A Shaggy-Dog Suit That Courts Can’t Shed

Thousands of small-claims lawsuits are filed in Orange County each year, but Allan Miller’s was unusual. He complained that his car had been hit by a dog.

Miller, 50, a Newport Beach attorney, wanted $315.09 from his neighbor who owns the dog, and though he lost his case, he did not lose his resolve.

Now, 2 1/2 years later, the matter is in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, where Miller is demanding a total of $22 million from the judges he says persecuted him and from the deputy marshals he says brutalized him.

Along the way, Miller filed petitions to disqualify every judge in the Laguna Niguel courthouse where his case was heard. In court documents, Miller referred to one judge as an “irrational tyrant” and to another as “evil and malicious.”

He has unsuccessfully appealed to Superior Court. He has been assessed $750 for making frivolous motions, and when he didn’t pay, he was arrested and jailed briefly.

But his civil rights suits against two Municipal Court judges and two deputy marshals are still alive.

“He literally made a federal case out of a case he had no right to appeal in the first place,” said Municipal Judge Pamela Lee Iles, one of the judges Miller sued but who has been dismissed as a defendant.

Miller repeatedly refused to be interviewed by The Times.

He has also refused cash settlement offers, according to Albert P. Ballog Jr., who is defending the judges and deputy marshals against Miller’s suits.

Ballog said that although Miller’s case is virtually unwinnable, he would “love” to settle the matter out of court and save litigation costs for the county. “But I can’t control the litigation. The plaintiff always has that option.”

And Miller, Ballog said, “feels he’s entitled to his day in court.”

To an outsider, the story may seem amusing, Ballog conceded. “I wish I could laugh at some point at this, but I can’t. I have two deputies accused of wrongdoing,” he said.

According to the county counsel’s office, which opposed Miller’s motions in Superior Court, the trouble is older than the dog-hits-car incident. Miller’s small-claims case was “part of what appears to be a longstanding neighborhood dispute,” the county counsel stated in one court document.

Miller lives on the closed end of a six-house cul-de-sac extending from Islamare Lane to the edge of a private lake in Lake Forest. At the other end lives Ashley, Jacob Garcia’s Old English sheepdog.

It was Ashley who, on Thanksgiving Day, 1985, “ran loose in the street into plaintiff’s car causing damage,” according to Miller’s small-claims suit against Garcia, which he filed 11 months later. Miller demanded $315.09 as reimbursement for repairing a dent and renting a car.

Miller’s case was one of hundreds that came before court Commissioner Ronald Steelman in Laguna Niguel in 1986, but Steelman still remembers it.

He said in a recent interview that he was surprised by Miller’s allegation that the dog, running from near Garcia’s home, could have caused such damage.

Steelman had an Old English sheepdog of his own. “I know that they are big and heavy, but I couldn’t believe it could cause a dent in a collision like that,” Steelman said.

He said he asked Garcia whether the dog showed any injury. None at all, Garcia replied.

“My dog is very independent,” Steelman said, “and if he decides to go after a cat on a walk, there’s not much I can do about it. It’s not beyond the possibility he could dent a car, but if he did, I think he’d at least be weaving around a little afterward.”

Steelman ruled against Miller, and under usual circumstances, that would have been the end of the case. According to state law, if you file suit in small-claims court and lose, you have no right to appeal.

But a month later, Miller filed a 13-page motion in Municipal Court in Laguna Niguel. He wanted Steelman’s decision set aside and a new trial ordered because, he alleged, Steelman and Garcia had conspired against him.

“It is obvious,” Miller wrote, “that, in finding for the defendant, Steelman was biased and partial, since he, himself, has a large English sheep dog and sided with the dog owner.”

He also accused Garcia of “discrimination, malice and evil” in trying to turn the neighborhood against him during the 10 years Miller had lived there.

The matter came before Iles on Feb. 3. “When I first saw the papers, I thought it was a practical joke,” she recalled. “It was my first day on the civil calendar. I mean, a dog running into your car? God!”

But Iles wasn’t joking after she learned it was an actual motion. She said in an interview that she regarded the motion as “legally, factually . . . and in any other circumstances bizarre” and asked Miller whether he knew that law prohibited appealing such small-claims decisions.

“He told me he was aware of that, ‘but. . . ,’ ” Iles recalled. It became apparent that “Mr. Miller decided it wasn’t over because he didn’t win,” she said.

