEAVE TO FILE RULE TO SHOW CAUSE, FILED ON OCTOBER 15, BY THE APPELLANT PRO SE. App. C -2 On September 19, 2001, this court ordered the appellant Beverly Mann to pay $5,180.00 to the Office of the State’s Attorney of Cook County within 14 days and file proof of payment with the clerk of this court. To date, the appellant has failed to make the required payment. The clerks of all federal courts in this circuit are directed to return unfiled any papers submitted either directly or indirectly by or on behalf of Beverly B. Mann unless and until she pays in full the sanction that has been imposed against her. In accordance with our decision in Mack, exceptions to this filing bar are made for criminal cases and for applications for writs of habeas corpus. Beverly B. Mann is authorized to submit to this court, no earlier than two years from the date of this order, a motion to modify or rescind this order. App. D-1 United States District Court Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division Beverly B. Mann JUDGMENT IN A CIVIL CASE V. Case Number 98 C 8004 Dorothy Brown, et al Jury Verdict. This action came before the Court for a trial by jury. The issues have been Tried and the jury rendered its verdict. e Decision by Court. This action came before the Court. The issues have been tried or heard and a decision has been rendered. IT IS HEREBY ORDERED AND ADJUDGED that there being no Federal Jurisdiction, this case is hereby dismissed. Michael W. Dobbins, Clerk of Court Date: 10/19/2001 Wanda Parker, Deputy Clerk App. E- 1 In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit In re: Beverly B. Mann ) ) Nos. 99-1750 and 99-3595 ) (Corrected) Response to Rule to Show Cause This court has issued a Rule to Show Cause why I should not be ordered “to satisfy personally the excess costs, expenses, and attorneys’ fees incurred because of” the conduct the court alleges in its Rule 53 Order. Much of that conduct allegedly occurred in my underlying state-court products liability lawsuit, which stemmed from my use of the prescription drug Halcion, manufactured and marketed by The Upjohn Company, the defendant in that litigation. But the Rule 53 Order’s summary of procedural rulings and events in the underlying state-court lawsuit contains numerous significant factual inaccuracies. E.g., I did not file the initial products-liability lawsuit in federal district court; Upjohn removed it there. And the lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed in federal court upon motion by my attorney at the time, Paul R. O’Malley, for reasons utterly unrelated to discovery: O’Malley wanted to add a defendant, my prescribing physician, whose joinder would destroy federal diversity jurisdiction and allow the case to be heard in state court where he wanted it heard. The dismissal order itself explicitly provided for leave to refile in state court within 60 days adding the physician as a defendant. Discovery was not a controversy at that early stage, much less the reason for the voluntary dismissal. Nor was I ever barred as a discovery sanction from presenting any App. E-2 particular evidence, nor ever threatened by the court with a discovery sanction of any type. I won’t even bother to point out that under 28 U.S.C. §451, the term “court of the United States” as used in §1927 refers only to federal court, not to state court, and that §1927 doesn’t authorize a federal court to impose sanctions based in part on events (even real ones) that occurred in state-court litigation. Not even when the federal court liquefies the two lawsuits into one for purposes of dismissing the federal case. But I do recommend the issuance of a Miranda-type warning, something like: Every-thing you say or that someone says about you in state court can and will be used against you in a federal appeals-court of law. In the 7” U.S. Circuit appeals court, anyway. Some of this court’s inaccuracies about the underlying case are adopted or construed (and in two important respects misconstrued) from the state appellate court’s still-unofficial opinion,’ which itself contains numerous misrepresentations about the contents of certain court orders and about certain other procedural events. These are distortions so stark that they approach outright fabrication; e.g., certain motions that the opinion implies were granted actually were denied (and the reverse), and the opinion represents specific judicial | filed an affidavit with the appellate court advising that I plan to file a petition with the Iliinois Supreme Court pursuant to Supreme Court Rules 317 and 315. There are several points, but what entitles me to review as a matter of right under Rule 317 is that the appellate court failed to review the merits of the summary judgments entered on three counts well before the remaining counts were dismissed for want of prosecution, the propriety of which implicates due process and equal protection guarantees. I attach a copy of the 20-page Petition as Exhibit 1. App. E-3 findings as directly contrary to actual statements in written memorandum orders. An easily illustrated example is the opinion’s statement that “{ojn January 28, defendant filed a motion to have facts deemed admitted based on plaintiff's failure to answer defendant's request for admissions.” Indeed Upjohn did file — such a motion, but the motion was denied because it was established that due to an error by a substitute secretary during Christmas week, Upjohn’s lawyers didn’t serve me with a copy of the request and I didn’t know of it until I received notice of the motion; the substitute secretary to the attorney responsible for mailing copies of several documents that were filed on December 27 had failed to include in the envelope a copy of the request for admissions. The envelope did include a summary judgment motion, to which I responded before Upjohn filed its motion on the request for admissions, and a large set of interrogatories (Upjohn’s eighth set, I believe, after several were stricken upon my motion), to which I also had responded — by answering some of them and successfully objecting to others — before Upjohn filed its admissions-motion. After Upjohn’s admissions-motion was denied, I promptly filed a blanket objection to the entire request. The objection was sustained and the request, like several earlier ones, was stricken. The incident was irrelevant to the appeal and was included in the opinion solely to mislead that the motion was granted rather than denied.” Both parties in that lawsuit timely ? This court plays a similar game, e.g., in its throwaway reference to the $100 sanction Judge Leinenweber imposed, the unelaborated mention of which misleads that the sanction concerned the substance of the lawsuit and that it was imposed after the issuance of the Rule’s required formal notice and opportunity to respond in writing, and that it was justified. But I had appealed App. E-4 objected to various discovery demands. Neither party’s discovery objections were ever ruled frivolous. In 1996 and °97, I moved successfully to strike one after another after another set of interrogatories/requests for admissions — each set containing approximately 200 interrogatories and a very substantial number of generic requests for admissions, which Upjohn served routinely in Halcion litigation. My sustained objections: uiat these discovery requests were redundant of earlier-completed discovery, that they were vexatious, and that they were served in violation of an Illinois Supreme Court Rule limiting the number of interrogatories to 35 without leave of court. I also moved successfully to quash several subpoenas (including one seeking a copy of my law school records, which I learned of only when an attorney for the University phoned me and asked whether I wanted the school to contest the subpoena on my behalf and on the school’s.)° from the sanction order, which (if only in theory) barred this court from presuming without examination that it was appropriately issued. > Another of the subpoenas was for the deposition of my sister’s former husband, a gynecologist who after graduating from Northwestern University Medical School in 1969 moved with my sister to Denver, where he completed his medical training. He has never practiced medicine anywhere but Denver, and I have never lived in Colorado, yet Upjohn said it needed his deposition because I might have seen him as a patient. I had not claimed gynecological injury from my use of Halcion, nor do I have a medical history of gynecological problems. My sister and her former husband, incidentally, were divorced in 1975, and she and her current husband have lived in Seattle since 1987. Suffice it to say I easily had her ex-husband’s subpoena quashed — as I did a deposition subpoena served on her current husband, who has never lived in Chicago, and a deposition subpoena served on my other sister’s husband, who has lived (with my sister) in Houston since 1983. As for the subpoena for my law school records, the notice of it was sent to O’Malley’s office, but O’ Malley didn’t know about it because (incredibly, in my view) neither he nor his associate App. E-5 Upjohn wanted to depose everyone I had ever known (well, there were a few of my former kindergarten classmates whose names did not appear on their deposition list). And in August 1997, I moved successfully to quash a mass effort by Upjohn to secure via written “evidence deposition” the testimony of virtually every physician I had ever seen; it wasn’t quite clear how, exactly, I was to attend the written evidence depositions.‘ The federal judge’s voluntary-dismissal order had required that I respond within a specified time (14 days, I think) to a lengthy set of interrogatories Upjohn had served upon me shortly before the dismissal. I happened to be out of town at the time, and O’Malley faxed me the interrogatories, which I answered and then Fed Ex’d back to him. (The notary’s stamp on my answers read “King County, WA.”) Yet no sooner was the lawsuit refiled than did Upjohn’s lawyers serve me with another lengthy set of interrogatories. O’ Malley objected on the grounds that they were almost entirely duplicative of the ones I already had answered. The objection was not sustained, I was ordered to answer the routinely reviewed subpoena notices; the office receptionist was ‘ instructed simply to place those notices in the appropriate case file upon their receipt. It was this incident, in June 1996, that caused my already strained relationship with him to sever. * “Evidence deposition” is a term of art, and something of a misnomer, in Illinois law. It differs from a discovery deposition (a non-evidence deposition?) in that its supposedly sole purpose is as verbatim trial testimony and, with limited exceptions, objections not made during an evidence deposition are deemed waived at trial. Discovery depositions, by contrast, under Illinois law cannot be used as verbatim trial testimony. Evidence depositions are allowed only by court order, the grounds for which must be the anticipated unavailability of the witness at trial, a circumstance that Upjohn did not (and could not) claim regarding even a single one of the targeted deponents. And for obvious reasons, there is no rule in Illinois permitting written evidence depositions. App. E-6 interrogatories, and I did. No sanction of any type was issued then, or — I reemphasize — at any other tine in that litigation. No, most of the controversy in that litigation — and the one that ultimately caused me to request that the case be dismissed for want of prosecution — concerned not any failure to provide information in discovery but my failure to