Sykes v. Cook Cnty. Circuit Court Prob. Div., No. 15-1781 (7th Cir. 2016)
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After losing an Illinois guardianship battle concerning her mother, Gloria filed a federal lawsuit, alleging that officials and the state were violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by refusing reasonable accommodations to allow her mother of the right to be present at court proceedings with family members. The Seventh Circuit affirmed dismissal,citing the Rooker‐Feldman doctrine and long‐established precedent that federal courts may not intervene in state probate proceedings . Gloria returned to state court, pursuing a “Motion for Reasonable Accommodations” for herself and her mother in the probate proceeding. Gloria went to the motion hearing with her service dog, Shaggy, for assistance with her post‐traumatic stress disorder. She entered the building without a problem and went to Judge MacCarthy’s courtroom. Gloria alleges that Judge MacCarthy called the case, and then “immediately, angrily, and indifferently” interrogated Gloria about her need for Shaggy and “expelled Gloria and her dog from the courtroom—banned forever.” The record reflects only an order striking Gloria’s motion without prejudice and prohibiting Gloria from returning with Shaggy without leave of the court. Gloria returned to federal court, alleging that banning Shaggy from the courtroom violated the ADA. The district court again dismissed, finding that it lacked subject matter jurisdiction. The Seventh Circuit agreed, reasoning that the source of any injury is a state court judgment.
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In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 15 1781 GLORIA JEAN SYKES, Plaintiff Appellant, v. COOK COUNTY CIRCUIT COURT PROBATE DIVISION, et al., Defendants Appellees. ____________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 1:14 cv 07459 — John J. Tharp, Jr., Judge. ____________________ ARGUED APRIL 5, 2016 — DECIDED SEPTEMBER 14, 2016 ____________________ Before WOOD, Chief Judge, and BAUER and WILLIAMS, Cir cuit Judges. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge. Gloria Jean Sykes went to her mother’s probate proceeding to present a motion and brought her service dog, Shaggy. Instead of letting her present her mo tion, the judge asked her a series of questions about Shaggy, struck her motion, and entered an order barring Shaggy from the courtroom. Gloria argues that she should be able to bring a lawsuit in federal court for denial of reasonable accommo dations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But be cause the source of her injury is a state court judgment, we lack subject matter jurisdiction to hear her case. 2 No. 15 1781 I. BACKGROUND A. Gloria’s First Federal Lawsuit This case originates in an earlier guardianship dispute be tween two sisters over their mother, Mary G. Sykes. Gloria Jean Sykes is Mary’s younger daughter. Carolyn Toerpe, her older daughter, was granted guardianship of Mary in 2009. After losing the state guardianship battle, Gloria filed a law suit in 2011 in federal court, alleging that Toerpe, the Cook County Guardian, two participating guardians ad litem, the Cook County Circuit Court, then Governor Quinn, and the state of Illinois were violating the ADA by refusing reasonable accommodations to her mother. Gloria alleged among other things that the state defendants were depriving her mother of the right to be present at court proceedings and to receive rea sonable accommodations in the form of support and consul tation with family members. The district court dismissed the lawsuit, finding that if Gloria obtained the relief she sought, it would be forced to overturn the state court decision grant ing guardianship to Toerpe, in violation of the Rooker Feldman doctrine. It also relied on long established precedent that fed eral courts may not intervene in state probate proceedings. We affirmed the dismissal of that lawsuit. M.G.S. ex rel. Sykes v. Toerpe, No. 12 3373, Dkt. 19 (7th Cir. Jan. 9, 2013) (un published order). B. State Probate Proceeding After losing her federal appeal, Gloria returned to state court, pursuing her federal claims in a “Motion for Reasona ble Accommodations,” seeking relief both for herself and her mother in the probate proceeding. On the day the motion was scheduled for hearing, Gloria went to the Daley Center with her service dog, Shaggy, whom she uses for assistance with her post traumatic stress disorder. She entered the building without a problem and then went up to the courtroom of Judge Aicha MacCarthy, who was presiding over Mary’s pro bate case. Gloria alleges that Judge MacCarthy called the case, No. 15 1781 3 and then “immediately, angrily, and indifferently” interro gated Gloria about her need for Shaggy. She also states that the interrogation lasted for several minutes, and at its end, MacCarthy “expelled Gloria and her dog from the court room—banned forever.” While it’s unclear what caused Glo ria to think the ban was in perpetuity, the probate record re flects that Judge MacCarthy entered an order striking Gloria’s