Currently, we have six active cases in U.S. District Court (five in Washington, D.C. and one in the Eastern District of California).
In addition, we have four cases in the U.S. Court of Appeals (three in the D.C. Circuit and one in the 9th Circuit in California).
On May 7, 2019, our Petition for Writ of Certiorari was docketed in the U.S. Supreme and assigned case #18-1402.
This case began with two cases in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (16-cv-2313 Ellis & McNeil, et al v. Judiciary and 17-cv-00022 Stanley, et al v. Lynch, et al). These two cases were consolidated and originally assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, with Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey referred to administer all pretrial, non-dispositive motions.
You can read the history of these proceedings by clicking the “Lawsuits” tab on my website MENU, then selecting 16-CV-2313, Ellis, et al, v. Jackson, et al on the sidebar. At the bottom of the case’s page, you will find links to the docket sheets for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and the U.S. Supreme Court, which contain links to the court documents filed in each case.
To bring you up to date more quickly, however, Magistrate Harvey made some egregious errors in his administration of the cases and, when we brought them to Judge Sullivan’s attention, he declined to take any action to correct them. So, we filed a Motion to Recuse both Judge Sullivan and Magistrate Harvey. Magistrate Harvey denied our Motion to Recuse, and continued in the cases. But, Judge Sullivan withdrew and the cases were reassigned to Judge Timothy J. Kelly.
Judge Kelly then, on June 19, 2018, adopted Magistrate Harvey’s Report and Recommendation to dismiss both cases. We, subsequently, filed a Rule 59 Motion to Alter or Amend Judgment on July 16, 2018.
To date, Judge Kelly has failed to rule on that motion.
So, on January 19, 2019, we filed a Motion to Set Rule 59 Motion for Immediate Hearing or Render Judgment, but, again, Judge Kelly refused to rule on the motion.
Continuing our efforts to obtain a ruling on our Rule 59 Motion, on February 22, 2019, we filed a FRAP Rule 21 Petition for Mandamus in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
On April 5, 2019, however, a three-judge Panel in the D.C. Circuit denied our Petition stating “ORDERED that the petition for a writ of mandamus be denied without prejudice for refiling. Petitioners have not shown that the district court’s delay in ruling on their motion to alter or amend the judgment is so egregious or unreasonable as to warrant the extraordinary remedy of mandamus. We are confident that the district court will act as promptly as its docket permits.”
Keep in mind that, as of this writing, our Rule 59 Motion was filed 10 months ago.
So, on April 29, 2019, we filed in the U.S. Supreme Court our Petition for Writ of Certiorari, which was placed on the docket on May 7, 2019 and assigned case #18-1402.