retain paid opinion witnesses, which I maintained I did not need in order to prove my case. The controversy, in other words, was not about my failure to disclose witness’ s identities or to produce documents but about my failure to pay opinion witnesses. That was it, pure and simple. And should this court doubt this, I am providing in an accompanying appendix.a copy of the Table of Contents and the Points and Authorities table from my opening brief in that appeal. And I can provide on disk or in hard copy all four briefs filed in that appeal, if this court would like. The paid-opinion-witnesses issue also was the subject — the only subject — of the petition for temporary restraining order I filed in federal court in October, 1997, that so enrages this court. It also was a central part of my appeal, although as is SO typical of appellate opinions the state-court opinion doesn’t mention it. Instead it cites a litany of allegations and presents them inaccurately as sustained by the trial court, apparently on the legal premise that any accusation a defendant makes against a pro se plaintiff is by definition accurate, at least when removed from its context (as most of the enumerated items are). But almost none of the items was addressed in the briefs to that court, and since the court knew of the allegations it also knew (or should have known) of my responses to them, and of the trial court’s determinations concerning the allega- tions, and of the reasons for the trial court’s determinations, none of which buttressed the opinion’s premise. App. E-7 For example, the court utterly misrepresented the nature and significance of one ruling by writing, “On February 19, the trial court granted defendant's motion to bar fact witnesses.” The intended inference, of course, was that all my fact witnesses were stricken. But that is nonsense. The motion was a typical pretrial motion seeking to bar certain named trial witnesses. I no longer recall the details, but by no means all of my fact witnesses were stricken; I think only two of them were. And I had some of Upjohn’s witnesses stricken, too. In most litigation about to proceed to trial, names of witnesses are stricken on pretrial motion. So, the hell, what? This wasn’t an issue on appeal and therefore was not addressed in the briefs. The court mentioned the February 19 order because it wanted to mislead; an honest recounting of it, as with an honest recounting of so much else in that case, would have been pointless or, worse, self-defeating. That court perverts into parody the legal construct that appellate courts can affirm upon any grounds found in the record. As does this court, it redefines the phrase “grounds found in the record” as any statement that appears in any document in the record, however unsupported and even if overtly rejected by the trial court. It designates the defendant’s lawyers as factfinder, as the lawsuit’s diarist, as the font of true observation, and whatever they write may properly be adopted, unexamined, by the court. And any sentence in a court order can be extracted, in or out of its context, and adopted unscrutinized and without elaboration, as needed. This court knows the routine: The trial court entered summary judgment/a sanction order/a discovery order/a ... order; therefore the summary judgment/the sanction order/the discovery order/the ... order is affirmed.” - App. E-8 Or: The trial court entered summary judgment/a sanction order/a discovery order/a ... order; therefore an order that piggybacked on the summary judgment/the sanction order/the discovery order/the ... order is affirmed. No need to examine the truth of the allegation or the propriety of the foundational order even when it is being appealed. I call it a house=of-cards, although in criminal-law lingo | think it’s known as a Ponzi scheme. Most astonishing about the state-court opinion is the extraordinary degree to which that court freelanced through the huge (and expensively prepared) court record, recasting utter irrelevancies in a starkly false light.” I address some additional instances in detail in Exhibit 1, attached. But of more immediate importance is that this appeals court in its Rule 53 Order makes several key errors, particularly concerning Illinois law regarding: (1) the appealability of two orders (which this court erroneously calls judgments) entered in the state-court case respectively on September 28 and November 19, 1998, on the file- preparation-fee matter; (2) whether under Illinois law my fees- challenge lawsuit and the underlying products-liability one really are the same case and therefore a replay of Pennzoil v. Texaco; (3) whether Illinois appellate courts have the authority to waive or reduce the file-preparation fee; (4) the effect of a denial by the Illinois Supreme Court of a Rule 381 petition, and the resulting effect on the issue of comity; and * | include in the appendix my two three-page motions concerning the attorney-eye-surgery incident that that court calls inexcusable. This court can, if it wishes, read the motions and draw its own conclusion. App. E-9 (5) the constitutional structure in Illinois for funding the county and appellate courts. This court also misconstrues the nature of my federal constitutional challenge. I think that in part this is because the court misapprehends Illinois’ constitutionally-determined funding structure for the courts; the graduated ceilingless fees are paid not to the state, although it is the state alone that funds the trial and appellate court systems, but to the counties, which fund no part of the court systems. And in part it is because no judge or court-staff member read my briefs — which, incidentally, did address the funding-structure question. (Had the Rule 53 Order’s author read my briefs he would know, for example, that I did pay the $1,635 record- preparation fee — not to the state but to the county, as per the law I was challenging. Although the state alone funds the courts it plays no role whatsoever in the collection or use of the fees, a primary basis for my lawsuit. So much for this court’s contention that the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office failed to assert certain defenses because it did not have the interests of the state at heart; the state had no interest at heart, but the county did.) Instead, a law clerk was assigned to summarize my arguments as filtered through the appellees’ briefs, as is standard procedure for appellate review, or faux appellate review, in pro se civil lawsuits. A foolproof strategy for an appellee contesting a pro se appeal is to not even mention the appellant’s strongest arguments; it works every time. Or so, as a frequent filer, is appears to me. I. The Fee-Challenge Lawsuit This court misunderstands the essential premise of my federal lawsuit, which is that a graduated, ceilingless appellate fee determined by the size of the court record irrespective of App. E-10 the relevance of most of the record to the issues being appealed, and paid not to the state (which alone funds the county court systems in Illinois) but instead to the county itself (which pays nothing toward the cost of running the court system), irrationally requires appellants whose court files are large to pay unduly to support the county government albeit not the state government and therefore not the trial or appellate court system. A. Under Illinois law, the September 28 and November 19, 1998, state-court orders on the fee challenge were not appealable. This court derides my claim that the September 28 and November 19, 1998, orders issued by Cook County Circuit Judge Susan Zwick were not final orders with res judicata effect. Deride though it might, this court presumes incorrectly; under Illinois law those orders were not appealable and they had no legal effect other than to bar the fee-challenge from being litigated as part of the products- liability lawsuit. This court attributes to Judge Zwick its own view, which ridicules my fee-challenge motions as an inappropriate effort to convert the products-liability case into some new constitutional claim. Ridicule though it does, the court misconstrues the nature of Judge Zwick’s orders as determined by Illinois law. Zwick found my motions inappropriate not because they asserted a constitutional challenge to the record-preparation fee for appeal in the products-liability lawsuit but because under IIlinois law the constitutional challenge could be brought only in a separate. lawsuit. And under Illinois law, as long as there exists the option to file a separate lawsuit, such orders are not appealable. See, e.g., by analogy, S.C. Vaughan Oil Co. v. Caldwell, Troutt & Alexander, 181 Ill. 2d 489, N.E.2d 338 (1998), holding that orders denying motions to vacate App. E-11 dismissals for want of prosecution are not appealable as long as the plaintiff could refile within one year under 735 ILCS 5/13-217. The motion I presented at the September 28 hearing was to compel the release of the already-prepared record on appeal. It invoked specific provisions of the Illinois state constitution but not the United States Constitution. Judge Zwick expressly declined to consider the constitutional challenge to the statutory subsection at issue, 705 ILCS 105/27.2a(k)(4). She said I would have to file another lawsuit in order to challenge the constitutionality of the fees statute. She also said she knew of no statute or Supreme Court Rule other than Rule 298 that would allow her to compel the release of the record without the payment of the preparation fee. As per normal procedure there, I drafted the order. I wrote that the motion was denied. At the November 20 hearing, the motion I presented to Zwick requested the severance of portions of the record for preparation for appeal. The motion sought alternatively a finding that the fees statute violates three provisions of the Illinois state constitution. That motion, like the earlier one, included no federal constitutional claim. But it did include a section titled “The Procedural and Jurisdictional Basis for this Motion,” which read: As Mann understands it, there are essentially two methods by which the constitutionality of a statute may be challenged. Anyone with legal standing to challenge the statute (i.e., anyone in reasonably imminent danger of suffering harm because of the statute) may do so by filing an independent proceeding with a court; e.g., a petition for mandamus or prohibition. If the statute pertains to litigation, persons who are litigants in a proceeding effected by the statute may also file a motion seeking relief App. E-12 from compliance with the statute via a finding that the statute is unconstitutional. It was the latter method that was employed recently to obtain a court ruling finding particular sections of the Illinois Tort immunity Act, and ultimately the Act itself, unconstitutional. To wit: Kunkel v. Walton, et al., No. 81176 (Nov. 20, 1997); Best v. Taylor Machine Works, Nos. 81890, 81891, 81892, 81893 cons. (Dec. 18, 1997); Hettinger v. Krah, 95 L 601(not a Cook County case).... .... In Kunkel, supra., and Hettinger, supra., for example, the plaintiff filed a personal injury lawsuit and then challenged the section of the Tort Reform Act requiring the plaintiff to allow the defendant indiscriminate access to the respective plaintiff s lifetime medical records without regard to their relevance to their lawsuit, upon sanction of dismissal of the lawsuit. The plaintiffs each challenged the constitutionality of the statute, not collaterally in a different court proceeding but directly in motions brought within their respective underlying lawsuits. The