‘Vexatious Litigants’ : Little-Known Blacklist Bars Some From Filing Lawsuits

Richard Stypmann is classified as a “vexatious litigant” by the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, a title that prevents him from filing a lawsuit in the federal courthouse.

In the past, Stypmann estimates he has filed up to 200 lawsuits, plus 300 administrative complaints of police misconduct.

“I’m a vexing litigant,” Stypmann says proudly. “I’m vexing to the dictators and the abusers of civil rights.”

Stypmann is one of at least 70 people whose names have been placed on a little-known blacklist of people who must get approval from a judge before filing a lawsuit in the court, whose jurisdiction includes the San Francisco area and northern coast of California.

The orders are based on no law or court rule but on the “inherent power of the court to control its business,” said Chief Judge Robert Peckham.

He says he favors maximum access to the courts but takes comfort from the fact that the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals hasn’t ordered San Francisco judges to accept any cases from the blacklist.

Court files checked by the San Francisco Examiner show that attempts to get approval for filing lawsuits by those on the blacklist are routinely rejected. About half of the orders blacklisting litigants have been issued since 1984.

The subjects of the orders include civic gadflies, the mentally ill, tax protesters, prisoners, and ordinary people with gripes against corporate and government bureaucracies. All have filed previous suits, often more than 10, without the help of lawyer, before being blacklisted.

One prisoner filed about two dozen suits. In one year alone, he submitted 36,000 pages of documents.

The suits often duplicate earlier ones that have been thrown out. The judges handing down the orders call the subjects’ suits “frivolous” and often “incoherent.”

Scrapes With Authorities

Stypmann, 41, a process server, has been getting into scrapes with authorities since he was 12 when he says he “picketed a cop who beat a dog” in his native North Carolina. Since he came to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, he has been arrested 175 times “just because I’m politically active.”

The most famous name on the blacklist, and the one that has been there the longest, is Ruchell Magee.

The 48-year-old Folsom Prison inmate is serving two life sentences, one for robbery and kidnaping in 1963, the other for kidnaping a Marin County Superior Court judge in a bloody 1971 courthouse breakout.

In the first four months of 1971, U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti noted in his no-filing order that year, Magee filed 10 unsuccessful suits. Since 1984, judges have rejected at least nine more suits, ruling them all frivolous.