On July 3, I filed a Motion to Vacate and for Protective Supervisory Relief after the North Carolina Court of Appeals issued an order on July 1 dismissing my entire appeal and taxing me $364.25 in costs. The order included no legal reasoning, no citation to any rule, and—most importantly—no judicial signature. I believe it was issued solely by Clerk Eugene Soar, in retaliation to my federal § 1983 civil rights lawsuit. This is not a technicality. This is a fundamental violation of due process: they dismissed my appeal while a motion to disqualify both him and Yopp was still pending, without ever ruling on that motion, without disclosing who—if anyone—authorized the dismissal, and without any legal basis. They didn’t even follow their own rules on printing fees.
Worse, the order was issued two days before Yopp’s federal answer was due—so this ruling could be waved around in federal court to try and gut my § 1983 claims before they even begin. They are using the order to argue my case is meritless, knowing full well it came from a clerk who has no lawful authority to decide anything—especially not when he’s a party to the lawsuit. The deeper truth is this: they didn’t want to risk a federal court declaring that orders had been issued without judicial review. So they shut the appeal down first .
This motion isn’t just about vacating a single order. It’s about confronting a system that thinks it can operate in the shadows—where decisions are made by people with conflicts of interest, signatures are omitted, records are sealed, and nobody is held accountable. If the Court truly believes it acted lawfully, it should have no problem putting a name on it. Instead, it buried the ruling in anonymity and pretended the disqualification motion didn’t matter. But it does. Because every time they erase the rules to protect themselves, they prove my case.