ultimate relief they sought was the ability to proceed with their lawsuits without complying with the statutory mandate that they waive all rights to medical privacy. The avenue by which they obtained such relief: a finding by the court (the circuit court, affirmed on appeal) that the statute at issue violated Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution of the State of Illinois. The court declared the statute unconstitutional, thus granting them the ultimate relief they sought; they were allowed to proceed with their lawsuits without indiscriminately waiving their medical privacy rights. In Kunkel and Hettinger, the plaintiffs could obtain the ultimate relief they sought simply by a single action of the court. Once the court found the challenged statute App. E-13 unconstitutional, the court allowed the lawsuits to proceed without the statutorily mandated waivers. The judge agreed with my premise. She read aloud a paragraph from an Illinois Supreme Court opinion (I think it was from Kunkel) which said the trial judge has the discretionary authority to exercise jurisdicticn to hear constitutional issues collateral to the litigation. She said she was exercising her discretionary authority to decline to exercise jurisdiction to hear the constitutional challenge, partly because the County was not a defendant in the products-liability case. (Their counsel did appear at the hearing, but only because I had requested her presence.) Again the judge told me to “file another motion.” She also said I had misconstrued her earlier ruling when I drafted the September 28 order: She had not denied the constitutional challenge; she simply had declined to exercise jurisdiction to hear it. And she denied my request for severance of portions of the record. She dictated the precise language for the order, which reads: 1. The court states that it is reiterating that it is declining to accept jurisdiction to hear the constitutional challenge because the constitutional challenge was not a part of, and is collateral to, the underlying products liability lawsuit. 2. The motion to remove documents from the record is denied on the basis that the court lacks the authority to allow it. Her two orders, as they concerned the constitutional challenges, were similar in nature to ones that sever some counts in a complaint or that deny a discretionary joinder motion, orders that are non-appealable, at least under Illinois law, as long as no substantive rights are affected. Orders that, even if appealable, are not judgments and do not bar the App. E-14 litigation of the issues in a separate lawsuit if that is the choice of the litigant. Judge Zwick neither intentionally nor inadvertently precluded my right to litigate the issue. She just denied me the forum of the products liability case in which to litigate it. By reading from (I think) Kunkel, she said she could have exercised jurisdiction to hear the matter but that she chose not to. She never suggested that she thought I was making an inappropriate effort to convert the products-liability case into some new constitutional claim. She said I had a constitutional claim, stemming from my appeal in the products-liability lawsuit, but that she would not hear the claim as part of the products-liability lawsuit although she could if she chose. This court, citing Federated Department Stores, Inc. v. Moitie, 452 U.S. 394 (1981), writes, “This suit could have been dismissed on preclusion grounds; a disappointed litigant must appeal, rather than file another suit, even if developments after entry of the first judgment show that the decision was incorrect.” But under Illinois law there was no judgment — none whatsoever. There was only an order declining to accept jurisdiction to hear the fee-challenge as part of the products- liability case. This court’s citation to Moitie follows immediately the court’s reference to my Rule 60(b) motion in 98 C 6078, and I’m not sure whether the Moitie citation is intended as a res judicata finding on the dismissal of 98 C 6078 as well as on Judge Zwick’s orders. But 98 C 6078 was dismissed not on the merits but on jurisdictional grounds that no longer existed by the time I filed 98 C 8004, and Moitie finds a res judicata bar only to the refiling of a claim already decided on its substantive merits. Moitie barred only my relitigation of the jurisdictional issue on which the district judge based the judgment in 98 C 6078, and I was not trying to relitigate that issue, which no longer was relevant. App. E-15 This court’s Rule 53 Order puzzles me with its citation to Mazanec v. North Judson-San Pierre School Corp., 763 F.2d 845 (7" Cir. 1985), to support its sneer that “federal courts are entitled to abstain on their own ... to protect themselves from impositions of the kind that Mann has perpetrated.” Nearly every paragraph of Mazanec undermines this court’s premise. For example, Mazanec treated as a threshold question the appealability of an abstention order in the jurisdiction where it was issued. And after noting that in this circuit (where the abstention order was issued in that case), orders granting abstention are appealable as final orders and orders denying abstention before final judgment are not appealable, that opinion commented that the latter are no more final than are orders denying motions to dismiss under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6). In my case, Zwick’s abstention orders were no more final than was the order at issue S.C. Vaughan Oil Co. | know of no Illinois legal authority that suggests otherwise. If this court does, it should cite to me that authority and allow me to address it before I am sanctioned for litigating the fees issue in federal court. I did discuss in the federal litigation the question of issue-preclusion, in the documents | filed with the district court (see the first paragraph of Section C below) and in my appellate briefs. I did not ignore the issue; this court ignored what I wrote about it. This court chides the State’s Attorney’s office and Judge Leinenweber as well as me for our collective failure to see an issue-preclusion bar. But the State’s Attorney’s office is familiar with “the preclusive effect of an Illinois state court judgment” and with what “that state’s res judicata App. E-16 requirements” are, see People ex rel. Burris v. Progressive Land Developers, Inc., 151 Ill. 2d 285 (1992), as is Judge Leinenweber, a former Illinois state legislator and chair of a legislative committee that drafted Illinois’ completely revamped civil practice statutory scheme in 1982. As was | in the fall of 1998, when I litigated the matter. Which is why none of us found Judge Zwick’s September 28 order as amended by her November 19 order, nor her November 19 order itself, a judgment with res judicata effect under IIlinois law. Or under IIlinois law a judgment at all. B. This court holds inexplicably that Art. III standing to challenge the constitutionality of a state court-fees statute itself bars a federal constitutional challenge in federal court, an untenable and circular legal position. This court also questions Judge Leinenweber’ s belief that I was challenging the constitutionality of the fee statute itself rather than the state judicial system’s application of the statute to my appeal. But this court appears to base its conclusion on this point solely upon my Art. III standing to challenge the fee statute, an untenable and circular legal position. In my brief in 99-3595 at p. 4, | wrote, “The statute applies to all types of cases, including criminal, dissolution of marriage, child custody, adoption and probate, as well as to personnel injury and products liability lawsuits.” I had written the same in my brief in 99-1750 and in most of the documents I filed with the district court. And in my brief in 99-3595 at pp. 30-31, I wrote in a section titled “The Public Has a Strong Interest in Providing Access to Appellate Review Irrespective of a Party’s Financial Ability to Pay a Four-Figure Tax”: App. E-17 The public has a substantial interest in the ultimate determination of the constitutional issues presented in this lawsuit. As Mann noted above, the fees schedule at issue applies in every type of litigation in Illinois state court, civil and criminal. Mann does not challenge the district court’s premise that litigants must be prepared to pay the reasonable expenses of litigation. She does challenge the constitutionality of a statute that requires litigants to pay litigation expenses that are neither reasonable nor inherently necessary but, rather, artificially erected by the government. Civil litigation is almost always very expensive. Hourly attorneys’ fees have a market rate set mainly by large corporate clients and are virtually always in the three- figure-per-hour range. Court reporter fees also are substantial; court reporters attend approximately two years of school tc gain the special skills that enable them to perform their service and then must purchase the very expensive equipment and (these days) computer software necessary to their job, and their fees reflect this. These are non-artificial (if not always reasonable) expenses of litigation. But the district court’s premise is preposterous that this justifies the government’s assessment of the artificial fees at issue in this lawsuit. Mann also believes that the fees schedule creates and inherent conflict of interest for attorneys representing clients upon a contingent-fee arrangement. In such circumstances, the attorney usually has agreed to pay the expenses of the litigation during its pendency and to deduct those expenses from the eventual monetary reward, if any. It seems likely to Mann that the prospect of a prerequisite court-fees payment of perhaps thousands of dollars may App. E- 18 impact upon the advice the attorney gives the client regarding the advisability of appeal. Having silently conceded the inevitability of a chasm between the actual stated grounds in a pro se civil appeal and what (after translation by a law clerk) passes as the court’s summary of it, this type of thing no longer jolts me; I expect it of the court, and the court doesn’t disappoint. But the threat or imposition of sanctions (and certainly of sever ones, as this court plans to impose on me) are another matter entirely. Particularly so given that this court apparently bases its sanctions assessment partly on my standing to challenge the fee statute — not on my lack of it but on my possession of it. The court says (as I understand it) that standing to challenge the fee statute operates as a nearly irrebuttable presumption that the constitutional challenge concerns the statute’s application only to that plaintiff's underlying case. Only if the plaintiff must pay the fee in order to appeal from an already issued judgment does she have standing under Art. III to challenge the fee’s constitutionality. And because she is challenging the fee’s constitutionality by virtue of the assessment of the fee in her appeal, she is presumed to be challenging its constitutionality only as applied in her case. The presumption can be rebutted (presumably) only by filing a petition for class certification. But I lacked the funding and the legal expertise to litigate a class action. So according to this court I was not challenging the statute’s constitutionality but only its constitutionality in my situation. No matter that a finding of unconstitutionality in my situation effectively would have stricken the statute in all situations, just as occurred in Kunkel and Taylor Machine Works. It was not the nature of my claim but my failure to App. E-19 seek