As I’ve previously mentioned, one of my pet peeves is the claim by the trial lawyer crowd that tort reform is unnecessary because judges already have the power to punish lawyers who file frivolous lawsuits. Technically, this claim is true. But it relies upon an extremely narrow definition of “frivolous” — the vast majority of absurd cases covered here on Overlawyered are not considered frivolous by current legal standards — and those who practice know how rare it is for judges to actually issue sanctions.

Take John Aretakis. He’s a New York attorney who has carved a legal niche for himself suing the Catholic Church over sexual abuse by priests. Well, to be more precise, the legal niche he occupied, according to a federal judge’s ruling last month, was filing a series of “utterly baseless” lawsuits against the Church, in which he ignored the law, misrepresented the law to the court, filed cut-and-paste complaints without proofreading them, and filed and publicized the suits for the improper purpose of embarrassing and humiliating Church officials. (AP, North Country Gazette).

Although this was not the first such lawsuit filed by Aretakis — or the second, or the third — and even though his suits have been uniformly rejected, this is the first time a judge has sanctioned him for his behavior. The court described the suit harshly as follows:

Taking Mr. Aretakis’s behavior in this case as a whole, it is clear that his conduct is sanctionable because it is sloppy and unprofessional; the pleadings are so far removed from adequate that they cannot be said to have been filed in good faith or after a reasonable inquiry; the bulk of the allegations dealing with sexual abuse are wholly irrelevant to the RICO claim, and; the Title VII claim is admittedly without basis in law.

But despite this harsh description, the Court still declined to make the victims of this frivolous lawsuit whole; Aretakis was fined just $8,000 — far less than the defendants asked for — and told not to do it again.

And it wasn’t because Aretakis made such a good argument in his defense:

Not surprisingly, Mr. Aretakis’s response to the Motion for Sanctions does not respond in a meaningful way as to why sanctions are not appropriate here. Instead, Mr. Aretakis recounts an irrelevant action in Tucson, Arizona, and another regurgitation of thrice-told tales of sexual abuse, plus non-sequiturs concerning a drunken process server with felony convictions attempting to serve process, among other wholly irrelevant topics.

The text of the decision can be found here (PDF).

Read On…

Filed under: Arizona, loser pays