Johnson v. Stone
| Decision Date | 29 June 1959 |
| Docket Number | No. 12522.,12522. |
| Parties | Eleanor B. JOHNSON, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Theodore STONE et al., Defendants-Appellees. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
Eleanor B. Johnson, Chicago, Ill., for appellant.
Theodore Stone, Benjamin Adamowski, Chicago, Ill., for appellee.
Before SCHNACKENBERG, PARKINSON, and KNOCH, Circuit Judges.
Plaintiff sought to recover damages, in the U. S. District Court, for injury resulting from allegedly tortious actions of defendants and for violations of the Civil Rights Statutes, 42 U.S.C.A. § 1981 et seq., committed jointly in connection with trial and judgment entered in a suit brought against plaintiff in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois. On appeal the judgment in that case was affirmed in part and reversed in part and the cause remanded with directions by the Appellate Court of Illinois.1
Plaintiff charges that counsel for the plaintiffs in the state court proceedings, in the course of the trial thereof, misappropriated exhibits; introduced perjured, improper, irrelevant and slanderous testimony of witnesses; and made improper, irrelevant, slanderous and untrue statements.
The defendants here include the plaintiffs in the State Court action, their attorneys and witnesses, the conservator and members of the family of the former holder of a note which was involved in plaintiff's counterclaim in that suit, the trial court clerk and bailiff.
Plaintiff describes Counts I and II of her amended complaint filed in the District Court as comprising Common Law claims alleging conspiracy and malice; Counts III and III A as alleging slander by counsel for the plaintiffs in the State court suit; and Counts IV and V, as asserting "civil rights" violations in depriving plaintiff, under color of law, of due process and equal protection of the law in that suit.
The District Court sustained motions to dismiss the amended complaint for failure to state a claim on which relief could be granted. Plaintiff has appealed from that ruling.
Jurisdiction as to Counts I, II, III, and IIIa is grounded on diversity of citizenship. In the absence of a federal question, we must be governed by Illinois law with respect to substantive rights.2 Illinois provides litigants no independent right of action for civil damages based on conduct such as alleged by plaintiff in Counts I and II.3 The defamatory statements alleged by plaintiff appear, from Counts III and III A of the amended complaint, to have been made in the course of a trial and to have been relevant thereto; they must be construed as privileged.4 In prosecuting her appeal to the Illinois Appellate Court, plaintiff assigned as error most of the items of misconduct of which she now complains. These received the attention of the Illinois Appellate Court, which reversed and remanded the cause on other grounds. The opinion finds no error in the trial leading to the judgment on the complaint, thus in effect affirming that part of the proceedings below. The reversal is based solely on the failure of the Trial Judge to direct a verdict for plaintiff in the case before us on her counterclaim.
The Court said in its opinion, which is not set out in the abstract published at 11 Ill.App.2d 241, 136 N.E.2d 560:
In her Counts IV and V, plaintiff asserts that defendants deprived her of due process...
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