class status for it that bars my access to federal court and that subjects me to sanctions for proceeding with the matter in federal court. How absurd. The fee statute is neither vague nor susceptible of varying interpretations depending upon the circumstances — even less so, in fact, than was the statute in Mazanec. If the fee statute was unconstitutional in my case it was unconstitutional — period. Which is exactly what I argued to the district court and to this court, e.g., at pp. 26-27 of my brief in 99-3595, where I wrote: Because Cook County reaps a substantial monetary windfall as a result of §105/27.2a(k)(4), the subsection is, by definition, a general-revenue tax upon what is a very small subgroup of county residents: appellants in cases in which there is a large court record. No legitimate governmental purpose exists for the levy of this general revenue tax. For Mann, this statute has required her to pay approximately $1,400 (the amount of her payment beyond the approximate cost to the county of the preparation of her court record for appeal) to support the general expenses of county government. There is no connection between the requirement of this payment and any legitimate justification for it. The basis for this constitutional challenge obviously does not rest upon the financial resources of the appellant; it is equally available to any appellant whose court record is large, irrespective of the litigant’s net worth, whether a homeless person living on the curbside of lower Wacker Drive, or Beverly Mann, or Abra Rockefeller Prentice. App. E-20 Nor, incidentally, did I arbitrarily select the $150 that the court says I was willing to pay, but no more. The $150 amount was selected for me; it’s the initial amount that pursuant to another subsection of the statute must be paid. The subsection I was challenging kicks in as a per-page ceilingless fee if the court file is larger than 200 pages. | challenged that subsection but not the one that assesses the $150 fee. Had the latter subsection assessed a $250 fee or $500 fee or even a $750 fee, I’d have paid it. But no more. C. Under Illinois law, my federal lawsuit and the underlying one are not the same case and therefore not a replay of Pennzoil v. Texaco. In my amended complaint and mandamus petition, I quoted the following from Retired Chicago Police Assn. v. City of Chicago, 7 F.3d 584 (7" Cir. 1993): : To assess the preclusive effect of an Illinois state court judgment, therefore, we must apply that state’s res judicata requirements. Under Illinois law, an action is barred by res judicata when there exists: “(1) a final judgment on the merits rendered by a court of competent jurisdiction; (2) an identity of cause of action; and (3) an identity of parties or their privies.” People ex rel. Burris v. Progressive Land Developers, Inc., 151 Ill. 2d 285, 602 N.E.2d 820, 825, 176 Ill. Dec. 874 (Ill. 1992); see also Welch v. Johnson, 907 F.2d 714, 720 (7th Cir. 1990) (stating same). Irrespective of whether this court agrees with me that Judge Zwick’s September 28 and November 19 orders were similar to ones that sever some counts in a complaint or that deny a discretionary joinder-motion and that they therefore did not bar litigation of the fees issue in a separate lawsuit, and setting aside the matter of identity of causes of action between the _ products-liability lawsuit and the fees-challenge lawsuit, it is App. E-21 indisputable that there existed no identity of parties or their privies in the federal and state-court actions. Nor does this present a merely technical, and therefore perhaps insufficient, distinction between my cases and Pennzoil v. Texaco, the case this court finds determinative. The bond at issue in Pennzoil, and the statute that required its payment, were solely for the benefit of Pennzoil, not for the benefit of the government entity to which the bond would be paid. The bond money represented the monetary judgment that was to be appealed, and the government entity would hold the bond money in escrow solely for the benefit of Pennzoil, which had won the judgment. It is no artifice to note that the petitioner to the Supreme Court in Pennzoil was, well, Pennzoil, not the government entity to which ‘ »2 bond was to be paid. The government entity was neither a party nor a party-in-interest to that proceeding; it had no financial or other interest in the outcome of the Supreme Court case. Indeed the Pennzoil opinion begins: The principal issue in this case is whether a federal district court lawfully may enjoin a plaintiff who has prevailed in a trial in state court from executing the judgment in its favor pending appeal of that judgment to a state appellate court. The issue in Pennzoil concerned the procedure for executing the monetary judgment awarded to Pennzoil at trial, specifically whether the procedure for executing the judgment implicated a federal constitutional right. But in my fees- challenge case the real party-in-interest was not Upjohn, the appellee in the products-liability case, but Cook County, the government entity that not only would collect the fee but would use the fee. And did use the fee; the county has not paid and will not be paying Upjohn the $1,635 I paid to it for the preparation of the court record. : App. E-22 So how is this a replay of Pennzoil? And, more to the immediate point, why should I be sanctioned in light of Pennzoil for filing the federal lawsuit? Other than that this court likes to sanction people for the sake of sanctioning people, that is. As for Judge Zwick, she was right (for once) in ruling against me. (She was right al/ the time when she ruled for me.) I had relied upon Kunkel, Taylor Machine Works and Hettinger for my proposition that she did have jurisdiction to hear the fees-challenge. But the statutes at issue in those cases (particularly in Kunkel and Hettinger) were for the sole benefit of private civil defendants in such cases, not for the benefit of the state or other government entity. And as the names of those cases denote, just as the name of Pennzoil v. Texaco denotes, it was not the government but the defendants in the tort actions who were the parties in interest as well as the parties in name. _ Although Zwick said she had the option to accept jurisdiction on the fees challenge, and although at the time I certainly agreed with her interpretation of the law on that, I no longer think she even had the option to hear it, given that it was the county and not Upjohn whose interest was at issue in the fees matter. I think the appropriate analysis would be analogous to that in considering discretionary-joinder motions. And at least unless the county was being joined as a party, a joinder motion would have to have been denied. D. Illinois appellate courts have no authority to waive or reduce the file-preparation fee Although this court says otherwise, there is no Illinois rule that enables an appellate court to waive or reduce the file- preparation fee as this court claims. I, at least, know of none, and that is not for lack of trying. Unable to find one myself, I inquired of the deputy chief clerk at the appellate court clerk’s App. E-23 office (Steven Ravid, who this year became that court’s clerk) and was told no such procedure exists. As this court notes, Illinois Supreme Court Rule 298 provides for petitions to be presented to the trial court and also strictly limits eligibility for that relief. Another Rule permits the severance of some documents from the remainder of the record to allow their preparation for appeal, but it requires the discretionary approval of the trial judge or agreement of the appellee. I presented such a motion to the trial judge but Upjohn contested it successfully on the grounds that neither of its appellate attorneys had been involved in the case at the trial- court stage and they would need the entire record when drafting their briefs (these were cross-appeals).° The wording of the Rule suggests that such a motion could be presented also to the appellate court, but when I told Upjohn’s local appellate counsel — Thomas Fegan, a longtime Illinois appellate specialist — that I planned to file one he said the appellate court could not entertain motions under that Rule. Fegan is the author of a book on Illinois appellate procedure, and I checked his book’s discussion of the Rule (1 don’t recall which Rule it was) to verify that he thought this. The book confirmed it and cited supporting case authority. E. An exhaustion-of-state-constitutional-remedies prerequisite would divest federal courts of original jurisdiction to hear any federal due process or equal protection claim against any government in Illinois, or at least would divest it of original jurisdiction to hear any such challenge to an Illinois statute. ° This sounds like a transparent excuse to ratchet up the cost to me of the appeal, but it was not. At virtually the same time, Upjohn’s lawyers provided me with copies of transcripts of about 25 hearings at $.20 per page, the same rate they charge their clients, saving me more than $2,000 in court-reporter fees. App. E-24 Article I, Section 2, of the Illinois state constitution mirrors the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses. It was the primary state-constitutional provision | asserted in the motions Judge Zwick declined to hear, and in my Rule 381 petition that the Illinois Supreme Court declined to hear. It reads: No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law nor be denied the equal protection of the laws. If the existence of that or any other constitutional provision requires federal court abstention in my fees-challenge lawsuit, then they would do the same in other cases challenging Illinois statutes. But they don’t. This court’s opinion in Club Misty, Inc. v. Laski, 208 F.3d 615 (7th Cir. 2000), begins with: “Two licensed taverns in Chicago appeal from the district court's dismissal of their suit to enjoin an Illinois state statute pursuant to which the plaintiffs would have lost their licenses had they not been granted preliminary relief that continues on appeal. The statute, 235 ILCS 5/9-1 et seq., is challenged both as depriving the plaintiffs of their property without due process of law and as a bill of attainder.” It ends with: “So the issue ‘is not too much delegation, but delegation to the wrong body: delegation of judicial decision-making, for example, to people who are not judges.’ [Citations omitted.] That is what Illinois has done and what the due process clause prohibits.” No fear expressed there of unwarranted determination of federal constitutional questions. Nor in Kendall-Jackson Winery, Ltd. v. Branson, 212 F.3d 995 (7th Cir. 2000). The federal constitutionality of Illinois statutes are challenged in federal district court just as the federal constitutionality of other states’ states are challenged in App. E-25 federal district court even when those states’ constitutions have provisions that mirror the federal constitutional provision cited. And they proceed through federal district-court and appellate resolution on their merits. While I was litigating my fee challenge in federal district court, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in Saenz v. Roe, 526 U.S. 489 (1999), in which it affirmed a ruling by the 9" U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that struck a California welfare-benefits statute as violative of several clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, including the equal protection clause. The district court in Saenz, like the 9” Circuit, had ruled on the merits of the federal constitutional issues, including the equal protection issue. The Supreme Court in its opinion in Saenz did not mention a state-constitutional-grounds exhaustion requirement, and I don’t know whether California’s constitution has a provision similar to the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause and to the Illinois constitution’s Art. I, sec. 2. But I do know this: that on the date that the Supreme Court decided Saenz, a virtually identical lawsuit then on appeal before this court was based on an Illinois statute indistinguishable from the one in Saenz, and that the appellant was not the plaintiff but the state of Illinois. The district court had found that the statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment — this notwithstanding the existence of the state constitution's Art. I, sec. 2, and that the plaintiff was complaining about the effect of the statute on her. See Hicks v. Peters, 98-3696 (7" Cir.). I quoted from Saenz to the district court and in my briefs to this court (in 99-3595 at p. 29, in 99-1750 at pp. 36-37). The law clerk assigned to this appeal must have missed it. This court writes in its Rule 53 Order that it examined the briefs and record in my appeals and concluded that oral argument was unnecessary. But, with the exceptions only of App. E- 26 the issue-preclusion question and the state-court-funding- structure matter, both of which I discussed above, none of the issues on which it based its decision and its sanction was briefed to this court, nor even argued to the district court. | requested oral argument — although I admit I really didn’t want it. But at least at oral argument I would have learned that my appeals would be determined in a vacuum, upon cascading unscrutinized presumptions that I had no reason to foresee. I could have — and would have — requested leave to file a supplemental brief addressing them, albeit one that (like the others) no one would have read anyway. I’m writing that brief now, instead of meeting deadlines on a variety of other matters, only some of them related to my avocation as a frequent filer. But I’m not sure why. I’ve already lost my appeals, and this court already has decided to sanction me. It makes no difference what | write here. Just as it made no difference what I wrote in my formal briefs. | could have written anything. I could have confessed to murder (and did, at p. 19 in 99-3595). I could have recited nursery rhymes (pp. 7-9 in 99-1750). I could have excerpted pages from the phone book (pp. 10-18 in 99-3595). I could have divulged a purloined nuclear secret (p. 37 in 99-1750). It was all the same. As it will be again. F. A petition pursuant to Illinois Supreme Court Rule 381 gives Illinois the “first crack” at the issue and therefore satisfies the Pullman- doctrine prerequisite. Much of this court’s Rule 53 Order reads to me like a shell game. It skewers me for bringing the fees-challenge to federal court instead of presenting it to the Illinois courts. But it also disparages me for petitioning the Illinois Supreme Court to hear the case pursuant to a Supreme Court Rule explicitly designed to provide quick adjudication of such issues. And it App. E-27 notes gleefully that the Supreme Court promptly denied my petition to consider the issue, yet it orders the district court to abstain from the matter because, it says, I didn’t bring the matter to the Illinois courts. This court cites Mazanec to support sanctions against me, but Mazanec says, “no useful purpose would be served by abstaining in this case. The main purpose of the Pullman doctrine is to avoid, if possible, declaring a state statute unconstitutional, by giving the state courts a chance to interpret it narrowly. [Citations omitted.]” Mazanec also says “there are two requirements for abstaining under Pullman: some risk that the statute will be found unconstitutional unless narrowed; some reasonable chance that it can be narrowed through interpretation.” But apart from this court’s rumination about the former, the latter chance is nonexistent; the statute sets the fee, a ceilingless fee of $.25 per page. This court says I wasn’t challenging the fee as unconstitutional for anyone but me. But (even aside from the portions of my brief quoted above that do exactly that in unequivocal terms) the court’s assertion is a logical impossibility. I had never heard of the Tax Injunction Act. But apparently neither had the State’s Attorney’s Office nor had the district judge. And Mazanec, which this court cites in support of sanctions, ends with this: At the risk of supererogation, we add a final reason against abstention: the state did not ask for it until the end of the trial. We mentioned this point earlier in connection with delay; but it is also an independent argument against abstention. It is true that abstention can be ordered even if neither party requests it at any stage of the proceedings, [citations omitted] — and this may seem surprising: if the state does not want the protection that the doctrine affords App. E-28 it, why should the federal court extend the doctrine affords it, why would the federal court extend that protection to the state anyway? The answer is that "the state" is not an individual, but a collectivity. State attorneys general (who usually are elected officials, rather than appointees (who usually are elected officials, rather than appointees of the governor) may not have the same interests as other organs of state government; nor may local officials; and federal court should not get involved unnecessarily in what may be intramural struggles of state government even if invited to do so by one of the contenders. But if the responsible state officials are willing to litigate the case in federal court, that court does not have to force it back into state court. [Citations omitted.] These state officials were willing. My Rule 381 petition — this court’s derision of it notwithstanding — accommodated the need for state comity and satisfied the requirement of the Tax Injunction Act. And when contending parties invoke the process of the federal courts, it becomes the unsought responsibility of those courts to resolve the federal and constitutional issues the judicial system has been forced to confront. See Bush v. Gore, 121 S. Ct. 525 (2000). This court shirked its responsibility to consider my fees challenge, and veils that truth under a pious sanction order. Conclusion Much of this court’s Rule to Show Cause relies upon the factually erroneous statement in the state-court appellate opinion that the trial court had issued several sanctions orders were issued against me. On September 18, I filed with the Illinois Supreme Court an Appeal as of Right and, alternatively, a Petition for Leave to Appeal, in which | address that issue at various points in her Petition to the App. E-29 Illinois Supreme Court, but particularly in several paragraphs on p. 16, one of which reads: Illinois Supreme Court Rule 219 is titled “Consequences of Refusal to Comply with Rules or Order Relating to Discovery or Pretrial Conferences.” Sec. (c) requires that “(where a sanction is imposed ... the judge shall set forth with specificity the reasons and basis of any sanction so imposed either in the judgment order itself or in a separate written order.” No such sanctions order was entered in this litigation. I attach to this Response as Exhibit | a copy of that 20- page Petition. The Petition addresses all of the matters this court raises about the manner in which | litigated the state- court products liability lawsuit. I also note an opinion that this court issued earlier this week in Downey v. State Farm Fire & Casualty Co., No. 00- 3473 (7" Cir. Sept. 17, 2001), in which the court said it believed initially that no federal jurisdiction existed (the ultimate basis for this court’s Rule to Show Cause issued against me) but provided the plaintiff with two opportunities to address the jurisdictional question, first at oral argument and then in a supplemental brief. This court concluded then _ that federal jurisdiction did exist in that case. I received in the mail today, September 19, in an envelope postmarked September 18, a copy of the Defendants’ Estimate of Total Expenses, which they say amounts to $5,180.00, a very steep sanction, particularly given the absence of any earlier indication that there even existed a jurisdictional issue. In this light, I ask that this court accord me a hearing of the sort provided under F.R.A.P. 46(c) so that I can try to convince it that I believed, and why I believed, throughout this litigation that federal jurisdiction existed in my fee-challenge lawsuit. App. E-30 Respectfully submitted, Beverly B. Mann Respondent Pro Se 7261 North Campbell Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60645 (773) 465-4587 September 19, 2001 al App. F - 1 1999 U.S. Dist. LEXTS 13426, * BEVERLY B. MANN, Plaintiff, v. AURELIA PUCINSKI, As Clerk of The Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, and COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS, Defendants. Case No. 98 C 8004 UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS, EASTERN DIVISION 1999 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13426 August 3, 1999, Decided August 3, 1999, Filed OPINION BY: Harry D. Leinenweber OPINION: MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER Before the court is defendants’ motion to dismiss. Plaintiff Beverly B. Mann ("Mann"), pro se, sues Aurelia Pucinski, as Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois and Cook County, Illinois, the municipality. Although suing pro se, Mann is a trained lawyer, and has brought numerous lawsuits in this District unrelated to the immediate lawsuit. Plaintiff challenges the constitutionality of a provision of the Illinois Clerk of Courts Act, which sets a fee of $ .25 per page for copying and transferring a circuit court record to the Illinois appellate court for court records over 200 pages. 705 ILCS 105/27.2a(k)(4). Specifically, plaintiff alleges that App. F —-2 Section (k)(4) of the Act violates Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution [*2] and Article I, Section 2, and Article [X, Section 12 of the Illinois Constitution. BACKGROUND The court is intimately familiar with this case as it has produced a fairly extensive procedural history, including one prior lawsuit. Briefly, the procedural history is as follows. Mann originally filed a federal lawsuit, Case No. 98 C 6087, styled not as a complaint but rather as a petition for a temporary restraining order and writ of injunction or prohibition to prevent the Illinois clerk of courts from imposing the statutory fee in Mann's state court appeal. Mann currently is appealing a decision issued by the state circuit court in her products liability suit against the Upjohn Company. Mann objects to having to pay the statutory fee, amounting to $ 1,543.75 in her case. This court held a hearing on Mann's motion for a Temporary Restraining Order but denied the motion and dismissed the case for want of jurisdiction. This court's reasons for finding a lack of jurisdiction were premised on the well-established rule in Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co., 263 U.S. 413, 416, 44 S. Ct. 149, 68 L. Ed. 362 (1923) and District of Columbia Court of Appeals et. al. v. Feldman, et. al., 460 U.S. 462, 103 S. Ct. 1303. 