Saturday, September 2, 2017

The 11th Circuit's decision re district courts' obligation to serve complaints of poor pro se litigants - too little to overcome the widespread practice of discrimination against the poor by federal courts.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit has issued a very important ruling regarding civil rights cases of indigent people:  that federal courts must themselves serve complaints of people who are given the so-called IFP status.

Yet, as important as this ruling is, it does not cancel the statute - and a very wide-spread practice - where federal trial courts dismiss pro se lawsuits of indigent people before serving them upon the opponents - as the 11th Circuit say they must do, pretending that they are "frivolous", and thus acting as advocates for the defendants.

Abolishing the statute is more in order, as this very rare case can be easily circumvented by dismissing the pro se IFP complaint and designating the appeal as "frivolous", as trial courts are allowed to do by statute, thus blocking appeals from their own decisions.

28 U.S.C. 1915(h) should be abolished as a disgusting statute allowing and encouraging discrimination against victims of civil rights violations by the government simply because they are poor.

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