According to the rules for contested case petitions, a judge should be assigned within five days of filing, but ten days later I still hadn’t heard anything. When I went to check the status, I discovered that the Office of Administrative Hearings had an eFiling system, so I registered. That’s when I saw that my petition had been accepted, the Department of Justice had filed a Notice of Appearance, and—without me being properly notified—they had already filed a Motion to Dismiss. Turns out they sent everything to the wrong address, misspelling the street name, but I had also accidentally typed the wrong apartment number when I filed. I was lucky I had signed up for electronic communication, or I would’ve missed the deadlines to respond and to submit my pre-hearing statement. Filing a contested case is supposed to be informal—just like small claims—you file your petition, then submit a more detailed pre-hearing statement when ordered.
What shocked me most, though, was that the DOJ appeared as counsel for NCHRC. That was deeply disturbing—this wasn’t a 1983 civil rights lawsuit or damages claim; it was a procedural appeal of a failed investigation. NCHRC has in-house legal staff, and the DOJ is supposed to protect civil rights in North Carolina, not defend the agency that violated mine. The conflict of interest was blatant, so I filed a Petition to Disqualify the DOJ and asked that they retain separate counsel. When I read their motion to dismiss, it was 15 pages of intimidation tactics and mischaracterizations—claiming I had “appealed” instead of petitioned (even though no pre-hearing statement had been filed yet), and asserting sovereign immunity in a context that didn’t apply. They cited irrelevant case law, tried to block my petition before it was fully submitted, and disregarded the facts entirely. It was a premature, aggressive move designed to silence me—made even worse by the fact that it came from the very agency tasked with protecting civil rights in the first place. I filed a full response, addressing each point in detail to shut down that argument before it could be twisted further.’
The next day, the judge ordered the DOJ attorney to respond to my motion to disqualify and gave him 21 days to do so. I only had 10 days to respond to the motion to dismiss, so at first I felt like it was an unfair ruling—why give me less time than the Attorney General, who already knows the law? But she also instructed him to include a memorandum of law, so I took that as a sign she was requiring him to actually justify the DOJ’s involvement with case law. That gave me a little hope that maybe I was finally going to get a fair and impartial tribunal.
*Instead of listing every as it would take too much of my time, I have laid out every statute and violation done by the NCHRC in my prehearing statement below.