75 L. Ed. 2d 206 (1983). [*3] The rule, known as the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, prevents federal district courts from providing appellate review of state court decisions, as federal jurisdiction is strictly original and the correct avenue of appellate review exists in the state appellate court, the state supreme court and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court. In other words, this court has no subject matter jurisdiction over final decisions by the state courts. Id.; see also Garry v Geils, 82 F.3d 1362, 1364-1368 (7th Cir. 1996). Mann had filed a motion with the state circuit court seeking to have the circuit court clerk ordered to forego the statutorily mandated App. F —3 fee for preparing the court record. In addition, Mann filed a petition for writ of mandamus with the Illinois Supreme Court, which was denied. In essence, Mann asked this court to review these state court decisions, which this court could not do under the Rooker-Feldman doctrine. Therefore, this court dismissed Mann's suit for want of jurisdiction. Following the court's dismissal of the lawsuit, Mann filed several subsequent motions attempting to establish this court's jurisdiction, including in chronological order: a motion to vacate the judgment [*4] order, a motion to reconsider, a second motion to reconsider, a second motion to vacate the judgment order, a motion for leave to file an amended petition for writ for mandamus or prohibition, and another motion to reconsider. All of these motions were denied. Subsequently, Mann brought this second lawsuit to continue her quest to obtain copies of the circuit court record without having to pay the statutorily-mandated fee. To remedy the jurisdictional defect existing in her prior federal suit, Mann argued that the circuit judge had not actually denied her motion ordering the clerk to waive the fee, but that the circuit judge had declined to consider it. On the basis of this argument and after determining that the Illinois Supreme Court had declined leave to file the mandamus action, this court found that Mann had cured her jurisdictional defect. Having established jurisdiction, Mann initiated this suit by bringing a "Motion for Hearing on Petition for Writ of Mandamus and Prohibition." This court, finding no federal statutory authority to issue a writ of mandamus forcing the clerk to issue the circuit court record to Mann free of charge, denied her motion. Mann responded by filing [*5] a Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order. Incidentally, before this court ruled on Mann's motion for a temporary restraining order, Mann attempted on at least two occasions to file emergency motions for leave to amend her complaint before other fellow judges in this district, both of which were ; sothe Pe SERENA oe i ee App. F -4 denied. This court subsequently denied Mann's motion for a temporary restraining order. At that point, Mann filed a Motion for Leave to File an Amended Joint Complaint, which the court granted, and a Motion for Preliminary and Permanent Injunction. After briefing on these motions, the court denied Mann's motion in a Memorandum Opinion and Order. See Mann v. Pucinski, No. 98 C 8004, 1999 WL . 135305 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 3, 1999). Following this memorandum opinion and order, Mann filed an Emergency Motion for Reassignment in front of Judge James B. Zagel. After deciding the motion was not the proper subject of an emergency, Judge Zagel ordered Mann to present the motion for reassignment in this court. Mann then presented her "Motion for Judicial Recusal," pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 455 and Motion to Vacate the Order Denying a Preliminary Injunction, which this court [*6] denied. Thereafter, Mann filed a Notice of Appeal from this court's orders denying her motion for judicial recusal and to vacate the order denying a preliminary injunction and the court's memorandum and opinion order denying her motion for a preliminary injunction. Thereupon the defendants brought a Motion to Dismiss Mann's amended complaint and amended joint complaint, which is the motion immediately before the court. nl In short, Mann has shown no shortage of creativity or tenacity in seeking her desired relief. nl As a side note, Mann also thereafter filed a Motion for Sanctions Pursuant to Rule 11, which the court denied. And in addition, Mann filed another case in federal court arising from the same state court suit against Upjohn, seeking an ‘injunction against Cook County Circuit Court Judges O'Connell, Cohen, Cox and Bastone from denying her a request for a trial continuance, which Judge Plunkett denied. PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Page(s) hop FO-F missing in original. App. F — 10 [*15] and costs, $ 75. (3) Court appeals when original documents are forwarded, over 100 pages, plus delivery and costs, $ 150. (4) Court appeals when original documents are forwarded, over 200 pages, an additional fee of 25 cents per page. 705 ILCS 105/27.2(a) (West 1999). Mann contests Section (k)(4) only. In ruling on Mann's motion for a preliminary injunction, this court partially analyzed the constitutionality of Section (k)(4) and determined that Mann had virtually no chance of succeeding in bringing her state and federal constitutional claims. See Mann v. Pucinski, 1999 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2804, No. 98 C 8004, 1999 WL 135305, at **1-4 (N_D. Ill. March 3, 1999). This court found that Illinois does not treat certain litigants more favorably than others (except indigents - in that a waiver of the fee is available under Supreme Court Rule 298 for indigents), nor does it impose any insurmountable impediments to civil litigants in order to carry on an appeal. Id. at *2. The court concluded also that there is nothing irrational or arbitrary about imposing a fee on users of the court system in order to provide financial support for that same court system. Id. at *3. The court [*16] found numerous cases affirming the constitutionality of statutory fees under the Illinois Constitution. Id. The court read and still reads these state court decisions as foreclosing Mann’s claim under the Illinois state constitution and to hold that under the Illinois Constitution, fees must be used to support the court system and the legislature need not first ascertain the actual cost of a service when establishing the fee. Id. As for Mann's federal constitutional claims, after further App. F - 11 briefing the court is convinced that Mann's claims must fail. Under Mann's asserted facts, the fee imposed by Section (k)(4) does not violate her rights to equal protection or procedural due process as a matter of law. Although the Constitution guarantees no right to appellate review, once a State affords that right, that right must be provided equally. Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U.S. 12, 18-24, 76 S. Ct. 585. 590-93. 100 L. Ed. 891 (1956). The Illinois rule challenged in Griffin deprived most defendants without means to pay for a transcript access to appellate review. Id. The Supreme Court has navigated the basic rule in Griffin, that appellate review may not be [*17] denied by a party's inability to pay, taking into specific account the underlying stakes of the case. M. L. B., Petitioner v. S. L. J. Individually and as Next Friend of the Minor Children, 519 U.S. 102, 103, 117 S. Ct. 555, 556, 136 L. Ed. 2d 473 (1996). The Supreme Court has interpreted Griffin to mean that equal access to appellate courts without regard to a defendant's ability to pay is more narrowly confined to cases where imprisonment is at stake or where the conduct is quasi-criminal in nature. M. L. B., 519 U.S. at 103, 117 S. Ct. at 556. In addition, the Supreme Court "has also recognized a narrow category of civil cases in which the State must provide access to its judicial processes without regard to a party's ability to pay court fees. Id. (citing Boddie v. Connecticut, 401 U.S. 371, 374, 91 S. Ct. 780. 784, 28 L. Ed. 2d 113 [divorce proceedings]). Making clear, however, that a constitutional requirement to waive court fees in civil cases is the exception, not the general rule, and the Court has refused to extend Griffin to the broad array of civil cases." Id. (internal citations omitted); see also United States v. Kras, 409 U.S. 434, 93 S. Ct. 631, 34 L. Ed. 2d 626 (1973) [*18] (statutory requirement of payment of filing fees as condition precedent to obtaining discharge in bankruptcy has a rational basis and does not deny indigents equal protection of the laws); Ortwein v. Schwab, 410 U.S. 656, 93 S. Ct. 1172, 35 L. Ed. 2d 572 (1973) (Oregon appellate filing fee, as applied to indigents seeking to appeal an adverse welfare decision, is not App. F — 12 violative of the due process or equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment). The limited exception to this rule denying a constitutional waiver in run of the mill civil cases is for civil cases involving state controls or intrusions on family relationships, for example, in parental termination appeals, where the family association "'of basic importance in our society’ is at stake.” Id.. 519 U.S. at 103, 117 S. Ct. at 556-57. Under Griffin and its progeny, the court concludes that Mann's underlying lawsuit is a run of the mill civil case, to which the constitutional waiver of court fees does not apply. As a product liability lawsuit, the special interests advanced in most criminal cases and in rare civil cases, such as where choices about marriage, family life or the upbringing [*19] of children must be made, are not implicated here. Id. The court further finds that a rational basis exists for the fee in Section (k)(4). Mann argues that there is no rational basis alleging that the fees in Section (k)(4) are not used to support the appellate courts, the fee discriminates against the class of appellants whose litigation has garnered a large court record, and the fee greatly exceeds the cost to the county of providing the service at issue. First, the court summarily dismisses Mann's notion that the $ .25 per page fee over 200 pages is disproportionate to the actual charge and that it is excessive. Mann's cost per page, $ .25, is a bargain compared to the charges the Supreme Court has identified as within a reasonable range for similar statutory appellate transcription fees. M. L. B.. 519 U.S. at 139, 117 S. Ct. at 575 (Thomas, J., dissenting generally to the majority's main holding that an indigent is entitled to free transcripts in civil cases where fundamental familial rights are implicated) (Mississippi's $ 2 per page charge "falls comfortably within the range of charges throughout the Nation." citing inter alia Ariz.Rev.Stat. Ann. § 12-224(B) [*20] (1992) ($ 2.50/page); Mass. Gen. Laws § 221:88 (1994) ($ 3.00/page); S.C.App.Ct. Rule 508 ($ 2.00/page)). As for Mann's contention that the fee App. F — 13 discriminates against the class of litigants who have amassed long court records, the court finds that the class identified by Mann as being discriminated against hardly could qualify as a classification attracting heightened scrutiny under the equal protection clause. Such classification is reserved for suspect classifications, such as race, for example. See e.g. Harris v. McRae, 448 U.S. 297, 100 S. Ct. 2671, 65 L. Ed. 2d 784 (1980). And the Supreme Court "has never held that financial need alone identifies a suspect class for purposes of equal protection analysis." Id.. 448 U.S. at 323. 