Riley Jackson lawyers: Dealing in deceit
Which opposing party is attempting the most brazen legal chicanery in our pending appeal of "The Jail Case" before the U.S. Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta? The "honor," in what should be a surprise to no one, goes to the Rob Riley defendants and their esteemed counsel from the Birmingham firm of Stott and Harrington.
How does the Riley scam work? Well, let's take it step by step.
Our lawsuit, focusing primarily on my unlawful arrest and incarceration for blogging in Shelby County, Alabama, is timely on at least two grounds: (1) Accrual of the statute of limitations (SOL) in a civil-rights case is governed by federal law, which holds that the SOL in a case involving false arrest and imprisonment does not begin to run until the imprisonment ends. My imprisonment ended on March 26, 2014, and "The Jail Case" lawsuit was filed on March 26, 2016, inside the two-year window under Alabama law; (2) A legal concept called "equitable tolling" extends the SOL in cases where a party is hampered by a legal disability.
In our case, the disability in question is the broken arm that my wife, Carol, suffered at the hands of deputies in Greene County, Missouri, during an unlawful eviction. Carol's broken arm, which came just as we were about to file our notice of appeal and original brief in "The Jail Case," was a comminuted fracture that required eight hours of trauma surgery and involved a number of possible complications that could have been life threatening. It also required about six months of intensive physical therapy, and during that time, I pretty much became Carol's full-time caregiver.
If that does not qualify as a legal disability that prompts equitable tolling, I'm not sure what would. But the Riley defendants were not having it. Since they had no real legal argument, they decided to distort reality, with the assistance of their lawyers from Stott and Harrington. Here is how we described it in our reply brief (embedded below, with our appellants' brief):
Perhaps the most blatant outrage in the Riley response brief involves the Shulers’ claim re: equitable tolling, due to Carol Shuler’s broken arm – broken by law-enforcement thugs in Missouri. Riley states: “It is nonsense to suggest that an injury to Carol Shuler should extend the statute of limitations date for a claim of abuse of process which belonged only to Roger Shuler. Carol Shuler was not a party in the underlying Shelby County court action upon which the abuse of process claim was based.”
We invite you to examine a couple of documents (here and here) from the underlying court action in Shelby County. The first is an amicus curiae memorandum from the Alabama office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), showing that Judge Claud Neilson's actions in ordering my arrest and incarceration were wildly unlawful. Under "Respondents" near the top of the motion, you will notice the name Carol T. Shuler. That's my wife, the one who had her arm broken. Her name is present because she was a party to the case, put there by the Riley defendants themselves, who included her in their lawsuit.
Stott and Harrington
The second document is Rob Riley's Motion for Contempt. Again, the name Carol T. Shuler appears among Respondents. And Riley even goes so far as to seek her arrest.How do the Riley defendants, and their Stott and Harrington lawyers, then reach the conclusion Carol was not a party in the Shelby County court action? That defies explanation, and here is our reaction in the replay brief:
Carol Shuler was not a party? Really? Are the Riley defendants and their lawyers monstrous liars or are they too lazy to check the public record? The Riley lawyer does not even know who his client sued? Carol Shuler most certainly was a defendant in the underlying court action, and a simple search on Alacourt.gov shows that (if Riley hasn’t caused the record to be sealed). In fact, the Riley defendants specifically sought Carol Shuler’s unlawful arrest and incarceration, just as they did with Roger Shuler; their law-enforcement cronies just weren’t able to kidnap her. This blatant false statement in a legal brief should call into question all of the so-called arguments Riley attempts to pass off as legitimate.
Both the Riley defendants and the Stott-Harrington lawyers are "officers of the court," so this sham argument probably constitutes fraud on the court. We will be studying that issue and considering how to respond as we await findings from the Eleventh Circuit.
(To be continued)
