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Ernest Walker, left, and Gary Fielder (screengrab via YouTube)
Two Michigan and Colorado attorneys who were sanctioned to the tune of more than $185,000 for their failed 2020 election lawsuit against Dominion Voting Systems, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, several Democratic governors, and others, did not receive any help whatsoever Monday from the Supreme Court of the United States.
SCOTUS, in a lengthy orders list to kick off the October term, refused to hear the petition for a writ of certiorari that was filed by Ernest J. Walker and Gary D. Fielder in May.
In their petition, the attorneys asserted that the trial and appellate courts based their costly sanctions rulings “upon a misunderstanding of constitutional law and § 1983, which, if not corrected, will have a long and devasting [sic] effect on American jurisprudence.”
The petition posed four questions for SCOTUS to answer:
1. Whether Petitioners were properly sanctioned under a district court’s inherent authority for asserting standing on behalf of voters for damages against private persons engaged in state action pursuant to § 1983.
2. Whether Petitioners were properly sanctioned for multiplying the proceeding in violation of § 1927 by naming certain out-of-state defendants when they were voluntarily dismissed without inconvenience to them in their individual capacity.
3. Whether Petitioners were denied due process by the Tenth Circuit’s affirmation of the district court’s refusal to set an evidentiary hearing before sanctioning them.
4. Whether a sanction requiring Petitioners to pay over $186,000 for the attorney fees of the requesting defendants was reasonable.
Apparently not impressed with any of the above, the high court Monday declined to take up the case — without comment, as is typical in most case denials.
A federal magistrate judge in November 2021 ordered Walker and Fielder to pay a combined total of $186,922.50 in 2021 for trying to pass off “unverified and uninvestigated defamatory rumors” as court credible pleadings.
When U.S. Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter decided to toss the case in August 2021, he called the “bad faith” lawsuit “one enormous conspiracy theory.”
The magistrate noted that the lawyers had even cited up a Time Magazine article as supposed proof of a racketeering (RICO) plot involving Democratic governors and secretaries of state to steal the election from Donald Trump and hand it to Joe Biden, with the help of voting machine company Dominion, social media giant Facebook, and Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state.
“For Plaintiffs’ counsel to hold up this article as supporting the existence of an illegal RICO conspiracy to rig the election is an affront to the truth and an attempt to mislead the Court,” Neureiter said at the time, adding that the case was “not a client-generated lawsuit.”
“This is exclusively a creation of the Plaintiff’s counsel. They are experienced lawyers who should have known better. They need to take responsibility for their misconduct,” the magistrate summarized.
The magistrate judge further said that Walker and Fielder’s “pointless and unjustified lawsuit” also damaged the public trust in the legal system, by “manipulat[ing] gullible members of the public and foment[ing] public unrest.”
“To that extent, this lawsuit has been an abuse of the legal system and an interference with the machinery of government,” the judge added.
In their petition to SCOTUS, Walker and Fielder claimed the Time Magazine article “was only a part of a broad foundation constructed by many pieces of evidence that create a clear picture of abuse.”
Marisa Sarnoff contributed to this report.
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