100 S. Ct. at 2691 (internal citations omitted). Moreover, "the State's need for revenue to offset costs, in the mine run of cases, satisfies the rationality requirement." M. L. B.. 519 U.S. at 123-24, 117 S. Ct. at 567 (internal citations omitted). On its face, like similar transcription fees, the purpose of the fees in Section (k)(4) is to offset the costs of preparing the appellate record. The fact that [*21] long transcripts are more costly to the court system and that the legislature imposed a per page fee is further evidence the purpose of the statutory section is to offset the costs of preparing a long record. It stands to reason that under a flat fee scheme the clerk's office would lose money the longer the record. Thus the court finds a rational basis for the statutory fees in Section (k)(4), that of offsetting the fees of transcription. Mann also contends that there is no rational basis because the fees are not directly earmarked and used to fund the appellate courts, but rather, Mann contends the fees are collected and deposited into the general Cook County fund and are used for the general operation of county government. However, the issue of whether the fees are used for purposes unrelated to the costs of operating and maintaining the courts has been raised, found to be unsubstantiated, and rejected by the Illinois courts. See Zamarron v. Pucinski, 282 Ill. App. 3d 354, 357-60, 218 Ill. Dec. 23, 668 N.E.2d 186 (1996). Finally, the court notes that the fact that a waiver is available to indigents under Rule 298 is further basis for this court to find arational [*22] basis for the statutory fee. The fact that Mann, who purports to be of limited means, has not applied App. F - 13 for such waiver, remains puzzling to the court if in fact Mann is serious about seeking appellate review. Mann requests that a writ of prohibition be issued barring defendants from enforcing 705 ILCS 105/27.2a(k)(4). Because Mann's claims fail on their merits, this request is denied as moot. On July 12, 1999, Mann filed a motion to supplement the record on appeal with her Response to Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss Plaintiff's Amended Complaint and Amended Joint Complaint and its exhibits, filed for purposes of this motion to dismiss. Mann states she filed her opening brief in her appeal on July 7, 1999. Mann's motion to supplement the record on appeal is granted. CONCLUSION For the foregoing reasons, defendants' motion to dismiss is granted. Mann's request for a writ of prohibition is denied as moot. Mann's motion to supplement the record on appeal is granted. IT IS SO ORDERED. Harry D. Leinenweber, Judge United States District Court Date: August 3, 1999 JUDGMENT IN A CIVIL CASE Decision by Court. This action came before the Court. The issues [*23] have been heard and a decision has been rendered. IT IS HEREBY ORDERED AND ADJUDGED that the motion by defendants’ to dismiss is granted. Date: 8/3/1999 App. G-1 Following are the first four pages (the first three sections) of Mann’s Petition to the Illinois Supreme Court in Beverly B. Mann vy. The Upjohn Co., No. 92383, scheduled for ruling on December 5: 1. Appeal as a Matter of Right and Alternative Prayer for Leave to Appeal Petitioner, Beverly B. Mann, a nonpracticing attorney pro se, appeals to this Court as a matter of right from the decision of the Illinois Appellate Court, First District, Third Division, in which that court affirmed without review the 735 ILCS § 5/2-1005 entry of summary judgments on several counts and the 735 ILCS § 5/2-619 dismissal of another count, affirmed without review the denial of a735 ILCS § 5/2- _ 1005(g) motion for leave to file amendments to the complaint, and affirmed on the basis of a series of supposed sanctions orders existing nowhere in the record (no such orders were entered!) the denials in violation of 735 ILCS § 5/2-1007 of motions for a single three- or four-month trial-date continuance and the denial (in violation of this Court’s precedent) of a 735 ILCS § 5/2-1301 motion.' That court’s denial of any appellate review of the orders granting the defendant’s § 5/2-1005 and § 5/2-619 motions and of orders denying Mann’s § 5/2-1005(g) motion violated several state and federal constitutional provisions: the due process and equal protection provisions of the Constitution of the State of Illinois (Art. I, sec. 2) and of the Constitution of the United States (the Fourteenth Amendment), the Illinois Constitution’s scheme of separation ' Someone — presumably a law clerk — foraged through the 26- volume file and extracted disjointed sentences and titles from the appellee’s motions (almost none of which even were mentioned in the briefs because the parties considered them irrelevant). Incredibly, the Appellate Court misrepresents these as findings by the trial court. App. G-—2 of powers between the legislative and judicial branches (Art. II, sec. 1), the Illinois Constitution’s conferred right to appellate review (Art. VI, sec. 16), and the United States Constitytion’s conferred right to jury determination of issues of fact in most common-law civil lawsuits seeking monetary damages (Seventh Amendment). As did that court’s unexplained affirmance of the stated policy of the Cook County Law Division, as per former Chief Judge Donald P. O’Connell’s arbitrary directive, that requires as a prerequisite to the grant of trial-date-continuance motions the designation of paid opinion witnesses. Mann had repeatedly challenged that policy as violative of constitutional due process and equal protection precepts and as contrary to 735 ILCS § 5/2-1007, and the issue was central to much of her appeal. The Appellate Court’s failure to consider these challenges amounts to a tacit finding that Illinois circuit courts can ignore at will the specific dictates of a state statute, in seeming derogation of Illinois’ constitutional separation of legislative and judicial powers established in Art. II, sec. 1. em ea as of — Mann prays for leave to appeal. Proceedings Below Tice of the Appellate Court was entered on June 29, 2001. A Petition for Rehearing was filed on July 20, 2001, and was denied in an order entered on August 14, 2001. An affidavit of intent to file a petition for appeal as a matter of right and, alternatively, for leave to 4 from long-established and continuing rules of Illinois state law. (E.g. Illinois law held, and holds, that issues concerning motive are questions of fact to be determined by the factfinder after consideration of the evidentiary rather than — as the both the district court and the appellate court held without annotation in Mann’s case — questions of law to be determined without reference to the evidentiary record. Also e.g., Illinois law required, and requires, that contract disputes be resolved by reference to the terms stated in the contract at issue rather than by an appellate court without reference to the terms of that contract. Also e.g., Illinois law requires that tort damages be determined by the trier of fact after consideration of the evidence regarding the nature and extent of the injuries sustained, rather that by an appellate court without reference to the evidentiary record — as the appellate court did, again without annotation to legal authority, in Mann’s case.) The unpublished orders resolving those two appeals in Mann’s case therefore constitute de facto bills of attainder, thus they also violate Article I, Section 9 (as well as Article Ii). Article I, Section 9, states: No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed. Indeed, in Mann’s case, Judge Richard A. Posner, as chief judge of the 7 Circuit Court of Appeals last winter, has found in resolving complaints of judicial misconduct that Mann brought against the judicial panel in her second appeal that the panel had, in effect, passed, by judicial fiat, several bills of attainder in her case. Mann had alleged in her complaints that those judges deliberately misrepresented in their unpublished order of resolution that they knew the grounds upon which Mann had brought that appeal (and appeal that actually was a set of three consolidated appeals, each of which addressed rulings that stated various purported rules of law that were independent of one another and that therefore required separate consideration). App. M-5 Judge Posner dismissed the complaints upon a finding that there was “absolutely no evidence” that the panel was unaware of the various grounds for appeal, and, inferentially, the body of settled law upon which Mann had brought her appeals. (See Exhibits 5-9, accompanying.) Given the vast body of such precedent and the appellate panel’s stark deviation from that body of law in Mann’s case, Judge Posner’s finding acknowledges that the court consciously exempted Mann’s case from application of the law, some of it written by Judge Posner. Accepting the analysis in Anastasoff, the court lacked the legal authority, and therefore the jurisdiction, to do that. By that analysis, the appellate court orders issued in the two appeals in Mann’s case are void.' Sometime before she presents this motion to the court, Mann will supplement it with a supporting memorandum in which she will detail the relationship between Anastasoff and Mann’s case. For now, though, she notes the uncanny parallel between the first three questions presented in the certiorari petition that Mann filed with the Supreme Court last winter and the fist four pages of the Argument section of that petition, on the one hand, and Judge Arnold’s discussion in Anastasoff, particularly the discussion that addresses material ' On August 28, 2000, Mann filed a motion pursuant to Circuit Rule 53(d)(3) with the court of appeals citing Anastosoff and requesting publication of the Rule 53 orders entered in the two earlier appeals in this case. The court clerk’s office did not process the motion, however, instead returning the copies of it to Mann along with a letter from the pro se clerk instructing her that (notwithstanding any such indication in the wording of Rule 53), her motion must be phrased as a motion to recall the mandate, and that, in any event, she would have to file separate motions pertaining to each set of appeals (rather than a single consolidated motion, as her submitted motion was). Mann did not file the motions because she recognizes that that court does not grant motions to recall mandates. App. M - 6 considerations beyond those he discussed in his published journal article a year earlier. (Mann has joked that her certiorari petition may have been granted, after all — by the 8" Circuit Court of Appeals. But, as she will detail in her supporting memorandum, she has some reason to believe that there actually is an immediate connection between her petition and Anastasoff.) Those first three Questions Presented were: 1. Whether a federal circuit rule that permits the resolution of appeals by unpublished order may entitle an appellate court to avoid applying extensive pertinent settled law to arbitrarily selected cases, or whether, instead, a federal appellate court's use of that rule as a device by which to exempt some cases from application of the law actually creates two parallel bodies of law utterly independent of each other and thus violates the fundamental dictate of the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause. 2. Whether a federal appellate court must apply the doctrines of the law of the case and of waiver of claims and defenses as those doctrines are delineated in nearly 60 published opinions issued -by that same appellate court within the last five years and by this Court in Agostini v. Felton, 521 U.S. 203 (1997), when a plaintiff asserts those doctrines in a successive appeal as having precluded defenses after fourteen years of litigation, or whether, instead, appellate-court application of those doctrines is merely optional as long as the appeal is resolved via unpublished (and mostly unexplained) order. 