motion without prejudice and prohibiting Gloria from return ing with Shaggy without leave of the court. C. The Current Lawsuit Gloria returned to federal court with a new complaint that recycled many of her old claims, but added one that is the fo cus of today’s decision: she alleged that by banning Shaggy from her courtroom, various state defendants violated Glo ria’s rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The district court again dismissed all claims that Gloria as serted on behalf of her mother for largely the same reasons as the first lawsuit. It then turned specifically to Gloria’s claim regarding Shaggy and concluded that it lacked subject matter jurisdiction to determine if Gloria’s ADA rights were violated because she was denied use of a service animal during court proceedings. First, it held that because Gloria’s claim against the state defendants was inextricably intertwined with the state court order banning Shaggy and striking Gloria’s reason able accommodation motion, as a federal court, it was barred from hearing the claim under the Rooker Feldman doctrine. Rooker v. Fidelity Tr. Co., 263 U.S. 413 (1923); D.C. Court of Ap peals v. Feldman, 460 U.S. 462 (1983). Second, it held that it was barred from hearing the claim because it arose out of a state probate proceeding. And finally, it held that it should exercise Younger abstention because the proceeding was ongoing and because Gloria had an adequate opportunity to raise her fed eral claims about Shaggy in state court. See Younger v. Harris, 401 U.S. 37 (1971). 4 No. 15 1781 II. ANALYSIS On appeal, Gloria only challenges the district court’s dis missal of her ADA claim pertaining to the use of Shaggy in Judge MacCarthy’s courtroom. We review a district court’s dismissal for lack of subject matter jurisdiction de novo, ac cept as true all facts in the complaint and draw all reasonable inferences in the plaintiff’s favor. G&S Holdings, LLC v. Cont’l Cas. Co., 697 F.3d 534, 539 (7th Cir. 2012). We may affirm a dis missal for lack of jurisdiction on any ground that the record supports. Sladek v. Bell Mgmt. Pension Plan, 880 F.2d 972, 979 (7th Cir. 1989). A. ADA Accommodations for Service Animals Before reaching the question of jurisdiction, it helps to un derstand the substantive footing of Gloria’s claim. Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits public entities (which includes instrumentalities of state and local govern ments, like courthouses) from discriminating against quali fied individuals with disabilities. See 29 U.S.C. §§ 701 et seq., 42 U.S.C. § 12132. The ADA’s accommodation mandate re flects enforcement efforts by Congress to ensure citizens’ due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Tennessee v. Lane, 541 U.S. 509, 523 (2004). In Lane, the Supreme Court con sidered the Title II claims of paraplegic litigants and members of the public who were forced to crawl up stairs to access a courtroom, and held that Congress was authorized to, and did, abrogate Tennessee’s right to sovereign immunity in de fending against the claims by passing Title II of the ADA. Id. at 531. With a few exceptions, Title II requires public entities to permit service animals to accompany people with disabilities in all areas where members of the public are allowed to go. 28 C.F.R. § 35.136(g). Service animals are defined as dogs that are individually trained to do work or perform tasks for people with disabilities. Id. at § 35.104. “Emotional support animals” are not considered service animals which fall under Title II’s No. 15 1781 5 mandate. Id. In situations where it is not obvious if a dog is a service animal, employees of a public entity are permitted to ask if the dog is a service animal required because of a disa bility, and what work or task the dog has been trained to per form. 28 C.F.R. § 35.136(f). They are not permitted to request documentation for the dog, require the dog to demonstrate a task, or inquire about the nature of the person’s disability. Id. The basis of Gloria’s ADA claim on appeal is that Judge MacCarthy and by extension, the Probate Division of Cook County Circuit Court, asked impermissible questions to bar Shaggy from the courtroom, and denied Gloria reasonable ac commodations by banning Shaggy. Gloria’s complaint claims that Shaggy is a service dog, and we will proceed on that as sumption for the purposes of our analysis. Because Shaggy was banned from the courtroom, Gloria claims she was effec tively excluded from participating in and benefiting from ser vices of the courthouse. This case differs from a Lane style claim of denial of access to a courthouse, because her exclu sion from the courthouse stemmed from a judicial order, not from a courthouse policy or practice. B. District Court Lacked Subject Matter Jurisdiction With her claim now framed, we must determine if the dis trict court had jurisdiction over Gloria’s claim. At the time of the district court’s decision, Mary’s probate proceeding was ongoing. As a result, the district court applied Younger absten tion, the principle that federal courts should abstain from in terfering with ongoing state judicial proceedings that are ju dicial in nature, involve important state interests, provide an adequate opportunity to raise federal claims, and do not con tain special circumstances that would make abstention inap propriate. See Stroman Realty, Inc. v. Martinez, 505 F.3d 658, 662 (7th Cir. 2007). Between the district court’s ruling and this ap peal, Mary died, so her probate proceeding is terminated. As a result of Mary’s death, Younger is now a moot question be cause there is no ongoing state proceeding for us to disturb. 