Government

11th Circuit Sees No Reason Lawyer Lin Wood Should Not Have His Head Examined

Girl, same.

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If attorney Lin Wood wanted to prove he’s not insane, his legal peregrinations to get around the State Bar of Georgia’s instruction that he get a mental health evaluations are a weird way to do it.

Wood spent New Years Eve of 2020 calling Chief Justice Roberts a pedophile murderer in cahoots with Jeffrey Epstein. In 2021, as he flogged various debunked election fraud theories and furiously worked to overturn President Biden’s victory, he posted on Parler, “Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST.” and called the former vice president a “child molester.” By September he was warning his followers to stay away from Target and Walmart and “Stop buying the food that they have been producing for years with fetal tissue parts to kill you!”

Which is the kind of talk that gets you booted off Twitter, if not placed on a 72-hour hold. In the event, it did manage to get the attention of the Georgia Bar, which initiated an investigation and ordered Wood to get a mental health evaluation.

Wood responded in the sanest way possible: He sued everyone he could think of in all the courts. First he raced to the state courthouse, but when Georgia judges refused to block the Bar investigation, Wood turned to the US District Court, filing a complaint alleging that the investigation violated his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

So far so crazy! But then Wood filed a motion demanding that US District Judge Timothy Batten disqualify himself, because he’d presided over a couple of Wood’s doomed electoral challenges, and thus Wood intended to call Batten as a character witness in the Bar investigation.

Judge Batten refused, since prior knowledge of party gained during litigation has never been grounds for recusal. And then he dismissed the case as an effort to interfere with a state proceeding.

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Wood appealed to the Eleventh Circuit, which a weird way to prove that you’re the sanest lawyer in all the land. In the event, it didn’t work, with the three-judge panel ruling unanimously that none of his claims held water.

“Given that the district judge only had knowledge of Wood drawn from his experience has a judge, and because he did not exhibit pervasive bias towards Wood in the instant case, no reasonable observer could conclude that the district judge was biased,” the panel wrote yesterday, disposing of Wood’s claim that Judge Batten abused his discretion by refusing to recuse.

As for Wood’s contention that the Bar investigation was not a proceeding for the purpose of Younger abstention, the appellate court was similarly unimpressed.

The district court concluded that Wood’s “claim would effectively enjoin” the State Bar’s disciplinary proceedings against Wood, so the first factor was satisfied. Wood disagrees, arguing that he “is not asking to enjoin any disciplinary investigation or incipient disciplinary proceeding”; “[r]ather, [he] merely seeks to enjoin the [State Bar’s] mandate that he subject himself to a mental health examination.” His complaint suggests otherwise: it sought an injunction to “restrain” Appellees “from the continued violation of [Wood’s] protected privacy rights” and a declaratory judgment that Appellees’ actions were “a violation of [his] rights as guaranteed by the First, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.” He also sought compensatory damages for the “humiliation, embarrassment, injury to reputation and other injuries” he has suffered. In our view, this relief would clearly “interfere” with the State Bar’s investigation into Wood as he is seeking an injunction to bar them from, broadly speaking, infringing upon several of his constitutional rights.

And so Wood is right back where he started before he made the tour of every courthouse in Atlanta. Well not exactly where he started, since he could have kept his mouth shut about the Bar investigation and just sat for the stupid evaluation without all this rigmarole, instead of demonstrating to the world exactly why the Bar might have good reason to doubt his mental stability.

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But that’s not Lin Wood’s style.

Wood v. Frederick [11th Circuit Opinion]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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