3. Whether, prompted by a belief that unpublished appellate resolution that deviates from universally established law is of no large importance because it does not actually alter the law, an en banc federal appellate court is entitled to promulgate an internal court policy that prohibits it from hearing, en banc, any appeal that was resolved by unpublished order — or whether, instead, such a App. M-7 policy itself fundamentally and impermissibly alters the law by effectively (albeit quietly) dismantling the Equal Protection component of the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause and perhaps the Due Process Clause itself. As this court knows, Mann earlier filed two motions with this court pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. (b)(5) and (6). The initial one, filed on April 17, 2000, moves to vacate the order entered on July 14, 1986, that dismissed a key count in Mann’s operative complaint pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b). That motion is based largely upon the issuance of the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Village of Willowbrook v. Olech, 120 S.Ct. 1073 (Feb. 23, 2000). Her second motion, filed on August 1, 2000, is based upon the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Products, Inc., supra., reaffirming (or affirming, via reversal of a judgment as a matter of law entered by an appeals court in favor of the defendants in that case) unanimously that determinations concerning the state of mind — e.g., motive, belief, extent of culpable knowledge, intent — of defendants in civil litigation is a question of fact rather than a question of law and that, as such, these determinations must be made by the fact finder upon hearing and considering the evidence. Both motions remain pending, awaiting a ruling on Mann’s mandamus petition to the appellate court seeking the recusal of District Judge Wayne R. Andersen. Mann has concluded that the appellate court will never resolve her mandamus petition, so she will ask this court to rule on her pending motions (and this one, once the Fiore opinion is issued), notwithstanding her grounds for seeking Judge Andersen’s removal from this litigation. In support of those motions, Mann filed extensive exhibits, most significantly a complete five-volume set of her filings with the Supreme Court last winter. (The set includes her certiorari petition, two supplements to that petition, her petition for rehearing and a supplement to the petition for rehearing.) Those documents delineate with detailed annota- App. M -8 tion the appellate court’s many departures from settled law, express or necessarily implied, in the appellate court’s July 14, 1999, Circuit Rule 53 order resolving the second set of appeals in this case. Mann refers this court to her volumes of exhibits filed in support of her two earlier-filed pending motions, and she incorporates those exhibits as part of this motion. The memorandum that Mann plans to file in supplement to this motion also will discuss the U.S. Supreme Court’s intermediate opinion in Fiore, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s opinion in Fiore, and the significance of that case to the legitimacy of the legal findings and analysis in Anastasoff — and, in turn, this motion. The memorandum also will discuss the effect of Judge Rovner’s conflict of interest during the first set of appeals in light of her incessant self-marketing to the public and (more significantly) to her colleagues as a champion of women who allege gender-related discriminatory conduct in the course of their-employment (as Mann did in portions of her complaint upon which summary judgment was affirmed without even a word of explanation), and in light of her declared support (in published opinions) of government employees who allege violation of their First Amendment free-association rights (as Mann did in other portions of her complaint upon which summary judgment was affirmed, also without a word of explanation). Her panel colleagues — one of whom has yet to meet an evidentiary record in an employment-related case that he thinks actually could support a jury verdict in favor of the employee-plaintiff, the other who regularly writes elaborately detailed opinions explaining the court’s reasons for affirming summary judgments in employment cases but only when there actually exists legitimate reasons for the court’s affirmance — hardly would dispute voiced conclusions by Judge Rovner favoring the defendant in an employment case, or even actually read the plaintiff's briefs. App. M -9 Mann also will disc... the effect of the off-handed affirmances of the initial set of summary judgments upon the district court’s grant of the post-remand summary judgments, after remand. She will discuss, particularly, the inspirational role of those off-handed affirmances in the post-remand district court’s off-handed grant of summary judgment upon sweeping and utterly unexplained findings of fact or law; Mann doesn’t know which, because the court didn’t deign to identify which. 2 And she will discuss, also, the inspirational role of those off-handed affirmances its inspirational role in parrot- like appellate affirmance of those summary judgments upon sweeping and utterly unexplained findings of fact or law. (Mann doesn’t know which, because the court didn’t deign to identify which.) And she will note that during the twelve years when she was making the major financial decisions that enabled her to continue to pursue this litigation year after year but that will impact her life significantly for the rest of her life, she was entitled to a straightforward public acknowledgment by the appellate court that it does not apply the pertinent law when it wishes (whether for personal or ideological reasons) not to do so — that the court need only invoke its Rule 53 before it effectuates a single-case exemption of the law. Instead of paying her lawyers (through the teeth) and paying Lexis a four-figure amount for her extensive online research (at a rate of $4.25 per minute) when drafting the Argument sections of her briefs in the first set of appeals, Mann should have cut to the chase and just hired a private investigator. As for the City of Chicago, it got its money’s worth for Maxwell Rovner’s salary. And then some. Respectfully submitted, Beverly Mann Plaintiff Pro Se App. N-1 This is the reassignment order referenced in the Petition at p. 25 and ie AO 25B (Rev. 6/83) DESIGNATION OF DISTRICT JUDGE FOR SERVICE IN ANOTHER DISTRICT WITHIN HIS CIRCUIT WHEREAS, in my judgment the public interest so requires; Now, therefore, pursuant to the provisions of Title 28, United States Code, Section 292(b), I do hereby designate and assign the Honorable G. Patrick Murphy, United States District Judge for the Southern District of Illinois, to hold a district court in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in the matter of Beverly Mann v. City of Chicago, Docket No. 84 C 11020, until the matter is resolved. ay Sul Frank H. Easterbrook, Acting Chief Judge Seventh Circuit Dated: January 25, 2001 App. O- 1 UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS ORDER OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE It appearing that an order was entered on January 25, 2001 by Acting Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit-Court of Appeals Frank H. Easterbrook designating the Honorable G. Patrick Murphy of the Southern District o£ Illinois to act as the assigned judge in 84 C 11020, Beverly Mann v. City of Chicago, therefore IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that 84 C 11020 be reassigned from the calendar of the Honorable Wayne R. Andersen to the Honorable G. Patrick Murphy. ENTER..: FOR THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE ices ton Dated at Chicago, Illinois thisday of February, 2001 Chief judge !] App. O(a) - 1 This is a note Mann wrote for her own records on March 1, 2001, memorializing her conversations re: the reassignment orders appearing at Apps. N and O. (Nellie Finch is the operations manager in the District Court Clerk’s Office. Tresa Abraham is District Judge Wayne R. Andersen’s minute clerk.) She attached a copy of the note to a motion she filed in that case. A follow-up note, which she also made an exhibit to a motion in that case, appears at App. P(a). March 1 Conversation with Gladys Lugo, Aspen’s minute clerk, in her office today at about 4:00: She acknowledged that as Tresa Abraham told me, Andersen submitted to Aspen a standard recusal order on which he wrote a narrative explanation for his recusal. Lugo said that Aspen drafted his own order, the one that was filed, in place of Andersen’s, and said about Andersen’s order: It wasn’t issued. I asked her what happened to Andersen’s order, and she repeated that it wasn’t issued. I asked her whether it was just thrown out. She shook her head very slightly and said it just wasn’t issued. Yesterday Nellie Finch told me that the Clerk’s office simply received Easterbrook’s order and that that was the first her office had heard of any of this. App. P-! UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS ORDER OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE ( It appearing that the Honorable Wayne R. Andersen recused himself from 84 C 11020, Beverly Mann v. City of Chicago, and It further appearing that an order was entered on January 25, 2001 by Acting Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Frank H. Easterbrook designating the Honorable G. Patrick Murphy of the Southern District of Illinois to act as the assigned judge in 84 C 11020, Beverly Mann v. City of Chicago, and | It further appearing that, through a clerical error, the Executive Committee Order entered on February 21, 2001 reassigning 84 C 11020 to the Honorable G. Patrick Murphy omitted the statement provided by judge Andersen concerning his recusal, therefore, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the Executive Committee Order entered on February 21, 2001 in 84 C 11020 be amended to reflect the following statement be judge Andersen: The plaintiff, Ms. Mann, has expressed extreme feelings about her belief that this Court has not and will not treat her fairly. She filed a motion to recuse which was denied. She filed a petition for mandamus with the Seventh Circuit which was also denied. Nevertheless her feelings at this time seem so intense that I respectfully recuse myself with the App. P -2 suggestion that Ms. Mann's pending motions be reassigned to a judge irom another district. rer Chief Judge Dated at Chicago, Illinois this 12th day of March, 2001 App. P(a) — 1 This is a note Mann wrote for her own records on March 23, 2001, memorializing her conversations re: the reassignment order appearing at App. P. (Nellie Finch is the operations .- manager in the District Court Clerk’s Office. Tresa Abraham is District Judge Wayne R. Andersen’s minute clerk.) She attached a copy of the note to a motion she filed in that case. The note is a follow-up to the one that appears at App. O(a). March 23 I spoke today with Nellie Finch in follow-up to my conversation with her on March 21. On March 21, after learning of the amended reassignment order quoting what purports to be Andersen’s comments on his original never-issued recusal order, I had phoned Finch and asked whether I could get a copy of that original piece of paper on which Andersen’s comments appeared. She told me that it no longer exists, to which I responded that it apparently did exist on March 12, the date that appear [Text truncated at 120,000 characters. The full text is on the page linked above.] --- Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/documents/brief%3Amicro_IA40386009_0878%3A2. Public record. Not legal advice.