Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

“…His penchant for litigation as a form of costless entertainment”

In the past two years Tyrone Hurt has filed more than seventy appeals with the D.C. Circuit, whose judges observe (PDF):

In just the last couple of years, Hurt has sued the Declaration of Independence, Black’s Law Dictionary, the United Nations, agencies of the District of Columbia and the Federal Government, and various courts and their officers. Hurt has . . . demanded the deportation of a Spanish-speaking government employee.

Finding that Hurt has abused the privilege of having filing fees waived for indigence (“in forma pauperis”) the court dismissed his forty-four pending cases and decreed that he will have to pay ordinary filing fees if he wishes to bring any more pro se actions in that court. Hurt’s various failed lawsuits have demanded “sums of money dwarfing the size of the Federal Government’s annual budget”. (WSJ law blog, Oct. 3).

Filed under: ,

4 Comments

  • I just ran a search for Amanda Ajuluchuku on this site, and I’m stunned that the search came up blank. I recently defended a bank, one of the over 500 defendants she’s sued in federal court pro se, in forma pauperis, which she accused of programming its ATM machines to give her the wrong change (change? from an ATM) due to her race and disability. Fortunately my client did the right thing, and took my advice not to give her a thousand dollars to go away. She won’t sue them again.

    There ought to be a law about such people. Come to think of it, there is a law about such people, but it’s ridiculously hard to enforce, and jail isn’t an option. And overlawyered ought to have an easier to find link to such people. God only knows how much wasteful expenditure they wring through the courts.

    • By SSFC

  • Has anyone filed a Fed.R. 11(c) motion for sanctions for filing a frivolous pleading? Another question would be, why haven’t the various courts issued orders to the clerk to stop accepting these pleadings? Why has the DC Circuit continued to allow Tyrone Hurt to file with the Court?

  • Many a FRCP Rule 11 motion has been dismissed in the Circuit Courts because the FRCP is not applicable there, rather the FRAP is.

    • By VMS

  • >>>”God only knows how much wasteful expenditure they wring through the courts.”<<<

    If you want to seriously address problems in the court system, you may want to start with the source of the problems: attorneys. I have to admit that as an attorney, I’m disgusted with the monopoly that we have created in the field of law and the massive incompetence of my peers who can’t do good and appropriate work for their clients.

    In places like New York, you can’t do anything in the court system without a lawyer, even when the issue is minor. Contrast that with states like California where a great deal of work is done by litigants themselves and by legal assistance from paralegals. The court system in Brooklyn NY is so corrupt that an injustice of epic proportions is being perpetrated.

    Then, we have the absurd laws aimed at white collar crime and those laws for marijuana. Two sets of legal matters that are so overly harsh in their sentencing guidelines that we are losing an entire generation of tax paying Americans. A brain drain is happening around us and some people turn their focus on irrelevant and non-issues such as this one.