After Judge Osteen issued multiple retaliatory orders, it became clear the court was going to keep obstructing my case. I had to rewrite my mandamus and submit it as a supplemental filing, and at the same time I filed a Notice of Obstruction, Retaliation, and Ongoing Harm in both cases to put on the record exactly what I was dealing with and to stand up against the abuse I was receiving. Much of the substance overlapped with my supplemental mandamus, but in the notice I did not hold back.
In that notice, I laid out how the retaliation did not start with one bad ruling, it escalated after I notified the clerk that I intended to file the writ and then actually served it on the judge. Within days, the court denied my renewed motions for alternative service in both cases, questioned my honesty, implied perjury, and imposed impossible conditions that it knew I could not meet as a pro se litigant without electronic filing or institutional support. I had already spent months and $160 trying to serve Anna while she left the country and her family members refused service at properties tied directly to her, yet the court brushed all of that aside as if it were nothing more than my “opinion.”
I used the notice to document that what was happening was not just “abuse of discretion” in the abstract. The orders twisted pro se protections into weapons against me, punishing me for being clear and diligent. When I made a good-faith Rule 59(e) motion to reconsider nonfinal orders that were blocking my ability to litigate, the court did not meaningfully engage with the substance. Instead it reduced everything to a technical label, accused me of “deceptive” citation practices over a minor formatting error, and then used that to justify “close scrutiny” of my filings, as if my writing style itself was evidence of bad faith. That kind of reasoning is not neutral. It is targeted.
The notice also corrected the record where the court had misrepresented facts. I walked through how I had initiated service the same day I filed the complaint, how I filed an expedited motion for alternative service supported by sworn declarations and USPS records, and how the court later claimed there was “no evidence” of service attempts on file. I explained that the sheriff’s affidavits came from two different offices and that the “unknown person” they quoted was not a random stranger but family members who lived at properties connected to Anna and affirmatively refused service while confirming she was out of the country. To dismiss sworn deputies and then suggest I was lying was not a difference of opinion, it was an unfounded attack on my credibility.
Beyond the specific rulings, I used the notice to call out how local rules were being stretched far beyond their intended purpose. The court was treating formatting and briefing rules as if they were substantive barriers that could justify denying accommodations, blocking electronic filing, and ignoring ADA-related requests. I pointed out that local rules are supposed to serve Rule 1’s mandate for “just, speedy, and inexpensive” resolutions, not to create a separate shadow system that only lawyers can navigate. When those rules are enforced rigidly against pro se litigants while bent or ignored for state attorneys, it does not just harm one case, it erodes public trust in the entire judiciary.
By the time I filed that notice, I made it clear that I was no longer asking this court for relief. I was preserving the record for the appellate courts and for the public, including this website. The notice warned that what I was experiencing was not an isolated misunderstanding but part of the same pattern I had already lived through in state court, now repeating at the federal level: gaslighting, character attacks, and institutional protectionism whenever I challenged misconduct. Filing it was both an act of self-protection and a statement. If the court insisted on turning my effort to follow the rules into evidence against me, then I was going to make sure there was a permanent record showing exactly how it did so, in its own words and orders, lined up against the facts.