Federal Lawsuit Update 13

The long drawn out legal battle by Paul Kendall, Frank Martin, and Phillip Rousseau against HoCo is settled. Last month their effort to overturn the HoCo Board of Elections decision on the Turf Valley petition was dismissed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4^th Circuit in Richmond. This week their effort to stop Wegmans and overturn 15 years of HoCo zoning decisions was similarly dismissed by the court. They asserted that their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution had been denied by HoCo government.

The court was unimpressed with their legal arguments. They actually said that the case should have never even gotten this far. They wrote that the case should have been dismissed at the district court level.

“In this case, the Residents purport to state claims, which are possessed by every citizen of Howard County, to require that the County government “be administered according to law.” Their grievances are accordingly simply too generalized to provide them with standing to support federal jurisdiction. We therefore vacate the district court’s Burford order and remand with instructions to dismiss this action for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.”

For the past two years Kendall and his attorney Susan Gray, have lost in every court battle they’ve argued in. During this period I have been assisted in covering their legal shenanigans by a long time Tales of Two Cities netizen, Lotsabogeys. That of course is not his real name but I can assure you he’s a real person. We met for beers once at Victoria.

I am always appreciative when I get to have this kind of collaboration with a reader. It’s probably time to buy him another beer.