Miller later stated in a deposition that Iles “became very hostile and belligerent, kind of gritted her teeth. . . .”

Iles not only denied Miller’s motion but ordered Miller back for a hearing on whether he should be punished for filing a frivolous motion.

Miller was due in Iles’ court at 9 a.m. March 24, 1987, but court records show that he did not appear then. Iles went ahead and assessed a $750 sanction against Miller, giving him until April 1 to pay it to Garcia.

The court records show that Miller appeared in court “after 10 a.m.” that day and was notified of Iles’ ruling. Later, Miller declared in a petition that he had been delayed because “my stomach was upset.”

To challenge Iles’ ruling, Miller took his cause to Superior Court in Santa Ana, asking that Iles’ decision be reviewed and that she be stopped from punishing him. He described Iles’ conduct as “outrageous and that of an irrational tyrant who had treated me as a common criminal.”

The county counsel stepped in to represent Iles in the matter.

“Basically, what we are dealing with,” wrote Deputy County Counsel Gene Axelrod to the court, is an attorney who “could not cope with the fact that he lost his case against a lay person. . . . Not being able to accept that reality, he conjured up a motion . . . so contrived, spurious and frivolous . . . as to justify imposition of sanctions.”

A Superior Court judge dismissed Miller’s petition, allowing the sanction to stand, and on Aug. 25, 1987, Iles cited Miller for contempt of court because the money had still not been paid.

She set a hearing on the matter, which was postponed three times while Miller countered by filing objections and disqualifications of Iles and two other judges.

But when the case was called by Municipal Judge Blair Barnette--the only judge in Laguna Niguel that Miller had not disqualified--Miller was not in court, according to court records.

When Miller still had not appeared an hour later, Barnette dismissed Miller’s motions, ordered a warrant for Miller’s arrest, disallowed the disqualification of Iles and sent the case back to her.

Records show that Miller appeared in Barnette’s court at 1:30 p.m. that day, saying that is when he thought the hearing was scheduled. Miller later stated in a deposition that Barnette did not tell him a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Barnette claimed he told Miller about the warrant and instructed him to go to Iles’ court “forthwith.”

Apparently Miller did not go, however, because Iles signed the warrant that day ordering Miller’s arrest and marked it “Expedite.”

The next morning, Oct. 28, 1987, two deputy marshals went to Miller’s house, arrested him and put him in a holding cell at the Laguna Niguel courthouse.

In a deposition, Miller said the deputies pounded on his door about 6:30 a.m., threatened to kick it in and, once in the house, refused to let him dress properly or take his high-blood-pressure medication with him.

He said one marshal called him “a goddamn flake” and applied a chokehold so firmly that “I could hardly breathe.” One marshal searched his pockets and, in doing so, fondled him, he alleged.

(Ballog said in an interview that the only witnesses are two neighbors who saw the arrest, and their accounts are “completely opposite of what he (Miller) says.”) Miller was released later that day, and in a hearing a week later, Miller’s brother, Jack J. Miller, had taken over the case. The two Millers practice law together in the same Newport Beach office.

Iles vacated the contempt-of-court citation and redefined the $750 sanction as a judgment, thus leaving it up to Garcia to collect. By this time, she and Barnette had been named as conspirators in Miller’s federal suits, and Miller soon added as defendants two deputy marshals--Rudy Burbank and Don Maderios--whom he alleged had abused him.

U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon dismissed Iles from one suit, ruling that she was protected by judicial immunity. A similar motion on behalf of Barnette is set for hearing in June.

But the two deputies remain as defendants, and trial in that case is scheduled to begin before Kenyon on Aug. 15.

Ballog says he is virtually certain that if the case goes to trial, his clients will win. But recovering attorney fees is unlikely, he said. “We’d have to show it (Miller’s suit) was frivolous, without any merit at all, and that’s difficult,” Ballog said.

Ballog said he is trying to arrange some forum other than federal court--such as arbitration--where Miller can have “his day in court” less expensively.

Garcia said in a recent interview that Miller still has not paid the $750, and he won’t try to collect. Garcia and others in the neighborhood said their tactic is to ignore Miller and leave him entirely alone.

“He’s a very odd duck, very unusual,” Garcia said. “He’s very introspective, a bachelor in a bedroom community full of kids and dogs. He doesn’t seem to like that kind of environment.

“Remember when you were a kid? Every neighborhood had a grumpy old neighbor. That’s who he is.”