6 No. 15 1781 The district court also invoked the probate exception to federal subject matter jurisdiction, which precludes federal courts from interfering with persons and property that are in the custody of a state probate court. Marshall v. Marshall, 547 U.S. 293, 311 12 (2006). The rationale for the rule is that in sit uations where a state court controls the subject of a custody battle or the property in a decedent’s estate, another court should not “be permitted to elbow its way into such a fight,” particularly because state courts are assumed to have devel oped a core proficiency in probate and domestic relations matters. Struck v. Cook Cty. Pub. Guardian, 508 F.3d 858, 860 (7th Cir. 2007). But the exception does not bar federal courts from exercising otherwise proper jurisdiction, Marshall, 547 U.S. at 312, and we have cautioned that as a judicially created exception to the statutory grant of diversity jurisdiction, the probate exception should be narrowly construed, Storm v. Storm, 328 F.3d 941, 944 (7th Cir. 2003). In determining if the probate exception applies to an issue that is ancillary to a core probate matter, we look to the policies animating the excep tion, including consistency of legal decisions within a state court system, judicial economy, and the relative expertise of state judges as specialists in probate issues. Id. We are not convinced that applying the probate exception was appropriate under the above analysis. The decision pre venting Gloria from bringing her service animal into the courtroom has nothing to do with probate law. A probate court is in no better position to determine a litigant’s entitle ment to a reasonable accommodation than any other court. And there is nothing about bringing her ADA claim to federal court which would create dissonance in probate or domestic relations rulings across Cook County. In short, the injury com plained of here bears no relationship to probate law, other than that it happened to take place in a probate courtroom. We find this type of coincidental connection to a probate mat ter unpersuasive as a ground for stripping federal courts of No. 15 1781 7 their power to hear federal claims. So we do not find the pro bate exception a persuasive ground for dismissing the case. With those theories out of the way, we turn finally to the district court’s conclusion that it lacked jurisdiction under the Rooker Feldman doctrine. We start by noting that Gloria had at least three avenues to overturn Judge MacCarthy’s order in state court. She could have (1) sought mandamus in the Illi nois Supreme Court, see ILL. CONST. 1970, art. VI, § 4(a); People ex rel. Birkett v. Konetski, 909 N.E.2d 783, 791 (Ill. 2009), (2) pur sued an interlocutory appeal in a state appellate court under Illinois Supreme Court Rule 307, or (3) filed a motion for a supervisory order under Illinois Supreme Court Rule 383. In stead of pursuing these avenues, Gloria went to federal court. Lower federal courts are not vested with appellate author ity over state courts. Rooker, 263 U.S. at 416; Feldman, 460 U.S. at 486. The Rooker Feldman doctrine prevents lower federal courts from exercising jurisdiction over cases brought by state court losers challenging state court judgments rendered be fore the district court proceedings commenced. Exxon Mobil v. Saudi Basic Indus. Corp., 544 U.S. 280, 284 (2005). The ra tionale for the doctrine is that no matter how wrong a state court judgment may be under federal law, only the Supreme Court of the United States has jurisdiction to review it. Brown v. Bowman, 668 F.3d 437, 442 (7th Cir. 2012). Claims that di rectly seek to set aside a state court judgment are de facto ap peals which trigger the doctrine. Taylor v. Fed. Nat’l Mortg. Ass’n, 374 F.3d 529, 532 (7th Cir. 2004). But even federal claims which were not raised in state court, or that do not on their face require review of a state court’s decision, may still be sub ject to Rooker Feldman if those claims are inextricably inter twined with a state court judgment. Id. The “inextricably in tertwined” determination hinges on whether the federal claim alleges that the injury was caused by the state court judgment, or alternatively, whether the federal claim alleges an independent prior injury that the state court failed to rem 8 No. 15 1781 edy. Id. Because Rooker itself arose from a constitutional chal lenge to the state court’s use of procedures, the Rooker Feldman doctrine applies to procedural state court rulings as well as substantive ones. See Harold v. Steel, 773 F.3d 884, 887 (7th Cir. 2014). Further, we have held that interlocutory