Christine Bloom vs. Palos Heights Police Department, et al

Filing 78

MEMORANDUM Signed by the Honorable Milton I. Shadur on 1/23/2012:Mailed notice(srn, )

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS
EASTERN DIVISION
CHRISTINE J. BLOOM, individually,)
etc.,
)
)
Plaintiff,
)
)
v.
)
)
PALOS HEIGHTS POLICE DEPARTMENT, )
et al.,
)
)
Defendants.
)

No.

11 C 5536

MEMORANDUM
Because of the obvious attempt by the counsel for plaintiff
Christine Bloom (“Bloom”) to reshape this lawsuit into something
quite different because he must have sensed which way the legal
wind was blowing on defendants’ Fed. R. Civ. P. (“Rule”) 12(b)(6)
motion to dismiss, this Court’s lengthy January 4, 2012
memorandum opinion and order that granted the dismissal motion
included this n.5:
Something must be said about Bloom’s belated effort to
inject alleged sex discrimination into the case. When
any lawyer (or any client) simply changes the facts
because the law demands something other than what the
original version of the facts will provide, that
dubious tactic brings Rule 11(b) into play--and it is
difficult to ascribe any other motive for the new
assertion in this case. Bloom’s counsel is ordered to
submit an appropriate affidavit from Bloom on or before
January 16 identifying any good faith predicate for the
change in theories.
Counsel has responded by filing a document labeled
“Affidavit”--signed not by Bloom, as directed, but by counsel
himself--together with a letter to this Court that accompanied

the transmittal of the Judge’s Copy and that stated in part:
We believe this complies with what is being sought by
the request in Footnote No. 5, but if not, or if
additional information or affidavits are required,
please let us know.
To be blunt, the answer to counsel’s inquiry is “No”--in
major part the submission consists of arguments rather than
evidentiary facts, though the arguments are extraordinarily
contrived, reminiscent of times past when the New Yorker magazine
would sometimes insert a small and invariably bizarre item to
fill in the space following a major piece that had ended in midcolumn and would label that filler “Department of Clotted
Nonsense.”
In material part counsel attempts to support his attempted
transformation of the Complaint from what it was--an account of a
contretemps growing out of a dispute about the codefendant
parents of a teenage son dating Bloom’s teenage daughter--into
claimed sex discrimination by Palos Heights’ defendant police
officers by stating (Aff. ¶5):
In the original Complaint, I included allegations that
Bloom and S.B. are female.
Sure enough, Amended Complaint (“AC”) ¶1 does identify Bloom as
the mother of her daughter (as though the name “Christine” were
not itself enough to confirm that she is female), while AC ¶2
identifies the daughter as “a 15-year-old minor female.”
what?

But so

Not a word in the AC’s remaining 147 paragraphs that fill

2

22 pages with an extraordinarily detailed account of events even
hinted that the defendant police officers’ complained-of actions
were assertedly taken (even in part) because of sex-based
considerations.
Yet from those two mere identifying references counsel has
taken the impermissible quantum leap of asserting that the reader
should have been able to divine that sex discrimination was
afoot--that the complained of conduct was taken by the defendant
officers because Bloom was a woman.

In that regard counsel has

chosen to ignore his own AC ¶30, which alleges that the officers,
who had responded to a 911 call, spoke to the mother of the
teenage son at the scene and then acted on the information that
she provided them--they caused Bloom’s daughter to be taken to
the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation without Bloom having
been at the scene or even speaking to them.
Talk about a fanciful reconstruction of the facts--facts
that reflect the officers as having paid heed to information
given them by a woman, with no input having been provided by
Bloom herself--in an effort to evidence (or even imply) a
conspiracy based on Bloom’s sex!

In candor, that feeble non

sequitur could scarcely have survived in the heyday of the nowrejected overgenerous statement in Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41,
45-46 (1957) as to Fed. R. Civ. P. (“Rule”) 12(b)(6)
evaluations--a statement that has been replaced by the

3

plausibility requirement announced in the Twombly-Iqbal canon.
And the same lack of justification applies to the other
added rationalizations that counsel has put forth in his
argumentative submission.

Without exception they would require

the drawing of highly attenuated and implausible inferences from
assertions that do not qualify as reasonable in any real-world
sense.
It is frankly difficult to justify such post-hoc efforts at
a bailout, and consideration might well be given to a possible
sanction for counsel’s noncompliance with Rule 11(b)’s
requirement of objective good faith.

But this Court will not

entertain that possibility--instead the criticism contained in
this memorandum will be viewed as sufficient.

________________________________________
Milton I. Shadur
Senior United States District Judge
Date:

January 23, 2012

4