While the state case was spiraling into obstruction, I was hit with a crushing blow from the Fourth Circuit. They denied my petition for writ of mandamus in an unpublished, boilerplate opinion that bore no resemblance to what I actually filed or requested. The denial itself was not surprising. I stated directly in my petition that only one mandamus had been granted in the Fourth Circuit in the past five years. I understood the statistical reality. What devastated me was the deliberate misrepresentation of my filings and the complete disregard for the record. The opinion reduced everything I wrote to a complaint about “delay in time,” even though my petition explained in detail that the harm was not delay but obstruction preventing me from serving defendants, naming parties, and accessing the court at all. None of that was acknowledged. The court simply declared that “the present record does not reveal undue delay” and left it at that .
Worse, they denied the petition on the premise that I was trying to “overturn” district court orders, even though I explicitly clarified five separate times that this was not an appeal, not a request to reverse merits rulings, and not a substitute for appellate review. I even quoted that clarification in my rehearing petition. My original mandamus made it unmistakably clear that I sought only to compel the court to rule, and to vacate only those orders entered in retaliation for filing mandamus—not to revisit discretionary decisions. My petition for rehearing shows exactly where I stated this, word for word, yet the panel ignored its own summary of my filings and still claimed I was trying to use mandamus “as a substitute for appeal” .
They also claimed I “identified no other basis” for mandamus relief, even though my petition set out multiple bases grounded in Supreme Court and Fourth Circuit precedent including clear abuses of discretion, denial of access to the courts, obstruction preventing service, and retaliation for filing mandamus. I explained that no alternative remedy existed because appeal is impossible without a final judgment, and the court’s refusal to rule leaves the case frozen. They never addressed any of it. They never addressed the fact that I had pending TROs requiring prompt action, or that district courts cannot indefinitely refuse to rule on threshold motions. They never addressed my evidence showing systemic obstruction of pro se civil rights litigants. They simply erased the entire record.
The impact was shattering. It wasn’t just a denial—it was a federal appellate court telling me that the truth did not matter, that the record did not matter, and that my constitutional rights could be brushed aside without even engaging with what I wrote. The gaslighting was so extreme that it felt like a betrayal by the very institution that claims to safeguard constitutional rights. This wasn’t impartiality. It was a refusal to acknowledge the law, the facts, or the constitutional stakes.