orders entered prior to the final disposition of state court lawsuits are not im mune from the jurisdiction stripping powers of Rooker Feld man. Id. at 886. But Rooker Feldman has its limits, and federal jurisdiction does not terminate automatically on the entry of judgment in a state court. Exxon Mobil, 544 U.S. at 293. The doctrine occu pies “narrow ground” and is “confined to the cases of the kind from which the doctrine acquired its name: cases brought by state court losers … inviting district court review and rejection of [those state court’s] judgments.” Id. at 284. In order for the doctrine to apply, the state court judgment must be “inextricably intertwined” with the federal court lawsuit. In other words, there must be no way for the injury com plained of by a plaintiff to be separated from a state court judgment. See id. at 293; Commonwealth Plaza Condo. Ass’n v. City of Chi., 693 F.3d 743, 746 (7th Cir. 2012); see also Kelley v. Med 1 Solutions, LLC, 548 F.3d 600, 607 (7th Cir. 2008). So, for example, a state court loser is not barred from targeting a stat ute which has been construed against her in a state court de cision, so long as she does not seek to overturn the state court judgment itself. Skinner v. Switzer, 562 U.S. 521, 532–33 (2011). And the Supreme Court has warned not to confuse Rooker Feldman with claim preclusion: “If a federal plaintiff pre sent[s] some independent claim that denies a legal conclusion that a state court has reached in a case to which he was a party …, then there is jurisdiction, and state law determines whether the defendant prevails under principles of preclu sion.” Exxon, 544 U.S. at 293. In a similar vein, non parties are not barred from bringing a challenge to a state court judgment simply because they could be considered in privity with a party to the judgment. Lance v. Dennis, 546 U.S. 459, 466 (2009). No. 15 1781 9 Gloria argues that the allegations in her complaint are in dependent from Judge MacCarthy’s order because they focus on Judge MacCarthy’s wrongful conduct—interrogating Glo ria about Shaggy and banning Shaggy from the courtroom— and not her order denying Gloria’s motion for reasonable ac commodations. We addressed a similar argument in Kelley v. Med 1 Solutions, where the plaintiff argued it was not the state court’s award of attorneys’ fees which caused his injury, but rather the attorneys’ preceding fraudulent misrepresentations which led to the erroneous award. 548 F.3d at 605. We found that we lacked jurisdiction to hear the claim because in order to find that the defendants’ underlying representations vio lated the law, we would be forced to determine that the state court, which evaluated those representations, erred in its judgment granting the attorneys’ fees. Id. Similarly here, the result of Judge MacCarthy’s alleged misconduct was a state court order explicitly banning Gloria’s service animal from her courtroom. If the judge violated the ADA by engaging in impermissible questioning or wrongly banning Shaggy from her courtroom, those alleged violations were also the basis of her order. In her response to the defendants’ motion to dismiss, Glo ria attached an affidavit advancing a new theory that she was not attacking the order but instead a policy, practice or custom of ADA violations by Judge MacCarthy. She tried again to frame her challenge as distinct from the previous order ban ning Shaggy, by pointing to fresh violations when she re turned to the courtroom with Shaggy a few weeks after the order was entered. Her affidavit included allegations that Judge MacCarthy dismissed Shaggy as “just a pet” and ac cused Gloria of not having a disability. This information was ostensibly offered to show that Gloria suffered a series of vi olations, and the order was simply incidental to them. But even if we could consider the affidavit, it also states that the judge expressed anger because she did not follow the previous 10 No. 15 1781 order, which only reinforces the conclusion that the initial or der was a direct result of the judge’s preliminary inquiry and subsequent ban. In sum, to provide any relief in response to the harm stemming from Judge MacCarthy’s acts, her court order banning Shaggy would need to be set aside. The proper way to challenge the court order was through state court ave nues. Rooker Feldman will not always bar a litigant from bringing claims against a state court for denial of reasonable accommo dations. If the Daley Center had a policy of banning service animals, Gloria’s claim may have survived dismissal. Lane comes to mind as an example of an injury that occurred as a result of a litigant’s participation in a judicial proceeding, but was not inextricably intertwined with it. But when as in this case the injury is executed through a court order, there is no conceivable way to redress the wrong without overturning the order of a state court. Rooker Feldman does not permit such an outcome. III. CONCLUSION For the foregoing reasons, we AFFIRM the district court’s dismissal for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.
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