Notice of Appeal:
The Legal Reader reports (thanks to Joe Olson for the pointer):
Plaintiff George C. Swinger, Jr., an inmate in Washington State, filed a pro se Notice of Appeal in a civil case before U.S. District Judge Ronald B. Leighton in the Western District of Washington. The Notice, filed July 12, 2006, states:
I hereby am informing you that I am appealing the asshole Ronald B. Leighton's decision in this matter.
You have been hereby served Notice. You're not getting away with this shit that easy.
You can view the handwritten Notice of Appeal here (.pdf). (That's almost as good as a "Motion to Kiss My Ass" . . . .)
The links to the notice (and the motion to kiss the movant's ass) are in the Legal Reader post.
I'm talking about
I'm talking about Matthew Washington, the litigant in the "Motion to Kiss My Ass."
The guy who wrote the "Motion to Kiss My Ass" is in jail for murder. The Notice discussed here is by a different guy. The "Kiss My Ass" thing was just mentioned as another example of a humorous filing. And I agree with JB that it loses its humor when you find out the author is in jail for murdering a cop.
What I liked here is that the guy hand wrote a proper caption, included the line numbering and everything. Just like you would see on a computer-writen document. Nice job.
Still funny.
John: Read the Rule. The Notice in question does not, on its face, appear to violate Rule 11.
The remedy is to find the jackass litigant in contempt of court for calling the judge an asshole.
Perhaps the judge will get away with it after all.
But knowing how the Ninth loves to bend over backwards to poor indigent litigants, I'd bet it works anyway.
Fair enough. But the Notice merits a guffaw only because such conduct is extremely rare in the and likely to be quickly punished. Yes, we would laugh if someone pooped in court once. We'd not be laughing if it happened, say, once a month.
Practicing abroad, including in jurisdictions where verbal, written and physical abuse of judges is not uncommon, I suppose I am more [overly? Ed.] sensitive when it comes to respecting the dignity of the courts. But trust me, once you've seen a litigant throw a shoe at a judge or proceedings degenerate into a mass brawl (in Indonesia and Taiwan respectively, if you're curious), you don't soon forget it.
It really is a slippery and short slope. Abuse and incivilities multiply quickly, and prisoner pro se litigants are the ones most likely and inclined to drag the courts down to their level. Having had to sort through prisoner pro se petitions when I clerked, I don't there are thousands of potential, indeed eager, incarcerated imitators out there who aren't really subject to any effective sanctions.
Nice cite. I really have a problem with the court's analys of purging the contempt in this context. Sometimes, the legal term of art just isn't warranted.
Belloc