By Mike Scarcella
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal by two lawyers contesting a $187,000 financial sanction imposed on them by a judge who found they made recklessness and frivolous claims in litigation they brought seeking to overturn former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss as fraudulent.
The justices turned away the appeal by Ernest Walker and Gary Fielder, who had filed a lawsuit in Colorado accusing voting equipment company Dominion Voting Systems, Meta’s Facebook and the Center for Tech and Civic Life nonprofit organization of working to steal the election from Trump. The judge who dismissed the suit ordered Walker and Fielder to pay the legal fees of the parties they sued.
The justices announced their action on the first day of their new nine-month term.
Trump’s campaign and allies filed a raft of failed lawsuits in numerous states seeking to undo the Republican businessman-turned-politician’s loss to Democrat Joe Biden. The suits were based on Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud. Walker and Fielder in their lawsuit represented eight voters from five states.
U.S. Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter in August 2021 imposed the sanctions on Walker and Fielder over the suit that was filed in federal court in December 2020, the month after the election.
“This lawsuit was filed with a woeful lack of investigation into the law and, under the circumstances, the facts,” Neureiter wrote. “The lawsuit put into or repeated into the public record highly inflammatory and damaging allegations that could have put individuals’ safety in danger. Doing so without a valid legal basis or serious independent personal investigation into the facts was the height of recklessness.”
The lawsuit, the judge concluded, was “one enormous conspiracy theory” and arguments made by the lawyers “crossed the border into the frivolous.”
The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year affirmed the sanction based on the “inherent power” of judges and also a federal law that states that a lawyer can be held liable for costs for “unreasonably and vexatiously” extending a court case.
The 10th Circuit in its ruling said “an attorney is expected to exercise judgment, and must ‘regularly re-evaluate the merits’ of claims and ‘avoid prolonging meritless claims.'”
Trump’s allies made false claims that Denver-based Dominion’s ballot-counting machines were used to manipulate the election in favor of Biden. Fox Corp and Fox News, which aired those claims, in April settled a defamation lawsuit by Dominion for $787.5 million, averting a trial.
Fielder and Walker, in asking the Supreme Court to hear their case, said in a legal filing that they “behaved with decorum and timeliness. Every pleading was filed within the rules of professional conduct.”
Fielder and Walker told the justices that “by sanctioning counsel in this regard, citizens and lawyers will both hesitate to vindicate their rights, and the rights of others in similar situations.”
Dominion and the other defendants waived any response to the petition by Fielder and Walker to the Supreme Court.
Fielder and Walker were among other lawyers who either were hit with sanctions or faced attorney-misconduct complaints for legal work on lawsuits challenging Trump’s loss. Some of those pending sanctions cases involve lawyers more closely in Trump’s orbit, including his former counsel Rudolph Giuliani and ally Sidney Powell.
(Reporting by Mike Scarcella; Editing by Will Dunham)
